Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  The story of Starship Titanic itself is deceptively simple and characteristic of Douglas’s view of the human condition: you’re on your own, the world doesn’t quite make sense and it operates according to rules that you haven’t yet worked out. The player has to negotiate an upgrade to a higher class of cabin while the desk bot politely but intractably closes off every rational route to that goal. Simultaneously a stroppy talking bomb is counting down to detonation, and the player has regularly to defuse it since the bomb has a perverse habit of rearming itself. The ship is deserted apart from a demented parrot and a weird collection of nicely observed bots, some of whom will drone on about their war wounds at heartbreaking length. The key to success in the game is talking to the bots—and this takes discretion and subtlety, for first-class minds have invested ingenuity in making the job horribly tricky.

  There is a gigantic language engine built into the game. If you are so minded, you can talk to it for fourteen hours without it repeating itself. There are over three thousand sentences and phrases available to the bots, and they have a surprising range of cultural references at their disposal. It is an intellectual achievement of the highest order, one that required an endlessly inventive anticipation of player input and the subtle teasing of the audience along the route that the authors prepared for them. The language engine was very advanced—probably more so than the market required—but the culture of the company strove for excellence. Parsing natural language into recognizable components so as to generate an appropriate response from a library of possible replies is immensely complicated and it raises some interesting philosophical questions about meaning and the role of grammar in thought. An American baby and a Chinese baby are born with indistinguishable brains, and both set about learning their local languages thanks in part (according to Chomsky and others) to innate pattern generation and recognition talents built in by millions of years of evolution. A computer, on the other hand, is many orders of magnitude simpler than a baby’s brain, and its operating system (without which it is just an inert assemblage of components) may be all of ten years old. This is not the place to explore these notions, but one example of almost identical sentences with radically different syntax will suffice to illustrate the problem: “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like an apple.”* 203

  Douglas created the game concept and the basic architecture, and he and Neil Richards and Douglas’s old friend, Michael Bywater, wrote nearly all the character dialogue. Neil Richards also managed the text, and Douglas and Michael are credited with the game outline.

  Not surprisingly such a groundbreaking game took longer to produce than they had planned, a grim outcome because the revenue from the game was effectively their only source of income. If they ran out of money before the game was on the market, they’d be bust. If they got more money from S&S Interactive, they would delay the receipt of their own income from the game—possibly for years. What’s more they would miss the Christmas 1997 market, and run the risk that the launch would be stillborn. It’s often impossible to rekindle excitement if something is announced, then delayed. Cash flow can kill a business even at its moment of triumph because it takes time to collect debts from the market whereas expenditure always increases before the launch of a new product.

  In the end, after several missed dates, Robbie, who can be very persuasive, pleaded with S&S Interactive for more time and money—not an easy thing to do, for S&S prides itself on being tough. Gilles Dana, the Publisher of S&S Interactive who had taken over from Peter Yunich, flew over from New York to assess whether to pull the plug or extend some help. It was a frightening time.

  Gilles Dana happens to be a strictly orthodox Jew, and the TDV management was not quite sure what to feed him. There were a couple of Jews on the staff who were consulted. Yoz remembers Douglas listening intently and without the slightest hint of satire while Yoz explained some of the unusual culinary regulations:

  I laid everything on the table, and before Gilles arrived I lined up all the TDV directors and everybody who was going to be having lunch and carefully explained to them, “Look, this goes in here. If you’ve eaten that, you don’t eat this with that . . .” Enough for them to get the idea. Douglas was there. This was my first proper interaction with one of my all-time heroes, who happens to be the most famous, staunchest atheist in the world, and I have to explain to him how to keep kosher . . . It was deeply frightening. Douglas was very tactful, and asked a lot of questions. He knew how not to tread on people. Mind you, when Douglas was back in his office and, as he thought, I was safely out of earshot, he had this conversation with Alison [a colleague]. He was hitting his forehead with a cry of, “This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake.” And Alison said: “It’s religion, Douglas, it’s century-independent.”

