Doing an Infocom-type game was essentially a one-person job. In the case of HHGG it was two people - Steve Meretzky and me. Over three dozen people have been involved with the making of Starship Titanic over the course of two years. It's a completely different scale of complexity.

I was pretty much immersed in it for two years - which is much more than I intended. I outlined the general shape, scope and intent of the game partly by myself and partly with my old friend and occasional collaborator Michael Bywater. Then I did a fairly detailed script (which I must go and have a look at again now that we've finished the game, just to see if it still bears any relation to it at all). Then I worked with the art directors Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina to arrive at an overall aesthetic. They were really remarkable - it was just a question of letting them loose, really. Every time I suggested an idea to them they came back with something much grander and more extraordinary. Then I worked through and refined all the puzzle ideas with the programmers, and... well, by and large I was pretty involved with nearly all aspects of the production, except of course for actual C++ programming, which was way out of my league. Then of course, there was the dialog. This turned into a gigantic task, with a final total of sixteen hours of recorded dialog, comprising over 10,000 repsonses. A team of three of us handled this - me, Neil Richards and Michael Bywater. I also wrote a few small pieces of music (most of which was done - magnificently - by Wix), including Boppy's music in the music room puzzle.

>Why all the (malfunctioning) robots? Is there some message there about our continued development away from human contact into a sterile, sci-fi, "don't touch me with human flesh" kind of society?

Because in the context of a computer game you can either do malfunctioning robots pretty realistically, or you can do actual people very unrealistically. It's not a tough call.

>Were you flattered or annoyed when you heard that Hollywood was putting out a pricey extravaganza with a hauntingly similar title?

I thought it was a bit rich to be honest. I think they're trying to ride our wave a little.

I don't think that technology gives a better world, but it gives us a more interesting one.

>A warped cyber-intelligence appears in Starship Titanic, and the Hitchhikers trilogy (ahem) had Marvin the paranoid android. Why does defective/depressed technology keep appearing in your work?

I think I tend to be a humorous writer in the old sense of the word. If you remember, we used to believe that people's personalities were formed by certain bodily fluids or 'humours', and they might be sanguine or phlegmatic or bilious depending on which humour was dominant. If you make a character a robot instead of a person you can play with the idea of obsessed personalities very easily.

The idea first came to me many years ago and became just a paragraph or two in Life, The Universe and Everything. A number of people (including my agent!) said I should write it as a novel, but for some reason I wasn't keen. I think the reason, in retrospect, was that it was primarily about a thing - a ship - rather than about people and therefore didn't really lend itself to a novel. Many years later, when I was casting about for the right idea for a CD-ROM project it came back to me, and suddenly it seemed like the perfect vehicle, so to speak. In a CD-ROM adventure the environment is the first thing and you gradually populate it.

The project has taken two years and has involved dozens of people - programmers, designers, 3D artists, musicians, actors, other writers, and I've been involved in nearly every aspect of the production (other than actually coding in C++). It's been a huge task, and as far as I'm concerned it's been a great and very stimulating change to be leader of a collaborative team rather than just a lonely typist. You need that kind of change from time to time.

>Terry Jones must have seemed a natural choice when casting Starship Titanic's manic parrot, but how did you first get in touch with him?

I've known him well for 20 years, and we've frequently talked of working together, but have never really done so before.