The improbable voyage of Starship Titanic, the 1998 Douglas Adams video game filled with 'unhinged' chatbots

Douglas Adams originally devoted just half a page to eulogizing Starship Titanic in the tenth chapter of Life, The Universe, and Everything. A "sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge" cruise liner resembling a "silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale," the luxury ship did not even complete its first radio message--an SOS--before its "Improbability Field" engine prototype triggered a "sudden and gratuitous total existence failure" shortly after launching. It was one of many in-world anecdotes scattered through the third part of the late sci-fi author's revered "trilogy in five parts," The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Over 17 years after its publication, most readers had probably forgotten about Starship Titanic. In 1998, however, the ill-fated intergalactic cruise liner's tale suddenly expanded to include a video game featuring tens of thousands of lines of scripted dialogue, hours of vocal performance recordings, and a standalone 223-page novel written by Monty Python's Terry Jones.