Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Infocom

Status: No Download, Findability: 1/5

A short entry for now on what was likely to have been a C64/C128 release back in the day by Infocom.

This was to be a sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and was in development and design for a number of years. A sequel was mentioned in the ending of the game, and certainly light shed by Andy Baio confirmed this in 2008.

The game was plagued by delays, with no solid design or anyone to program it at one stage. Eventually it was moved over to British developers Magnetic Scrolls, with Infocom fighting to try and get it back to work on themselves internally.

In 2008, an Infocom archive was found with many details about the game, which Andy Baio wrote a detailed article about, including sharing remains of the game itself. More details about the findings can be found at https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/

On the website are a number of design notes and details as well. Two builds can be played from May 1988 and April 1989, but there is no C64/C128 version available. Just the Z-machine code, which should be possible to get working on the C128 at least. Maybe someone will do this some day.

I’ve left the developer credits here blank, as no actual C64/C128 build was seemingly done at any stage. I’ll update the page if anything changes.

Contributions: Fabrizio Bartoloni

Posted in: GTW64 archive | Tagged: | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

  1. Just a brief point, unrelated to the game but to the article – it’s worthwhile using The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to view the original version of the Waxy page. Andy had to cut some of the original article due to the heat he was getting in the comments section of that page.

    • Good shout Bernie! Shame that he caught some heat about the article, as he had good intentions to tell the story. Happens sometimes sadly.

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