by Nick Webb
But first, what would the company actually do? The goal, to quote from the business plan, was “the creation of a global on-line consumer transaction business which will exist on the World Wide Web and its successors. It will sell interactive entertainment and information experiences to a worldwide audience.” There is a misconception that the company would be mainly a vehicle for Douglas’s talents, but, although his presence was essential, TDV was always planned to be much broader than that. It was one of the new generation of multimedia organizations being made possible by new technology.
There were to be three planks on which TDV would rest.
Firstly, The Hitchhiker’s Guide (H2G2)—a guide to the Earth in this case, not the galaxy—would be created as a next-generation Internet service, a huge, living miscellany of useful information and opinion offering its users much more than a directory or a search engine. It wouldn’t be a semi-detached source of cool information or a portal out to the World Wide Web; the idea was that it would become something innovative and altogether warmer by providing society and fostering a sense of personal belonging. “Community” is an overused word, but H2G2, with its legions of passionate fans, stood a good chance of becoming one of the first “virtual” communities with a truly cross-cultural and international nature. One way it would achieve that was by getting the members to participate in the evolution of H2G2 by writing much of the guide themselves, with some editorial shaping in-house. For instance, instead of getting on-line to read a stodgy review of your local Italian restaurant from some established reference work, you could find the real info from no-nonsense H2G2 users. (“Saw a mouse on the stairs . . . full of braying advertising men with pony tails . . . watch for the heart-stopping cleavage of the waitress . . . better off at the great sushi bar two doors down.” You know.) H2G2 would be rich in editorial content and informed by Douglas’s own voice. It was always conceived as the Earth edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide—free to members and supported by sponsorship and advertising.
Secondly, there was Starship Titanic, a massive CD-ROM game of staggering visual panache and narrative complexity for which Robbie had closed a co-production venture with Peter Yunich at Simon & Schuster Interactive in New York. S&S would put up the money which was originally budgeted at over $2 million. This sum was immediately negotiated downwards, a typical corporate reflex that caused TDV problems from the outset. TDV would create and manage the project and have a 50% share of revenues. A linked website would provide further extension of the brand.
Finally, TDV planned to develop a second multiple-media brand, Avatar, and later Avatar Forest, which would appear first as a low-cost, long-running one-hour television series for Disney/ABC. In turn, they hoped, it would generate a 3-D virtual world based on the series. All the joint ventures would be 100% funded by the outside partners with their deep pockets and distribution muscle, and this would lessen TDV’s financial risk in the early years of the business.
With first-round money in place, TDV was able to expand and soon moved out of Bedford Square into a whitewashed, former industrial space in Camden Street in Camden Town. The offices were attractive, but on a main thoroughfare with one-way traffic droning down it all day and night like a reminder of mortality. On the other hand Camden Town is lively, with one of the city’s best street markets, and endowed with that essential for any area housing Douglas and colleagues—a surfeit of restaurants.
Funding in the UK was always tight. The wall of money heading like a tsunami towards all things dotcomish did not really pick up speed until the late nineties. In the UK in 1996 such ventures still looked speculative and hard to quantify, and it’s also always tricky striking a balance between how much equity to sell and how much to keep back so that the founders of the company still feel it’s theirs. Robbie also wanted the staff to have an opportunity of participating in the success of the company. To his credit, he admits that with their ambitions for TDV and their uncertainty about how to value it, they made a strategic error:
In the early spring of 1996 we had made an absolutely egregious mistake. It was a very, very slow death in many ways and it gave us a wound from which we never completely recovered. The scar tissue healed up, but it was fragile and was ripped open easily when the going got tough. And that mistake was when we were offered £3 million from Apax Partners for 30% of the company [valuing TDV at £10 million], we turned it down. It was a lower valuation than we’d expected because we’d set the threshold at something like £15 million. There were some ratchets put in for Alex [Catto] so that he would have the chance to buy more shares to equalize him up.
Frankly we were barking not to take that money from Apax. It was because we had an over-inflated sense of the value of the company. We were driven by some West Coast dream stories. But we weren’t there—we were in Camden, in London, in 1996 and the Internet was not a great big thing yet in Europe. There were still a lot of people for whom you’d have to spell the word “Internet,” let alone talk about what the financial models might be. And Apax was a blue-chip investment company.
Though the lack of development capital was to torture Robbie and the executive team throughout the life of the company, they did have some seed money and funds from their co-venture partners. Robbie, Richard Harris and Richard Creasey soon recruited a team of bright youngsters, many of whom were Hitchhiker’s fans. Kate Salmon joined as Douglas’s P.A. (When Kate moved on, Sophie Astin, a graduate in French from Leicester University, replaced her and soon became indispensable.) Tim Browse, a brilliant programmer, and Adam Shaikh, a terrific games designer, were recruited. Some were so young that like “Yoz” (Yoram) Grahame, a web technologist, they’d been introduced to Hitchhiker’s by their mums and dads.
