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Mr. Adams' Tricky Decision
In 1985, I was working for Activision as a Producer. One of my “lines” was the Lu-
casfi lm Games (before they began publishing the games themselves). I had the op-
portunity to work on the game version of the upcoming Lucasfi lm movie
Labyrinth
,
directed by Jim Henson and starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. The fi lm
was envisioned by Henson and awesome fantasy artist Brian Froud, and the original
screenplay was written by Monty Python's Terry Jones. The game team included my
old friend Steve Arnold (whom I met in 6th grade and had worked with at Atari).
Steve had become the General Manager of Lucasfi lm Games. The rest of the Lucas-
fi lm team included David Fox, Charlie Kellner, and Christopher Cerf, who was at that
time a writer for Sesame Street.
As we worked together on the game concept, Lucasfi lm had the amazing idea of
putting us together with Douglas Adams, renowned author of
The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy
and one of the funniest people I have ever met (we miss you, Douglas).
So they sent the team over to spend a week in London with the man himself.
Adams was incredibly stimulating. Every day a fresh blast of his wild and intel-
ligent humor stoked up the creativity of the team. We would start off with a piece of
the design to brainstorm about in Douglas' living room. By the time we'd eaten our
morning croissants, Douglas was off and running, cracking us up until our sides hurt.
His humor made us all want to be funny, and we all tried—but it was like singing
with Pavarotti. (Douglas also made me eat eel pie at a little shack on the bank of the
Thames, but that's another story.)
The peak of the brainstorming was reached when we were working on ideas
about how the game might start. Douglas proposed that we begin it as a text
adventure game in which the player would navigate to the theatre where Laby-
rinth was playing and buy a ticket (THERE IS A MARQUIS HERE. :GO LEFT, etc.). The
player goes into the theatre, the curtain opens, and a full graphic adventure game
begins! The game, although not a blockbuster, was a greater hit than the movie
in the United States, although I will never understand why the movie was pulled
early from theatres.
On our fi nal night in London, we dined at a high-class London restaurant (pheas-
ant with buckshot was my entrée). Terry Jones sat next to me, and I learned from him
that he felt pretty negative about the extensive rewrites of his original movie script.
As we spoke about it, he became increasingly overheated and eventually took off his
