Starship Titanic is an adventure game developed by The Digital Village and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. It was released in April 1998 for Microsoft Windows and in March 1999 for Apple Macintosh. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters.
Written and designed by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams, Starship Titanic began development in 1996 and took two years to develop. In order to achieve Adams's goal of being able to converse with characters in the game, his company developed a language processor to interpret players' input and give an appropriate response and recorded over 16 hours of character dialogue. Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, artists on the film Restoration (1995), served as the game's production designers and designed the ship's Art Deco visuals. The game's voice cast includes Monty Python members Terry Jones and John Cleese. A tie-in novel titled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic: A Novel was written by Jones and released in October 1997.
Starship Titanic was released to mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment, although it was nominated for three industry awards and won a Codie award in 1999. It was re-released for modern PCs in September 2015 by GOG.com.
Gameplay
Starship Titanic is a graphic adventure game played from a first-person perspective. The player moves on the eponymous ship by clicking on locations indicated by the cursor and advancing to the next frame after a blurred transition (although this can be avoided by holding down shift during clicks). The mouse can also be used to pick up and store items in your inventory and interact with onscreen objects. In the beginning of the game, the player is given a device called Personal Electronic Thingy (PET), which serves as a toolbar on the bottom of the screen. The PET has five modes: Chat-O-Mat, a text parser through which the player can talk with characters by inputting text; Personal Baggage, the inventory in which the player can add or withdraw items; Remote Thingummy, a set of functions to interact with objects and locations; Designer Room Numbers, which indicates the player's current location; and Real Life, an options menu with settings and a game save/load system.
Much of the gameplay involves solving puzzles by using items with other items or with objects and characters onscreen. Another significant aspect of the game involves talking with characters in the game, namely the bots that work in the ship and a parrot, by inputting prompts in the Chat-O-Mat mode. Additionally to conversation with characters through interpreting of user input, the parser often provides hints or explanations that come in the form of pre-recorded speech, which can help the player in progressing in the game.
The main objective of the game is to locate the missing parts of the ship's broken intelligence system in order to repair the starship. In order to advance within the game, the player must upgrade from the standard third class level to first class and thus gain access to areas that are restricted when the game begins. The game also requires the player to transport items throughout the ship through the Succ-U-Bus, a system of tubes that transfer objects placed in them to other parts of the ship; these tubes can be found in many areas of the ship. The player also needs to use the parrot to solve certain puzzles. A talking bomb can be found in the game and unwillingly armed by the player; if that happens, the player has to either disarm it or distract it during countdown to prevent it from exploding.
Plot
Starship Titanic begins in the player character's house on Earth, which is partially destroyed when the eponymous cruise ship crash-lands through the roof. Fentible, the "DoorBot," informs the player that the ship and its crew have malfunctioned and need help to return to normal. Once the ship is taken back to space, the player meets Marsinta, the "DeskBot," who makes a third-class reservation for them, and Krage, the "BellBot." The player begins the journey as a third-class passenger and, as a result, cannot access many areas of the ship reserved for higher-class passengers until they obtain a second-class promotion and eventually convince Marsinta to upgrade them to first class after managing to alter her personality.
Through backstory revealed in the ship's email system, the player learns that Brobostigon and Scraliontis, two associates of the ship's creator, Leovinus, double-crossed him and deliberately provoked a "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" by hiding the body parts of the ship's humanoid intelligence system, Titania, in various locations within the ship, as well as planting a scuttling bomb in an effort to destroy the ship and profit from its insurance. However, both men perished in the attempt, and the player discovers their dead bodies on the ship. After exploring the vessel and solving puzzles, the player eventually finds all of Titania's body parts and awakens her, repairing the sabotaged ship and allowing it to be navigated. The player then accesses the bridge and navigates the ship back to their home on Earth. Throughout the game, the player encounters other bots, including Nobby, the "LiftBot," Fortillian, the "BarBot," and D'Astragaaar, the "Maitre d'Bot." The player also meets a parrot that accompanies them throughout most of the journey.
After returning to Earth, the player gets a message from Leovinus (played by Douglas Adams) who announces that he has decided to retire on Earth as a fisherman and to find a wife. Depending on if the bomb was disarmed, one of two endings occurs: If the bomb wasn't disarmed, the ship takes off and explodes in midair. If the bomb was disarmed, the ship simply takes off and the player is informed by Leovinus that, by galactic salvage laws, they now own the Starship Titanic.