  As it turned out, Gilles brought his own food. He was, says Robbie, tough but totally straight, and he extended both their deadline and their funding, though on rigorous terms. Games are not like books which enjoy a market stable enough for there to be confidence that the “product” would still sell even if a year late. There was no leeway at all for further delay.

  Emma Westecott was appointed as producer of the game, and she did an astonishingly good job in motivating the team and making up time. Nearly all the company’s efforts were now directed to getting Starship Titanic finished while a small team maintained the H2G2 site—though it was not commercialised. The website venture taking second place compounded Robbie’s difficulties in raising money, for his multi-media company was now engaged on only one product. There was a running joke in TDV that H2G2 was operating on the South Park “Three Phase” business model. Apparently in South Park (the anarchic cartoon series) the underpant gnomes abduct the infant heroes and take them back to a huge, cavernous lair in the middle of which is a gigantic pile of underpants. There’s a flip chart behind the pile, and on the chart it says, “Phase One—collect underpants. Phase Two—[a giant question mark]. Phase Three—profit.” The underpants business model, one can’t help thinking, basically sums up much of the strategy behind the dotcom explosion. Despite this gallows humour, everybody I have spoken to who worked on H2G2 was proud to have contributed to it regardless of whether it made a profit or not.

  The pressure became overwhelming. The technicians frequently worked overnight and their room soon held mountains of print-out, tottering towers of discarded pizza boxes and changes of clothes. Robbie used to bring in food parcels for them when they were working on Sundays.

  Under this crushing pressure, another of Douglas’s intense friendships became a casualty. Never employ your friends, they say, if you want to keep them.

  Michael Bywater had known Douglas since Cambridge. Michael is a phenomenon. Once, Peter Bennett-Jones reports, after Michael had been consistently late for Footlights rehearsals, at which he played the piano, he had been threatened with the scrotal shears if he were late again. But at next rehearsal he turned up two hours after the appointed time looking wild-eyed and dishevelled. “Don’t ask,” he said. “I’ve just crashed a plane.” Michael does indeed have a private pilot’s licence (you will recall that he once flew a house party down to Douglas’s place in Provence). He plays the piano beautifully. He knows a great deal of stuff across an unusual range of subject matters. Once, at one of their smart dinners, Douglas and Jane, fatigued by Michael’s incontinent trickle of esoterica, especially of the medical variety, placed him next to Annie Coren, the wife of Alan, the humorist and writer. Annie is a highly respected consultant anaesthetist at a major London teaching hospital. After dinner she and Jane compared notes: “Michael,” Annie reported to Jane, “has a bluff that cannot be called . . .”

  Michael Bywater is the most intellectually competitive person anybody is ever likely to meet. He is ferociously bright, and not inhibited from letting others appreciate the fact. He does not wear his erudition lightly. In an age when the uneasy journalism of self-revelation is popular, it was nevertheless surprising when Michael told his readers
in the Independent on Sunday about an incident in his childhood. His parents, believing on medical grounds that he would be a singleton, adopted a baby girl. Michael adored her, but for whatever reason she did not bond well with his mother, and after a short time she was returned with great regret to the agency. All his life, Michael confessed, he had been at some emotional level convinced that if you did not pass muster you could be sent back. Human beings are so complex that the idea of a single motivational key to their behaviour is obviously crass—or best reserved for movies as with Citizen Kane’s Rosebud motif. Nevertheless, there is something driven about Michael’s need to impress. For God’s sake, relax, one wants to say: every sentence need not be a winner.

