That's right, today is Towel Day, a day in which fans of Douglas Adams' Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series carry a towel everywhere with them to commemorate the author and celebrate the hilarious books and radio shows. Hothead games (developers of Deathspank and Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness) have used this opportunity to announce that they are working on a new game based on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and launched a website for the game.
For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise, it started off as a series of radio plays on BBC Radio 4. In addition to writing the radio plays, Adams novelised them which lead to the franchise's widespread success. It was also turned into a TV series in the 80's and a Hollywood film (the less said about that the better) in 2005. It follows the story of Arthur Dent, who wakes up one morning to find his house about to be knocked down to build a new bypass. He soon learns that it is the least of his worries when the planet earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. A friend of Arthur's, Ford Prefect (who unbeknownst to Arthur, is actually an alien) teleports them off the earth and a series of bizarre and hilarious adventures in space ensue. Actually, calling them bizarre doesn't do the series justice. They're crazy, insane and extraordinary.
I'm a huge fan of the Hitchhiker's books (not huge enough to carry a towel with me on the 25th of May every year, but pretty darn close), and I'm excited to see what Hothead do with the franchise. The Penny Arcade games managed to integrate Penny Arcade's unique brand of humour into a decent game, hopefully they'll be able to do the same with HHGTTG. Nothing about the game has been revealed yet, so it could be anything. The obvious choice would be to do an adventure game, perhaps a graphical version of the original Hitchhiker's game, which was a very hard text adventure game made by Adams himself (which you can play in an updated form with some added graphical elements here, or in it's original form here), but other things could work in the universe too. Either way I'm excited to see what hothead do with it.
Any Hitchhiker's fans on Giant Bomb? What do you guys think of idea of a new game based on the franchise?
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