Much as the BBC series did, Hyperland struck me initially as a Pythonesque romp through the frontiers at the time of interactive media. No surprise, given that the author, Douglas Adams, wrote for Monty Python’s flying circus (which was my first surprise).
Other surprises . . .
First, for those of us who might seemed pressed by the due dates for this class, I found it humorous that Douglas Adams was deadline-challenged. As Erik Van Rheenen notes in “16 Fun Facts About The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” published in Mental Floss:
“Adams was a notorious deadline-buster. He was famously quoted as saying, ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.’ As he was polishing The Hitchhiker’s Guide, his publishers called Adams and demanded he finish the page he was writing. To ensure he didn’t hear the deadline’s whoosh, the publishing house immediately sent a bicycle courier to pick up the manuscript.
When writing the fourth book in the Hitchhiker “trilogy,” So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, Adams was locked in a hotel suite for three weeks with his editor (and girlfriend) to ensure the book got written in a timely fashion.”
I did give the H2G2 game a go. I did manage to turn on the light and bash about the room, but succumbed to a bulldozer crashing through the wall. The game appears to be merciless. (Not surprisingly.) It reminded me of Zork, one of the earliest text-based interactive computer games, and certainly the first that I played. Amazing where technology has gone since then.