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Starship Titanic is a computer game designed by Douglas Adams and made by The Digital Village, set in Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe, before the action of his five-part "trilogy". It takes place on a starship of the same name (an early attempt at using the Infinite Improbability Drive) which has undergone "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" and crash landed on Earth on its maiden voyage (in an allusion to the 1912 disaster involving the real-world RMS Titanic).
The player acts the part of a human that goes onboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts are collected and placed in the correct place, Titania comes alive and talks.
One of the most fascinating parts of the game is the conversation engine used to talk with the robot staff onboard the ship. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thingy (PET) at the bottom of the screen. The robot's response appears as text in the PET and is also spoken. The conversation engine works by combining relevant pre-recorded speech.
A book entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic has been written by Terry Jones based on the game. Critical reaction has been lukewarm; the general consensus is that the novel reads like a poor imitation of Adams' style.
Starship Titanic and Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure were first mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy".
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