The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Adventure Classic Gaming

The game is richly described, backed by an excellent forgiving parser, and more fun to play than you can shake a stick at. The only dark spot in an otherwise sterling effort is Adams' convoluted sense of logic, compounded by an unsatisfying ending. Other frustrations of the game owe more to the paradigm of game design from the early era of interactive fiction than anything Adams has done himself.
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Gaming Enthusiast
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is notorious though for its difficulty level and generally being “mean” to the player.
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SPAG
The writing is some of Infocom's very best, which is fortunate because the game itself is a little too short (only The Witness and Seastalker have fewer locations). The atmosphere produced is almost exactly like that of the book, even if specific details of the plot are often changed. The puzzles (including the legendary Babel Fish puzzle) are based on a brand of "consistent illogic" that is rather reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, and make the game one of those few that many will some day play again even after having solved it once. Hitchhiker's is one of the more literate text games on the market, as you will often have to pay more attention to how things are worded than you might in other games.
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SynTax
[...] the game follows the book pretty closely in parts but, naturally, can't go into the same detail. It is worth reading the book as it will help with some parts of the adventure - of course, it's well worth reading the book anyway as it is so terrifically funny. But I think that even though the game is standard level, certain bits would be quite tricky to solve without the benefit of reading the book first.
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SynTax
This game was my introduction to Infocom adventures, and what an introduction. It took me two weeks to get past that bulldozer [...] (Kedenan)

I was a bit disappointed by the ending of HHGTTG which was rather abrupt and suddenly bumped your score up when you'd thought you still had a fair way to go. What was more of a shame was the lack of the promised follow-up. A good game, though, and certainly a 'must' for any fans of Douglas Adams. (Sue)
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Page 6
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the brainchild of Douglas Adams. It started life in 1978 as a BBC radio series and quickly gained a cult following. From this grew four books, two records, three stage productions, a television series, the promise of a feature length movie and finally, an Adventure from Infocom.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (hereafter referred to as HGG) is set in a very high-tech galaxy with lots of computers, spaceships, robots and other technological marvels. Strange as it may seem, Adams had never even touched a computer when he originally wrote the radio series. His first encounter with a computer was about three years ago. Now he loves them!

After discovering computers, Adams also discovered Adventures and took a particular liking to Infocom's unique style. I believe he approached Infocom and suggested a collaboration to bring HGG to the computer. Infocom normally does all their work "in house", but this particular collaboration must have appealed to their warped sense of humour. So Douglas Adams teamed up with Steve Meretzky (author of Planetfall and Sorcerer) to bring us yet another Infocom classic.
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50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Hitchhiker’s is hard to summarize, but one of its overarching themes is that technology, in the hands of big business and bloated bureaucracies, does not make life better: in fact it makes it far, far worse.
[...]
As in previous versions, the game of Hitchhiker’s follows hapless Earthman Arthur Dent, who loses first his house and then his entire planet to unscheduled demolitions at the hands of uncaring civil services, local and galactic. Arthur joins up with Ford Prefect, a roving researching for the titular Guide—basically space Wikipedia on a tablet, before either such concept had been invented—which provides a useful source of authorial digression and, in the game, occasionally useful information. [...] Half the fun was putting the player in bizarre situations that gave Adams’ and Meretzky’s writing a chance to shine.
[...]
Like Tristram Shandy, the 18th-century novel that violated every inviolable convention of the book, Hitchhiker’s delights in breaking the still-solidifying rules of its own new medium.
[...]
“Douglas wrote the bulk of the responses to ‘correct inputs,’” Meretzky remembered, “but that’s just a small part of the text in an adventure game.” He would end up authoring over half of the content, seamlessly matching the cadences and style of his much more famous collaborator, as well as doing all the coding. “I was gratified,” he proudly recalled upon the game’s release, when Adams “remarked that in many cases he couldn’t tell which bits he’d written and which bits I’d written.”
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