  Intellectually Douglas and Michael were very much on the same wavelength. Both stood proudly on the bridge between arts and science. Given the interconnectedness of all things, in a more sensible world such mischievous distinctions would not need bridge-builders at all. Michael can talk about Heine and Heisenberg with equal facility. Some of his younger colleagues at TDV loved going for a beer with him. Though there was one lion and the rest were Christians, he could put on a coruscating performance. Other colleagues thought differently. Richard Harris and Michael, for instance, had personalities that grated upon each other. There were even occasions when Michael used his column in the paper to write about the company in easily penetrated disguise, something his co-workers considered bad form. Once, when one of Michael’s articles was published at a sensitive time for TDV, Robbie was almost inclined to reach for his lawyers.

  If most of us talk like bottles of pale ale, Michael talks like champagne, and he had fizzed at Douglas before when he had been under the cosh over several novels—especially Mostly Harmless. The two of them had been close for years: Douglas helped Michael out financially when he was struggling, and had stood by him, often proselytising about his talents. Douglas had nagged me, for instance, to commission Michael’s novel that was eventually bought by Sue Freestone and (as of February 2004) is yet to be published. In return Douglas got a lot of attention, a great deal of charm, editorial feedback and effervescent conversation. When Douglas and Michael were on song, gales of laughter would emerge from Douglas’s office in TDV.

  Such intimacy made their falling out all the more bitter. The immediate casus belli was the novel of Starship Titanic that Pan wanted to issue to coincide with the launch of the computer game. Douglas had flirted with the idea of writing it himself, but eventually became determined not to do so. As he explained, he just didn’t have the time to work on the game and a book simultaneously—a reasonable position given his rate of production.

  At first the great SF author, Robert Sheckley, was commissioned to write the Starship Titanic novel. Robert Sheckley is a wonderful American writer who has lived for many years in Europe, mainly the UK and Ibiza. His witty, surreal imagination always seemed best deployed on the short story, a form at which he is a master, though his shortish novels are objects of delight. Mindswap and Dimension of Miracles, written in the 1960s, are both masterpieces, and full of tropes and alarming reality displacements that years later could be described as Adamsy. But Robert Sheckley, a gentle, funny man, frequently hard up, and then in his late sixties, had not been very productive for some time. He and Douglas had something in common inasmuch as Sheckley once endured a ten-year writing block (though he was having an inordinate amount of fun on Ibiza). Douglas had read his work, and I know they met many years before Starship Titanic because on 31 August 1984 Douglas, Robert, Jane Belson, my friend Nick Austin (another publisher), my sister, Anna and Sue Webb (spouse and diary writer) had dinner at our place in Hackney, north-east London.

  Unfortunately, the novel that Robert delivered was not suitable. It’s difficult to say why. Robert may not have been on form, or his voice may have been so unlike Douglas’s own—or so different to the Starship Titanic source material—that it just would not do. It wasn’t until the autumn that they finally decided that the novelization was completely unusable, and this left Douglas and Robbie under time pressure on the delivery of the novel as well as the game. There was also money riding on it—a commodity of which they had a distinctly finite supply—for this piece of intellectual property resided in the company and not with Douglas. Pan, believing that the game would be issued in December 1997, wanted the book at the same time. Douglas never saw why two such different media had to coincide, but Pan was insistent. Besides, for books as with games, the Christmas market is vital. Robbie describes Starship Titanic at this time as a black hole sucking in all their money and resources. The famous advice in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, DON’T PANIC, seemed to be mocking them. Robbie, to his credit, never did panic, but he endured many a restless night with runaway brain.

  Michael had the answer. He would write the novel. Pan would publish at blinding speed, and Michael would hole up somewhere with his Apple, vast quantities of chocolate, cigs and black coffee, and emerge three weeks later—trembling, bearded, hallucinating, eyes the colour of Spam—with the novel in his hands. After all, he knew the dialogue and the architecture of the story as well as anyone. Pan agreed, and so did Peter Guzzardi, the American publisher. There was no formal offer, but Robbie’s email log confirms that everybody expected Michael would be writing the book. He was thrilled. Not only would he be paid to do it (for this was a task over and above his contract with TDV) but also he would gain a credential—a novel, albeit with an odd genesis, with his name on it. (The packaging was going to say “Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic” at the top and the author’s name at the bottom.) Perhaps like John Lloyd, Michael also felt a need to show the world that he too could hack it creatively up there with Douglas.

