The BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game has been revamped for its thirtieth anniversary.
The game is based on the original Douglas Adams story and was first a pure text adventure (and incredibly difficult to complete) but has been reworked over the years to appeal to more modern audiences.
It received an overhaul ten years ago for its twentieth anniversary when some images were added and the interface was redesigned.
More recently the game was just sitting on a BBC webpage collecting about 70 players per day and so it was given another reworking. "The time seemed right for a spit and polish and to re-house it on a shiny new server just before the old ones were switched off for good," explains the BBC. "An already cantankerous game with a penchant for killing people in a variety of amusing ways, the game has not become more friendly while sulking unloved and unnoticed."
In switching the game from Flash to HTML5, the interface was expanded. The expansion takes note of the rise of tablet gaming and includes an on-screen keyboard which you can use when you're playing on a touch screen device.
There's also the obligatory social media connectivity. According to the BBC, "rather than having a simple functionality where the user could tweet, we would allow the game itself to tweet, based on the actions of users in the game. This was when the games' personality started to shine through. This may or may not prove to have been a good idea."
You can play the new version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game on the BBC's website. Try not to die before Arthur Dent has left his house.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