It was a terrific company that at its height employed about sixty people either on the staff or on contracts. The atmosphere was both frantic and relaxed. Robbie was a humane boss who believed in a horizontal rather than a vertical management structure, and he was very approachable. They nearly all worked dementedly hard. The usual amount of intra-company flirting took place (probably more than the usual amount), and the prevailing spirit meant that you did not stop in mid-task if it happened to be going-home time. As a result, people got terribly tired, and if they really needed to recharge their batteries it was possible to take what were known as “duvet days” lying at home, groaning. Of course there were interpersonal tensions and wrangles, but it was a happy and well-motivated company.
Richard Harris, the Chief Technology Officer, a bouncy beardy generalist, had a degree in zoology from Aberdeen as well as a deep knowledge of IT. His background was in biological computation and his range of interests—inter alia, quantum physics, population modelling, motorbikes, the red-throated bee eater, gorillas, beer—was almost as catholic as Douglas’s. The two of them got on well, though they tended to compete over their high-tech toys—a dangerous game to play with Douglas.
London at the time, Richard believes, was the most creative city in the world (not excluding Palo Alto/San Francisco) for software design. The engineers and designers they recruited were “really brilliant, talented and obstreperous.” Douglas loved the atmosphere and the stimulation of the office. One of his colleagues said the affection and support he got at the office was “worth a hundred of his showbiz pals.”
Initially, with Avatar to one side, the company was structured into two teams, the larger one working on Starship Titanic and the other on the H2G2 website. (The latter “very unladdish,” Yoz reports. “Extremely witty, great fun, but they hardly drank at all, and never talked about girls or made rude jokes . . .”) A certain amount of competition for resources ebbed and flowed between the two, and there was the traditional joshing between the techies and the so-called creatives. Courtesy of Apple (the partnership was announced at MILIA in Cannes in 1996), TDV enjoyed some state-of-the-art equipment, though Yoz recalls a certain amount of obsolete stuff also got dumped on them. Technically the all-Apple environment did give the programmers a headache. What Ap
ple had available at the time was not ideal for game programming.
But it soon became clear that the revenue from H2G2 was some way off in the future. There was no shortage of potential users, but to persuade advertisers to part with their money you have to demonstrate that you have a regular audience, and that takes time to establish. Sponsorship is also notoriously tricky, a stately, slow dance of inching forwards and shuffling backwards again. Your contact at Megacorp says: “That’s interesting. Write me a proposal and I will take it to next month’s marketing meeting.” A month goes by. Then she says, “This is so new—more research needs to be done before we commit to this.” The following month the key decision-maker is in Japan, and the one after that is the end of Megacorp’s financial year so they’ve spent the budget. Another month passes and now “we’re reconsidering our Internet strategy so this little sponsorship deal is on hold. The tail cannot wag the dog . . .”
Another problem with H2G2 lay with the users writing the material. Robbie and the team knew that the members would not somehow create an innovative reference source collectively without a great deal of effort at the centre; he always strove to get the balance between public writing and in-house editorial right—and looking at the guide now with its rich variety and volume of entries the mix is very appealing. In retrospect the directors may have underestimated the work needed in-house, though their innocence in that respect reflects well on H2G2’s determination not to talk down to their audience. Some of the entries were wonderful, but many were not—and all of them reflected the many personalities, voices, styles and viewpoints of the writers. In aggregate the result just did not cohere into a usable resource.
And all the while Robbie and the other directors were acutely aware of how quickly they were spending money—something known in the jargon by the apt expression “the burn rate.” They threw themselves onto venture capitalists and well-heeled technology companies like Zero Mostel in The Producers launching himself on Little Old Lady Land. Intel came close but insisted on a local partner, and the UK market proved very steely indeed for a start-up multi-media company. Poor Robbie had to keep everybody motivated and fix a confident smile on his face until it ached, while in the privacy of his brain he worried about their finances.
Raising money had its lighter moments. Richard recalls what fun they had in California in 1997. Douglas, Ian Stewart, Richard and Robbie had flown out there to make a series of presentations. Douglas was essential, Robbie recalls. The esteem with which he was regarded “on the Coast” enabled their small but smart British company, as he said, to punch above its weight.
The local car hire company had a special offer, so for an increment of only $6 per day they tooled about in a large, red, convertible Ford Mustang with Douglas’s head sticking over the top like some mad tank commander’s. It was stressful, but an adventure. On that trip, Ian Stewart recalls, they made a pitch to Vulcan North-West, Paul Allen’s investment company. Paul Allen and Douglas had met several times and seemed to have a good rapport. Douglas was naïvely hurt that despite this good relationship with Paul, the investment decision had been pushed down the line to the analysts. They declined. The locals, despite the Grateful Dead T-shirts, flip-flops and “hey dude” laid-back manner, have a cool grasp of the basics when it comes to business. Douglas complained, “We only wanted a mere $1–1.5 million. It’s pocket money for Paul.” In fairness, Douglas understood that Paul’s investment company had to make their own judgements.
The TDV team met all the Microsoft billionaire aristocrats while they were touting for investment. Charles Simonyi entertained them in his mansion that had the size and content of an art gallery. He even showed them his bedroom with its vast picture window overlooking one of Seattle’s many lakes and a revolving bed enabling him to track the sun. It must have been difficult for the visiting Brits not to grin. But Simonyi did not invest in TDV either.