  In the event, Douglas changed his mind. Jane recalls that he came home after an exhausting day at TDV and told her about the problem over the timing of the novel. He was vaguely thinking of giving the book to Michael. “Well, if I were you, I’d vaguely unthink it,” said Jane, with her characteristic grasp of the practical. “You’ve only got a few weeks, and will not have any options left when they’re gone. Michael has never finished a book on time.”

  Douglas pondered, and then phoned his friend, Terry Jones, and asked him to do it instead. Terry, innocent of the history, agreed and managed to write a more than competent, good-natured novel in only three weeks. It does not catch fire on the page like one of Douglas’s, but it does the job. Pan published it just before Christmas 1997 when the shelves of the book trade are so swollen with stock that it is almost impossible to shoe-horn in another title. It sold about 80,000 copies—not bad at all, though nothing like the sales of a Douglas Adams novel.

  Michael went spare. To say he was upset would be like describing the US navy as a bit miffed about Pearl Harbor. He felt betrayed. He believed that he had been made to look foolish in front of publishers in the UK and the States. For a man like Michael, who bears his intelligence like a banner before him, this was humiliating. Fluency can be dangerous. Never a man to curb his linguistic skills, his articulate screech of outrage was so over the top that his relationship with TDV was almost irreparable, though Richard Creasey, exercising his prodigious skills of persuasion and diplomacy, lured him back into the fold for the short term. The schism is a pity, for Michael had a point, and he and Douglas had a huge capacity for amusing each other intellectually. Douglas wrote Michael a carefully considered letter, but the response was terse. There was even talk of lawyers. Both parties were hurt. Even now there is a deep and complex ambivalence in Michael on the subject of Douglas.

  Eventually Starship Titanic was completed, but, despite the superhuman efforts of Emma and the team, it did not make the US Christmas market. It was finally released for the PC market in April 1998—“a horrible year” Robbie remembers with a shudder—and the multi-language and Apple versions came out a year later. Apple Master Douglas took a lot of flack on-line for the delay in releasing the Apple version, but he was unfailingly polite about explaining the economic realities despite receiving “s
ome of the rudest emails ever written.”

  Everybody admired the graphics, but the sheer scale and density of the game and the tortuous ingenuity of the tactical traps make playing it a big investment of time, and in the end it gets frustrating. The team had become just too immersed in it, a world unto itself. Perhaps TDV was overly confident about the power of the brand to pull in buyers. Starship Titanic was also at the cerebral end of the computer game spectrum, whereas the mass market was to be found at the other end, home of Garth Gonad-Crusher shoot-’em-up violent graphics. S&S Interactive worked very hard to promote the game, though there was one occasion, Ed Victor reported, when Douglas was dismayed to find one of his college lecture audiences (the key market) had not heard of it at all. However, the game did win an industry award, the Codie, for the best Adventure/Role-Playing game.

  Unfortunately the sales were insufficient to change the company’s fortunes. After the release of Starship Titanic, there was not enough operating capital to fund TDV until another game or new revenue earner could be developed. All the more innovative sources of income were just not there yet in sufficient volume, and at that time investors were becoming more interested in the potential for on-line commerce than in computer game companies. They had realized that the games market was as volatile as the music charts. A hit could make a fortune, but there was a high incidence of expensive dogs. When Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance, an enlightened Norwegian/American venture capital company and an early investor in the company, expressed interest in Starship Titanic, it made perfect sense to restructure the games division and for TDV to be relaunched as H2G2, concentrating solely on building the Earth Edition of the guide. In September 1998, Thomas Hoegh and Robbie closed the deal for Starship Titanic and all its associated intellectual property to be transferred to Arts Alliance. It seemed like a good new home. Douglas said: