Well, my name's Tim Browse and I work at The Digital Village, known to its inmates as TDV (or in some cases, "The Didge").

My first project at TDV was "Starship Titanic". Some people will tell you that Starship Titanic is a CD-ROM, which is a bit like telling you that Ballykissangel is a television programme. It doesn't really help you if you don't know what the damn thing is. In the case of Starship Titanic, it's a game. An adventure game. With graphics and sound and everything. Well, not everything – for instance, it doesn’t have bananas*, but you get the idea. Look at the web site if you want to know more. But beware The Fandom Menace.

Many people are curious about how Starship Titanic was made**. Basically what would happen is that the development team would work insane hours for no discernible reason, and every now and then Douglas Adams would come in and say "Very good – now everyone stand on your nose and cluck like a chicken." Apparently he had some sort of bet with Richard Dawkins about natural selection. I’d join in, but I’m too busy trying to sell the 747 that mysteriously appeared in my yard last week.

Having read Douglas's work, it was interesting to meet him. My initial reaction upon meeting him was to stand up, only to find that I already was. Once I had been furnished with the requisite step-ladder, we chatted animatedly about natural language parsers, the random generation of 3D models of sea-shells, real-time versus pre-rendered graphics, and the possibility of me spending the next two years of my life chained to a PC while a large bald man dressed in a loincloth and some grease banged a large drum at the back of the office.

It was during this conversation that I made the discovery that this wasn’t the Douglas Adams who wrote "Watership Down", nor did he have anything to do with the chart-busting mega-hit, "Bright Eyes". My disappointment was almost palpable. But not quite. I tried to palp it, but nothing happened.

Eventually we shipped Starship Titanic and the comet missed Earth by a narrow margin. Life seemed to go on, albeit at a different pace, and with a sharp reduction of the development team’s intake of "Friends" videos. Now we’re working on various projects, some of which I am involved with. One of them is a Hitchhiker game, which will be released some time in the future. Douglas is an Apple Master – see www.applemartyrs.com for details – so we’ve also just finished working on the Macintosh version of Starship Titanic, which is in the shops now.

My current job title, made up by me, is "Technical Lead and Honesty Evangelist" for TDV. I became Technical Lead because I am one of the few people in the company able to wire a 13 amp plug without ending up looking like a scarecrow with relationship problems. I achieve this by the childishly simple stratagem of already looking like a scarecrow with relationship problems. Being Technical Lead means I get to decide which type of kettles we use, and to work out which are the really vital technical assets of the company, so that we can throw them away. Nobody’s yet noticed that I’m just pretending to be Technical Lead, but then the people I work with aren’t exactly rocket scientists. Well, not unless they worked on that Ariane fireworks thing. I think you know what I’m saying.

I recently added Honesty Evangelist to my job title, because I got sick of Evangelism in the computer industry. The idea that you pay someone to be an XYZ Evangelist, and they go around saying "XYZ is the solution. What is the problem?" seems to me to be backwards, against common sense, and insufferably smug and irritating. Evangelism doesn’t have to be like that – but it usually is. The sooner we lose technology evangelism, the happier I’ll be.

Still, as Mike Batt used to say, "Get those bloody rabbits out of my studio!"

*But it does have lemons

**This is a lie.