Jim Lynn, chief engineer on Starship Titanic, thinks that the technology was ten years behind what Douglas’s imagination wanted it to do both on the game and for H2G2. He and his fellow programmers, all Hitchhiker’s fans, worked heroically to try to realize Douglas’s dreams. Douglas was particularly close to software engineers Tim Browse and Sean Solle who worked well beyond the call of duty to make the H2G2 vision come true.
“He was always so disappointed when we said ‘no,’ ” said Jim, “and didn’t always understand why some of the simplest things were the hardest to deliver.” Douglas wasn’t very good at saying “well done” even though—as resident star and genius adored by the troops—this was something they wanted very much to hear. The TDV programmers worked wonders, but they were not a huge team in some billion dollar research park in Palo Alto. There was just a handful of them in Camden Town; their Chief Fantasist’s expectations were not always realistic.
Organizational life was something for which Douglas did not have the subtlest reflexes. He could be unreceptive to creative ideas from others—as if creativity was exclusively his job—and it was apparent almost immediately that the role of benign Godfather to other people’s projects (a role that all had hoped he might fulfil) was just not one that suited him, even if there were sufficient time. Douglas was out of practice in large meetings—after all it had been nearly twenty years since the BBC—and he would sometimes address his remarks just to one person in a way that could make colleagues sensitive to these nuances cringe inwardly. On the other hand, he often showed great warmth and kindness and never deliberately hurt anybody’s feelings; indeed he would be mortified when he realized that he had been a clodhopper. Douglas making amends was almost more embarrassing than the original slight. Despite the surface sophistication, in unfamiliar contexts the shy and gawky schoolboy could rise from his past.
The H2G2 site was very advanced technically for it was one integrated whole rather than lots of linked components, and was written in the computer language C++, which is unusual for a website. But despite its sophistication, Douglas’s dream for TDV was that it could develop some kind of artificial intelligence that would pass the famous Turing Test. That is still a long way off.* 198 Instead he had to settle for something that looked like it, and thereby he came up with one of his engaging analogies.
“Think of it this way,” he told the team:
It’s a magic trick. When a magician saws his shapely assistant in half on the stage, we see her feet wiggling at one end of the box and her head, clearly too far from her feet, at the other end. We know she hasn’t actually been sawn in half, but the illusion is bloody good. We don’t want to know how the trick is done. That’s the kind of illusion of artificial intelligence I want with Starship Titanic.* 199
Not being embarrassed by a surfeit of cash put all the more pressure on the timely production of Starship Titanic. Unfortunately this game, inspired by a joke in Life, the Universe and Everything,* 200 was hugely ambitious in scope, and almost beyond their resources to produce in the relatively short development time available to them, especially as the S&S money did not come through quickly. After a false start (Douglas’s fault, as he later admitted) over the buying in of some specialized software, the engineers wrote their own bespoke tools. Starting in the summer of 1996, delivering a giant game by September 1997 was always going to require a Himalayan effort.
The game itself is a remarkable achievement. From the outset Douglas had wanted a game with wit and humour that was also beautiful to watch. He had admired the graphics in Myst and loved the intriguing world it created, but he found it characterless and lifeless.* 201Starship Titanic would be richly inhabited by characters, in this case robots, many of whom were obstructive in ways too baroque to be described.
Visually it was stunning. Douglas had been attracted to the work of the artist and designer team Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, an Italian/Argentinian partnership of extraordinary talent. They were hired on a short-term contract and ended up working flat out for eighteen months. The look they created was that of an elegant but slightly sinister French oce
an liner of the 1930s. The colours are unusual. Every surface is highly polished and elegantly decorated in an art deco style that is somehow suffused with an off-beat eroticism. The robots (the bots) with their smooth yet expressive faces and their sudden unfoldings, like mechanised bats, are both funny and disturbing. In fact there is something both comic and nightmarish about the whole enterprise. Isabel found Douglas very appreciative of the artwork, and receptive to suggestions that emerged from it to the extent of sometimes writing them into the script. The only problem with graphics so detailed and finished was the sheer amount of information they contained. Sometimes, Isabel says, the polygon count had to be trimmed because otherwise the screen would just take too long to refresh itself.* 202 As it is, Starship Titanic is a colossal game requiring no less than three CDs to run. Quite possibly it is the most elegant computer game ever produced.
Some of those CDs’ capacity was taken up with a plot which rested on narrative foundations as big as a castle. Making something as complex as a computer game is a team effort, so it may be unfair to list some individuals and not them all. However, the software engineers—Tim Browse, Sean Solle, Rik Heywood, and Mike Kenny—did an exceptional job delivering far more than seemed possible. Adam Shaikh worked heroically on the architecture of the game. Douglas could not really program, though he admired those who could, and sometimes he drove the techies mad trying. Robbie said “he wanted to be the Michelangelo who chips away the stone to reveal the statue.” TDV employed experts to do that. Wix, Douglas’s old friend, wrote some evocative music; Terry Jones was typecast as the parrot; John Cleese made a cameo appearance as the mystery voice of the bomb.
