Douglas Adams originally devoted just half a page to eulogizing Starship Titanic in the tenth chapter of Life, The Universe, and Everything. A “sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge” cruise liner resembling a “silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale,” the luxury ship did not even complete its first radio message—an SOS—before its “Improbability Field” engine prototype triggered a “sudden and gratuitous total existence failure” shortly after launching.
It was one of many in-world anecdotes scattered through the third part of the late sci-fi author’s revered “trilogy in five parts,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Over 17 years after its publication, most readers had probably forgotten about Starship Titanic. In 1998, however, the ill-fated intergalactic cruise liner’s tale suddenly expanded to include a video game featuring tens of thousands of lines of scripted dialogue, hours of vocal performance recordings, and a standalone 223-page novel written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones. But Starship didn’t just become an immersive puzzle game—like its “majestic” literary inspiration, its underlying prototype software is now both the stuff of legend and a premonition of our surreal, AI-saturated present.
An ambitious, if not impossible, project
“We knew that what we were doing was impossible,” software engineer Jason Williams admits to Popular Science.
It’s hard to imagine a time when a major literary publishing house felt confident shelling out $2 million for an experimental video game based on a bit of nerd novel trivia. But in 1996, Adams somehow convinced Simon & Schuster this was the future of entertainment. By that point, the writer was no stranger to embracing various mediums and technology to tell his stories—his 1978 Hitchhiker’s Guide BBC radio series adaptation was the first comedy program to ever be produced in stereo, and he helped craft a text-based video game from the original novel in 1984. Adams remained interested in the potential for “new media” storytelling throughout the next decade until the 1994 release of the now classic puzzle-based video game, Myst.
Although intrigued by the gameplay mechanics and puzzles, Adams ultimately felt Myst’s world was too empty due to its lack of characters and storyline. He soon envisioned a similar game taken a step further. Or, as Willaims explains, a gargantuan leap into uncharted waters.
“We had to build 14-and-a-half hours of responses to be able to have even basic conversations with people, because you had to anticipate everything they might ever ask,” Williams says.
Designed within Adams’ newly launched multimedia studio, Digital Village, Starship Titanic’s plot hinges on the eponymous cruise liner crashing into your house after undergoing a “Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure.” After being essentially kidnapped, a player must beat the game’s already maddeningly difficult point-and-click puzzles through help and hints from a diverse cast of robot crewmembers (and one loudmouthed parrot). But you don’t receive these tips and clues by selecting from a set of predetermined, multiple choice dialogue options like so many of Starship Titanic’s many contemporaries. Instead, you need to actually “talk” to the characters through a messaging portal. Type out a question, and bots provide one of the over 10,000 lines of pre-scripted, fully voiced answers with almost no lag time.
“It was a very complex piece of software, very ambitious” Williams admits.
Williams’ department logged hundreds of hours creating a completely new natural language parsing engine from scratch, dubbed SpookiTalk. Unlike the recent explosion of modern large language model chatbots, parsers such as SpookiTalk aren’t probabilistic. Programs such as ChatGPT devote massive computing power to analyzing a human’s text input, then calculating the most likely response composed of a string of letters and spaces that a user reads as a complete statement. Parsers like SpookiTalk, on the other hand, flag any discernible keywords in a user’s input, then match them to a (hopefully) applicable, pre-written response. In Starship Titanic’s case, it managed this across a three CD-ROM set totalling just 2 GB. While an unheard-of size for video games in 1998, that’s nothing compared to today’s titles—or what Google AI Overview requires to come up with a (glue-tainted) pizza recipe.
At the end of the day, SpookiTalk’s smoke-and-mirrors often fell short of approximating actual artificial intelligence.But in some ways that matched the game’s overall tone, especially when attempting to chat with the Starship Titanic’s unwieldy crew. That’s because Adams—not one to ever keep ideas simple—didn’t want in-game conversations to follow what most sensible people might consider normal logical trains of thought.
Starship Titanic’s plot involves solving the mystery of who sabotaged its sentient navigation system named Titania. So, it made sense that the saboteur went the extra mile by also frying every other robot’s cognitive settings. This, as one bot tells the player in the beginning of the game, means everyone on the ship has gone “a little doolally,” resulting in sudden shifts in mood, cognitive capabilities, and functionality.
“Even looking back now and having worked on a lot more games, the craziest idea was that each of the bots had five different levels of response,” remembers co-writer Neil Richards. “I’m not sure anybody really appreciated that instead of having [around] seven bots, this was now a game with 35 bots in it… it just sort of spiraled.”
“I’d actually forgotten about that,” Williams says with a grin.
“It wasn’t even really a gaming industry project. It was a bunch of TV execs and [similar] folks who wanted to explore the internet and interactivity in gameplay,” says Emma Westecotte. “I think all of us across the whole team were naive about what [would be] involved.”
An uncanny experience
Starship Titanic was one of Westecotte’s first professional projects after graduating college. Now an associate professor of game design and undergraduate department chair at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD), she says her time working on the release’s gameplay was one of her favorite career experiences because of the freedom to experiment with completely new gaming frameworks and ideas.
“One of the things I realize [now] is that we didn’t consider the players at all, really. I would say I don’t think we could get away with that these days, right?” she laughs.
