The villa sits at the foot of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, where it stays in shadow until late morning. It is two hours' journey from Lima to the gate, and a further twenty minutes until security let me through. The maid shows me to the spacious lounge. Yoz Grahame barely acknowledges my arrival, his interest held by the cartoons on the wall screen.

The security's there for a reason. While most of the team behind h2g2 have been honoured for their roles both during and since its creation, Grahame is wanted in at least four separate countries for masterminding The Great eBay Heist of 2016. The extradition orders have been piling up for the past five years and while there are no major signs that the Peruvian government will give way, it's better to stay alert. This twenty-fifth anniversary interview is the first he's given in over a decade.

Grahame's eyes wander as I start with his health. "Back's playing up, RSI's still giving me twinges... it's too cold here in the winter." He sighs heavily and gazes out towards the green lake. He cuts off my next question halfway through; "Yes, of course I miss Hendon." He sighs again. "As delightful as the scenery is, I'd kill for a decent kosher pizza."

There's definitely something reassuring in the continued presence of his desire for a hacker diet. A Coke machine against one wall, next to an Addams Family pinball machine, shamelessly imposes over the antique escritoire. "Oh yes," he says. "I may be forced into exile, but I'd rather be in prison than here without my toys." He still takes an active interest in technology matters, often posting detailed rants on his blog about the latest Microsoft or AO-Apple developments.

But there are other habits he's had to give up, surely? He shrugs. "I haven't touched any class-A's since well before the job... god knows, I could if I wanted to. This bloody country's full of the stuff." He sniffs irritatedly, then waves to the coffee-skinned young man lounging on the sofa. "Luis, sweetheart... my cigarettes, if you would." Luis tuts impatiently and slopes away. Grahame signals the closest thing to a smile that I see all day. "A man's got to have some vices. It's only healthy." He winks and strokes his greying moustache.

Compare this to the Yoz Grahame of legend, especially in his h2g2 days. The stories have abounded ever since its launch, and yet more were brought to light when h2g2 subsumed the ailing BBC in 2012. They have done nothing to dent its popularity; if anything, the Gonzo tinge is seen by its fans as vital to the service's character.

"Well, we had to, didn't we? It's all part of the Guide researcher image. Not that we were new to the idea, of course. I'd been gulping down MDMA for a year of weekends before. Sean[Sollé] always liked to have a line or two on hand for the groupies. And after Shim got arrested in that Catholic girls school ..." I'm scribbling frantically now - it's rare for any of the original h2g2 team to even hint at the truth behind its gruelling launch. Given that he seems in a more talkative mood now, I ask him to start again.

"We had a hint when Jim arrived on his first day. This chap turns up out of nowhere in an Armani suit, leaves his Aston Martin purring in the middle of Maiden Lane and asks Robbie [Stamp, The Digital Village's CEO] to park it. That was the way he did things. Of course, he was enough of a pro to make sure the schmutter was stashed in the suit carrier for the photos; he had a bunch of pre-worn geeky t-shirts for those. And it wasn't like things weren't... somewhat unconventional at TDV before then - any excuse for a party, half of which ended up with people naked in the corridors, that kind of thing. But we knew that things were going to a new level when Jim walked in."

How did the existing staff react? "There was trepidation, of course, but we were so hyped up about the directors finally giving us the green to design the thing... Apple were beating down the door to give us kit, Douglas was coming up with new ideas every day..." He waves his hands in wide, overly-dramatic circles. "I think my mouse mat burst into flame at one point."

As did a certain restaurant, I point out. Grahame chuckles and nods, lighting up another Sobranie, and waves Luis towards the drinks cabinet. "Yes, we did get a little out of hand at points... but then, the Guide was always meant to be born out of a series of incredibly long lunches. We actually had that written into the initial plan and got the directors to sign off on it. Shim [Young]'s idea, I recall. Besides, we paid for the Thai Pot to be fully refurbished."

I comment that, given the stories of the design process, it's amazing that they managed to stick to a plan at all. "We finished remarkably close to the given deadline, actually. Though I think that was less to do with rigourous scheduling and more to do with a total lack of note-taking. We got to the deadline and RH [Richard Harris, Chief Technology Officer] said, 'Well, what've you got?' We had a big board meeting where the team got up to present the architecture and it basically consisted of us prancing around a whiteboard, fighting each other for the marker pens and randomly throwing up anything we could pull out of the haze. Mostly Tim drawing boxes while Sean sprayed them all with excitement. They loved it, of course, and immediately set us to work. Not bad, given that all it was really about was giving Douglas a quicker way of finding good record shops."

Surely the party process didn't translate to a workable software engineering methodology? Grahame tilts his head back and narrows his eyes. "It's... a hard one to balance. I'll tell you this: never code on acid. Really. Screw Thompson and his bats, it's got nothing on what was coming out of my screen. I had to take a week off, and I still can't look at certain bits of the Perl DBI. Speed, though, is something else. Did some of my best work on speed. It got to points where I was in the middle of something, and working out what I needed to do next, and then realising I'd already done it. F***ing great. Even compiled." He accepts the drink from Luis, swishing the ice cubes around the glass as he continues. "Yeah, we were just steaming through... Shim had Monster Magnet blaring the whole time, we'd do thirty-hour stretches and head straight out the door to Bar Aquda for the rest of the night. As long as the bitches didn't get in the way, of course." He sneers openly and takes a violent gulp of vodka and tonic.

The long-held hostility between Emma Westecott (the project's original editor) and Grahame is well-known, so I batton down for the barrage. He lets loose with a stream of venom, noisily showering the coffee table with spittle.

"That cow Westecott... couldn't code for p*** but actually had the gall to tell me what to do! Me! Meanwhile, her little team of pixel-pushing whores were strewing cartoons all over the place. Miall was just a snipy little bitch, never had a kind word for anyone, always the first to cut you down... I think she reduced [Richard] Creasey to tears at one point. And Elkins, she was just thick, poor cow. Kept accidentally scalding herself when making the tea. No grasp of basic physics whatsoever." His expression becomes manic, hands turning to claws as his anger boils. "I was trying to work and I'd have Tank Spice and her talent-free oestrogen army wittering on in the background..."

Desperate for a change in topic before it sends his blood pressure through the roof, I bring up the subject of h2g2's most famous staff member and the source of its inspiration: the world-famous author, TV presenter and Internet pundit, Douglas Adams. The name has an immediate calming influence, Grahame catching his breath and tilting his head in thought for a few seconds before picking up the thread.

"Douglas wasn't..." He pauses again. "Douglas's name is obviously tied firmly to h2g2, and rightly so, but he wasn't there all that much during the birth. Not that we minded much, as he was meant to be working on the movie script."

So, while not being there often in person, he still had a substantial role as architect. "Not in a conventional software engineering sense, but then h2g2's development had about as much in common with conventional software engineering as it did with animal husbandry. We had occasional meetings where he'd throw some ideas at us, some of his ideals for the service, then we'd go off and try and knock them into something that we could actually code." Grahame looks wistfully at the ceiling. "Some really fantastic lunches, those. Usually finished around four-ish. In the morning."

He pours himself another large Bailey's and sends the maid off for more ice before I can drag him back to the subject of Adams's influence. "He had a lot of great ideas and a lot of terrible ones, which is of course a key part of the design process. I mean, the idea about the service tracking his location and telling him when he was near a shop with that record he wants is obviously completely silly in retrospect. But the key thing with him, as always, was that he'd occasionally drop these beautiful, compact insights into the process that were incredibly valuable for focusing us on the ideals. Sometimes we got it and sometimes we didn't. At one lunch we asked him for insights on how to deal with the incredibly thorny issues relating to editing and moderating all the content we'd have to deal with, and he just said, 'It's easy - evolution!' and then sat back with a satisfied smile on his face. At the time I thought, 'Yes, that's very nice, Douglas. Now show us the f***ing code.' Which the bastard went and did five months later."

So he was primarily responsible for the legendary Species engine? "Oh, completely. We'd launched and were quickly swamped with a ton of submissions, ninety-nine percent of which complete crap that totally missed the point. 'On a little blue-green planet called Earth the carbon-based bipeds enjoy a sport where they kick a sphere around a large grassy area...' That kind of thing. Plus all the forums. We'd opened the floodgates and there was no way of managing it all without hiring five floors of editors and moderators. So instead of getting on with the bloody movie script, Douglas spent a week tinkering with Hypercard and came up with a little demonstration of what he was talking about. The others didn't get it but I spotted the potential immediately, of course; the way he was harnessing the users to self-moderate was totally optimal. It took about two weeks to implement. We still had a few technical hitches that took some ironing out - mainly involving Tim jetting over to Redmond and repeatedly throwing Steve Ballmer against a wall until he promised to fix their web server software - but once the code was out of beta it just took off. I remember a lovely slow Friday afternoon where we sat around in front of the monitors, waiting for the charlie being couriered across London for us, and just watched the site build itself. Fantastic."

I hear a car pull into the driveway. Luis taps his watch noisily and Yoz Grahame gives me an apologetic look, his mood having lightened considerably since the start of the interview. "That'll be my saffron-flagellation therapist. He can be quite vicious with the branches if I keep him waiting." While I gather my equipment I ask if Grahame's had any recent contact with the great man. "Not for many years, alas. I saw him briefly when Polly was here promoting her second album, but other than that, I'd rather not get in his way. It's hard enough to keep him working as it is."

As Grahame accompanies me unsteadily to the front door he pre-empts the traditional final question. "If there's one thing I regret about the whole thing... I wish I'd stopped them putting in all those stupid f***ing smileys."