h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Still working on this one?

Yeah. It's just that between school and work, it's been pretty hectic all around.

Fantastic entry. I hope it gets picked.

Oh the halcyon days of playing Keen....

I think I got epsido IV free with my soundblaster CD-Rom when they first came out.

Doesn't surprise me. Episode IV gets handed out a lot.

Or at least it did up until about a decade ago....can't honestly remember seeing it for sale as new in a store since then.

Are you still working on this, Affy? Or is it ready to be picked?

There are a couple of bits of info I've been meaning to post for a while, from the book Masters of Doom.

Once Carmack had got the graphics engine working -- he'd been tackling the problem of how to get scrolling working on the PC -- the idea developed to get the licence to port Super Mario Bros. 3 to the PC, and an actual demo was created; but Nintendo wasn't interested in pursuing the PC market. Hence Commander Keen, developed on computers 'borrowed' from Softdisk, where the makers then had ther day jobs.

Adrian Carmack, the artist, actually hated the game's style, and indeed anything cutesy.

'In most games, when a character died, it would just disappear, vanish. But Tom [Hall] had other notions. He was eager to incorporate some "larger philosophical ideas," as he said. He loosely based characters on idea he'd read in Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents; a guard was made to represent an id. He wanted to teach kids that when people or even aliens die, they really die, they leave corpses. So he wanted the dead creatures in the game to just... remain: not graphic or bloody corpses, just dead Yorps. Cute dead Yorps.'

Sorry I left it so long; I've got a backlog of stuff I put off until efter the end of the last University term. Hopefully some of this will be useful.

I knew about the SMB3 connection, but I didn't know that leaving the corpses was meant to be a big philosophical thing, thanks for that.

And to answer the question: yes, there is stuff that could easily be added if I had time. However, I don't think people would suffer if this was put into the editted guide.

I'd still like to change a few grammatical things, but if I should die tomorrow I wouldn't worry about whether or not I could've added more.

College has just been nightmarish for me this semester. Everytime I think I'll be able to get back to the Guide to work on stuff, I find myself at another deadline.

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congrats, and about time !!

Excellent and well done