While Westecotte’s team toiled on crafting the ship’s wholly unique animations and artwork, Williams’ department continued with SpookiTalk. After over two years of work and numerous release delays, a much-hyped Starship Titanic finally made it to store shelves—hilarious, smart, and packed with top-tier voice performances from the likes of Monty Python alumni, John Cleese and Terry Jones.
And yet the critics and players of 1998 were, to put it mildly, confused. Initial reviews were largely lukewarm, and sales numbers reflected similarly. “[A]n exercise in tedium and frustration for all but the most tolerant adventurers,” IGN said in its 4.9/10 review. CNN conceded the game to be a “zany, fun ride” while opining “it would be nice if the AI’s gave you more clues and remembered previous conversations,” betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of SpookiTalk’s capabilities.
In hindsight, Starship Titanic is arguably one of the most delightfully absurd, yet notoriously difficult and obtuse, video games of all time. It’s true that, despite being lovingly designed, SpookiTalk simply can’t hold up to a human player’s inputs beyond the most basic questions and instructions. Even then, the unhinged robots’ reactions would quickly deteriorate into nonsense thanks to their predesignated “Fuck Off Point,” as Richards coined it.
The “DoorBot extraordinaire,” Edmund Lucy Fentible, for example, would invariably exclaim “Memory failure! Memory failure!” after a handful of interactions. From there, Fentible remained terse, morose, and essentially useless until the player readjusted his “Cellpoint Settings” in the robot control room. Krage Koyotoal IV, your concierge BellBot, frequently would respond to questions with “I’m not going to answer that. Don’t feel like it,” even with allegedly healthy Cellpoint Settings. The talking parrot, with a distinct lack of Cellpoint Settings, generally either berated you and squawked.
Such experiences were so frustrating to players that later copies of the game would include a 120-page walkthrough strategy guide. Without it, as one writer warned in 2006, could result in “ripping out half your hair because you didn’t know that a… parrot enjoys eating brazil nuts instead of walnuts.” (For the record, the parrot prefers pistachios, not brazil nuts).
The main problem, like so many of today’s AI sales pitches, came down to overpromises. Starship Titanic’s official (still somewhat functional) website called the experience “truly revolutionary” and “uncanny,” while claiming that players “have not encountered anything like this before in any kind of game.” Some of the more patient players may have taken the time to experiment with SpookiTalk’s parameters and learn its conversational limitations. But for many others, they came away confused, if not annoyed.
“The way [Starship Titanic] was promoted, it was, ‘Hey! You’ve got robots! You can talk to them and you can say anything you like,’” Williams remembers. “Techie people might have gone, ‘I know what the technology is capable of, and what they’ve done is amazing. But you also know the average person on the street is going to say, ‘[But] they said I could talk to a robot…’ They had to really understand the restrictions that were there just because of the technology of the day.” But according to Digital Village alumni, the general public’s lackluster response didn’t phase them at all. Instead, they were thrilled at how much they managed to accomplish in such a comparatively short time.
“We knew we were trying to do something that actually wasn’t possible at the time,” Williams says. “We were trying to get as close to that as we could with the time and capabilities that we had.”
“I don’t remember any disappointment,” Richards says, while Williams remembers that, if anything, he came away “incredibly excited about the future.” Westecotte, meanwhile, calls her time at Digital Village the “first really inspiring experience” of her career.
‘There is nothing like her in the universe…’
Over 25 years after its release, there is now a satisfyingly Adams-eque irony in Starship Titanic’s legacy. We live in an era when seemingly every major Silicon Valley company promises increasingly wild and wondrous AI-powered products. But even with exponentially massive amounts of computing power, many offerings continue to spout absolute nonsense that makes Starship Titanic bots sound well-adjusted. Nearly every month features yet another CEO debuting an AI “Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong,” only to have it almost instantaneously succumb to a new version of “Sudden Massive Existence Failure.”
Meanwhile, Starship Titanic has not only avoided the dustbin of video game history; replays now offer a new and emotional experience thanks to the fundamental humanity and joy within every aspect of its design—the beautiful 3D art deco environment designs overseen by Academy Award-winning husband-and-wife, Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, the joyous voice acting from comedy legends, and the relationships borne from building the game itself. Even decades later, Richards repeatedly describes the Digital Village team as an adopted family, and regularly keeps in touch with many of them, including Williams and Westecotte. For years, some of the game’s most diehard apologists even continued an in-world online roleplaying campaign on the game’s official website forum—a portion of which is still live today.
The very end of a player’s misadventure through Starship Titanic sees them successfully return to their (still ruined) house. Once there, they receive a video transmission from the cruise liner’s architect, Leovinus, played by none other than Douglas Adams himself, whose brief monologue is all the more poignant now—the author suffered a fatal heart attack in 2001, barely three years after his game’s debut.
“Building this ship was my dream and now that dream is over… Thank you for restoring Titania. I know she isn’t real. Well, she’s ‘real,’ which is not ‘really real,’ if you see what I mean,” he deadpans before revealing that, by the galactic laws of salvage, the ship—its mercurial robots, its ambitious design, and its many endearing quirks—now belongs to you.
“There is nothing like her in the universe. I wish you joy…,” Starship Titanic’s creator tells you.
The post The improbable voyage of Starship Titanic, the 1998 Douglas Adams video game filled with ‘unhinged’ chatbots appeared first on Popular Science.
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