The hitchhiker's guide

[The S69ker]

Yesterday I could have run Ifocom's "guide to the galaxy". It is released as freeware game, so why doesn't ScummVm add it to the download list with other games? Also I noticed "Teen Agent" is vanished from this list. Why?

[Praetorian]

Yesterday I could have run Ifocom's "guide to the galaxy". It is released as freeware game, so why doesn't ScummVm add it to the download list with other games? Also I noticed "Teen Agent" is vanished from this list. Why?

As far as I know, we only had the demo of "Teen Agent" available for download from our site, and that is still there in the demos page: https://www.scummvm.org/demos/

The demos page offers two demos for it: "Teen Agent (DOS Union Demo)" and "Teen Agent (DOS WizTech Demo)"
I don't think we aim to have every freeware game that ScummVM supports available from our site, and there maybe other factors that come into play; eg. some sort of agreement with the creator or whether the game is easy to get from the big digital distribution platforms as freeware; ie. Steam or GOG. In this case, Teen Agent can easily be grabbed from GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/teenagent

Wrt to "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" I can only find this link about it being playable online for free via the BBC site: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articl ... ry-edition
I am unsure if this is the same as "released as freeware", but my gut feeling is that it isn't.

[The S69ker]

Here is page with list of freeware games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... s_freeware

There are also beneath a steel sky, teen agent and hitchhiker's guide of course

On this site it's possible to download floppy version of "Guide"
*link removed*

[eriktorbjorn]

Wrt to "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" I can only find this link about it being playable online for free via the BBC site: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articl ... ry-edition
I am unsure if this is the same as "released as freeware", but my gut feeling is that it isn't.

It might also be playable from https://douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html but I couldn't get it to run myself. It's possible that I just don't have any working Java plugin for my web browser. I don't think there's any link there for downloading and playing it offline, though.

[eriktorbjorn]

Here is page with list of freeware games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... s_freeware

"Made publicly available as a web-based game by the BBC." Judging by https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhiker ... tion.shtml it seems likely that BBC had some sort of deal with Douglas Adams, but there's nothing there that can be downloaded so I wouldn't interpret that as a permission to redistribute it. There are arguments that can be made for archiving old games of course, but that's hardly within the scope of ScummVM.

By the way, despite its new GUI and illustrations it's almost certainly running the original game in the background. The $VERIFY command will print some vague information about "ZMachine Lambda" and its author.

[The S69ker]

"Made publicly available as a web-based game by the BBC." Judging by https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhiker ... tion.shtml it seems likely that BBC had some sort of deal with Douglas Adams, but there's nothing there that can be downloaded so I wouldn't interpret that as a permission to redistribute it. There are arguments that can be made for archiving old games of course, but that's hardly within the scope of ScummVM.

Oh... But it would be nice if it was redistributed

[OmerMor]

Wrt to "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" I can only find this link about it being playable online for free via the BBC site: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articl ... ry-edition
I am unsure if this is the same as "released as freeware", but my gut feeling is that it isn't.

It might also be playable from https://douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html but I couldn't get it to run myself. It's possible that I just don't have any working Java plugin for my web browser. I don't think there's any link there for downloading and playing it offline, though.

If you don't have Java plugin, the site hosts the game file here: https://douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.z3

[eriktorbjorn]

If you don't have Java plugin, the site hosts the game file here:

Yes but I think the only way to find that link was to read the page source, so it may have been more a matter of implementation than an intentional feature.

[OmerMor]

If you don't have Java plugin, the site hosts the game file here:

Yes but I think the only way to find that link was to read the page source, so it may have been more a matter of implementation than an intentional feature.

Possibly. Feel free to delete the link if you think it's piracy.

[The S69ker]

Does anyone know for whom belongs rights on "Guide"? "Activision"? Or maybe "BBC"?

[eriktorbjorn]

Does anyone know for whom belongs rights on "Guide"? "Activision"? Or maybe "BBC"?

I don't know, but I always assumed it was Douglas Adams himself. Almost certainly no longer Activision.

The way I've heard it (and Wikipedia seems to back it up) is that Infocom had a time-limited license with Douglas Adams. At some point between the releases of The Lost Treasures of Infocom and Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom collections, the license expired, which apparently was why that game (as well as Shogun) wasn't included there. I don't know any details about the contract beyond what's in the Digital Antiquarian article about Bureaucracy. Michael Dornbrook commented on the article, but didn't offer much detail about it beyond saying that he still had a copy.