Development
Background
Douglas Adams first imagined the Starship Titanic in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where it is briefly mentioned in the book's 10th chapter. Adams describes the ship—named after the famous ocean liner—as a "majestic and luxurious cruise-liner" that "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure".
Before making Starship Titanic, Adams had previously served as a designer for Infocom's 1984 text-based game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on his successful science fiction series of the same name, and had been an advocate for "new media". Since working with Infocom, Adams had expressed interest in returning to game design, and feared that he was spending too much time by himself writing. He turned to game design again after playing Myst, which is when he said "the medium had gotten interesting again". However, he thought Myst was lacking in story and characters. Commenting on the gameplay of Myst and its sequel Riven, Adams said that "nothing really happens, and nobody is there. I thought, let's do something similar but populate the environment with characters you can interact with", and hoped to combine graphics and a text-based system that allowed for players to converse with characters in the game.
In 1996 Adams co-founded The Digital Village, a company intended to handle his future endeavours in film, print and new media. Adams first discussed founding the company with Robbie Stamp, a producer at Central Independent Television in the early 1990s, and they did so along with Stamp's boss at Central, Richard Creasey; literary agent Ed Victor was also one of the company's founders. Ian Charles Stewart, one of the founders of Wired, joined the enterprise shortly thereafter. In December 1995, The Digital Village arranged a deal to raise seed capital from venture capitalist Alex Catto, who bought 10% of the company's shares for £400,000. In 1996 Simon & Schuster Interactive reached a deal with the company to finance Starship Titanic, whose budget was estimated at $2 million.
Development of the game began Summer 1996. Around 40 people worked on the game's development.
Writing The story was created by Adams, who wrote the game's script with Michael Bywater and Neil Richards.Starship Titanic final credits Additional dialogue was written by D. A. Barham. Adams's inspiration for the game—particularly the objective of upgrading from third to first-class—came from an experience with airline ticketing personnel, where he was told he would be given an upgrade from economy-class tickets upon checking in for his flight, but found out upon arrival that the upgrade had not been arranged; he said the idea is based on the premise that "everyone wants a free upgrade in life". Adams had devised a story concept to add an additional gameplay element where players would be able to enter the ship's data system as a "full realtime, flyable environment" and control how information flows through the vessel, but the idea was abandoned because, according to Adams, it was "a bridge too far".
Adams aimed to develop a text parser-based dialogue system as opposed to the drop-down conversation menus of contemporary adventure games, in which player have limited dialogue options. The text parser includes over 30,000 words and 16 hours of dialogue recorded by voice actors. According to Adams, over 10,000 lines of dialogue were recorded for the game. In order to make conversations with characters convincing, The Digital Village's Jason Williams and Richard Millican created a language processor called SpookiTalk, which was based on VelociText, a software developed by Linda Watson of Virtus Corporation. Producer Emma Westecott thought the processor was preferable as common text-to-speech programs "made the voices sound cold and distant". Douglas Adams claimed that they made "all of your characters sound like semi-concussed Norwegians". The bots in the game understood around 500 words of vocabulary and were capable of conversing with the player as well as each other. According to Westecott, the developers' intention was "getting into characters" and cited games such as Myst and Mortal Kombat as contemporary games that lacked "proper interaction" with human characters. Williams and Millican modified VelociText into SpookiTalk in order to improve recognition of complicated sentence forms from players, as well as reducing repeated responses, and retaining a character's memory of an object or topic as a conversation progresses. Additional dialogue support was done by linguist Renata Henkes.
Design The futuristic, Art Deco visuals were designed by Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, who also worked on the 1995 Oscar-winning film Restoration. Chichoni drew the initial sketches of the ship on a flight to Los Angeles on the day he and Molina joined the project. Adams described the ship's interior design as a mixture of the Ritz Hotel, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamun's tomb and Venice. In order to make the design of the ship similar to Art Deco, Molina and Chichoni drew inspiration from 1950s American electrical appliances and modern architecture; to design the ship's external shape, they also drew from bones and dinosaur skeletons.