Happy Towel Day Everyone - New Hitchhiker's Guide Game Announced!

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?

Source.

I love the series, and the premise certainly lends itself to an adventure game. 
 
I just think that without Adams' writing, it will be inherently missing what made the series so special to me.

Well.. I would have rather seen more of the Penny Arcade games.  But as a fan of the Hitchhiker's; I'm of course curious and moderately excited about these news.  
 
Need to find my old towel I used to walk around with on the 25th. This made me nostalgic. 

The Hollywood adaption wasn't THAT bad. I would recommend it to anyone new to HHG. Especially considering asking most people in 2011 to go listen to a British radio play from the 80's or watch the 80's TV series is usually going to be met with disdain. If they enjoy the movie I would say to read the books then get into the other stuff. 
 
I must say though my teenage self watching the guys in milliways at the end of the universe is somthing I'll remember forever. Even if I did see it on UK GOLD in 2000

Ok this kinda made my day. Cant wait to some screenshots or something. Although I do wonder if any of the GB crew would be interested.

This is the best Towel Day news.

I'm not sure if I'm excited for that, or whether I am expecting them to ruin it, but I do love those books a whole lot.

I don't see how this can end well.
 
I didn't know today was towel day, I'll have to integrate that into the improv show I'm doing tonight.

I think Hothead is capable of pulling this off... dunno why it took so long for somebody to make it into a game.

@TurboMan said:

I think Hothead is capable of pulling this off... dunno why it took so long for somebody to make it into a game.

It didn't take this long for someone to turn it into a game. As I said in the original post, Douglas Adams himself made a text adventure game based on the books. It was very hard, I've tried to play it several times and given up pretty quickly.