Gaming

I was thinking about this a few days ago! The game has maybe a dozen interactable characters, along with some characters that ignore your input and babble on about various nonsense in the voice of Terry Jones. I'm not sure if you'd have to pay Terry Jones's estate to develop that game with his voice. Probably so.

The game's setting is really bizarre, the Titanic in space, which leads to the visuals being gaudy and eerily out of place. The graphic design was really wonderful. It'd be nice to see the game's setting updated to a modern standard. Art deco seems to have fallen out of fashion after Bioshock pumped it up to infinity. I love art deco and would love to see something that embraces it fully like Starship Titanic did.

The puzzles, however, are really terrible. The worst kind of esoteric stuff. But, I think, the point of the game was to talk to the Bellbot and the Doorbot and ask them enough questions to overcome the ultra-esoteric puzzles. I'd love to see such an idea attempted again, perhaps more gracefully. There was a puzzle in Starship Titanic where you had to ask Bellbot to "give me the light" or something like that and if you used any other phrase like "hand me the light" it wouldn't work. ChatGPT definitely could smooth stuff like that over, where it can ascertain the meaning of text to bridge such gaps in speech.

Could Starship Titanic be rebuilt? Probably not since Douglas Adams and Terry Jones are dead and so whatever passion there might be for this oddball game is likely dead. (Though if Douglas Adams were alive he'd be absolutely enthralled to remake this game.) But I do think Starship Titanic is a game that people who want to make the next big thing in video games ought to play to see what people were reaching toward back in the day but failed. Those bots may not feel real, but they do have a lot of personality.