4.Mar.1999

LONDON, April 1999 - The Digital Village Ltd can at last announce - Starship Titanic hits the Macintosh! The game has already been launched in the US and reaches British stores this Friday (April 9)

If you have trouble finding a copy, you can alwaysorder your copy online through the official Starship Titanic website.

The iMac - blue, translucent, and very, very cool - makes the perfect iceberg for Starship Titanic to encounter, but the game will run on an iMac of any colour, indeed almost any modern Mac. (for exact spec see below).

The game, devised by author (and AppleMaster) Douglas Adams, and created by his own London-based company, The Digital Village, has already caused a sensation on the PC platform.

The game marks Douglas Adams’s first return to the computer game world since his collaboration with Infocom in the 80’s, which produced the legendary adventure game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Starship Titanic starts when the most fabulous starship in the galaxy crashes on its maiden voyage — into your home. When you board it you enter some of the most fantastic settings ever produced for a computer game, but at first you are restricted to Super Galactic Traveller class (translation: coach). You therefore find yourself in the grip of one of the most powerful forces known to modern man — the desire for a free upgrade. To achieve this you have to engage the crew of dysfunctional robots (and a semi-deranged parrot played by Terry Jones of Monty Python) in conversation.

Douglas Adams says "The thing I loved about the old text-only games was the sense that the player was engaged in a virtual conversation with the machine. It was a very compelling experience, and great fun for a writer to work on. It seemed to me, looking at modern, beautifully designed graphics games, that the thing that was missing was precisely the thing that the old text games excelled at — real interaction with characters and story. For that you need to simulate conversation within a graphics environment, and that’s what we set out to do. It was a Herculean task. Three writers (Neil Richards, Michael Bywater and myself) spent a year writing over ten thousand lines of dialogue. That’s about sixteen hours of pre-recorded speech, cut up into tiny little snippets which the game’s language engine (called SpookiTalk) assembles on the fly. It will take you a long, long time to exhaust the conversational resources of this game.
"I’m delighted that we are finally able to bring Starship Titanic home to the Macintosh. It looks gorgeous running on a Mac screen, and particularly stunning on an iMac."

"Other developers take note: this is the shape of things to come"
"an innovative piece of software filled with everything that is right about adventure games"
PC Zone (UK), May 98

"Utterly absorbing"
"In pure adventuring terms, Titanic is darn near flawless"
"the action sucks you in from the start"
"all the fun, frustration, intelligence and challenge of the great adventures of the past"
PC Direct (UK), June 98

"Cyberspace has yet to name its first poet laureate, but if that day ever comes, the first one should be Douglas Adams" Toronto Globe and Mail , May 3 98

"perhaps it is the greatest testament to the digital story's success when you can say to a friend: 'Read the book if you like. But I suggest you play the game first"
New York Times, April 9 98

"...this year's best new CD-ROM adventure game" Newsweek , April 13 98

System Requirements: 120MHz PowerMac or faster 32Mb RAM MacOS 7.5.1 or greater Display capable of 640x480 in thousands of colours Quad-speed CDROM