Infocom “Lost Hard Drive” Reveals Hitchhiker’s Sequel and More

By Joe Haygood | April 21, 2008

Anyone that remembers the heyday of PC gaming, will instantly recognize the name Infocom. Infocom brought us some of the greatest adventure games for many years until their demise in 1989. The greatest part about Infocom was the fact that their games were created, for the most part, without a single graphic. Yep, their specialty was text based adventure games, that would challenge your mind, and let you think up the scenery.

Next to Zork (and if you have no clue what Zork is, read here and then play it here), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was Infocom’s pride and joy. It sold the most of any game they put out next to Zork, and was routinely quoted as being one of the best book to game adaptations at the time. There was always rumor about a sequel being planned for Hitchhiker’s, but we never really heard much about it in the public, this being around 1986-89, so there was no quick access to the Internets to get the scoop on development. But as most would tell you, if you put something on a computer, someone else will find it later, and that has appeared to happen for the guys at Waxy.org

The guys at Waxy.org got ahold of a drive image from the Infocom servers, circa 1989. This image has everything from all the games Infocom had released, and even some that were in development. It also has a ton of emails from inside Infocom that shows the strife in development of the sequel. But the bigger prize are the two development versions of Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

While there is not much there in regards to playability, it is interesting to see the strife that could derail a sequel to a popular game, and how egos, disenchantment and the downfall of a type of gameplay could kill not only a highly anticipated sequel, but a company as well.

Now if companies would only take note of the cool stuff that Infocom would put in their box and start doing that again, I would be a happy camper.