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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Oh, cool. (The only time I ever met Douglas Adams, I was in London and dropped in on TDV, where a friend of mine was working as a sysadmin -- this was around summer 1997 -- and I got the tour, which included the man himself, who just happened to be in.) IIRC the novelization was going to be written by Robert Sheckley (who was also there, one of the great SF satirists of the 1950s to 1970s, up there with Harry Harrison in his early period):

http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sheckley_robert

TDV had enormous energy back in mid-1997, but as I understand it everything fell apart very rapidly after Douglas died; he was the main driver behind the whole project, so rather than being an independent games house -- which it had the potential to become -- it died with its founder. (There's a lesson in here for startups, I think: try not to depend exclusively on a single creative vision?)

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The company imploded before Douglas died. The dotcom collapse was the final nail. Also Douglas being far more wrapped up in trying to get the film made probably didn't help. He had moved to America and was barely involved with TDV after the game.

I was in charge of douglasadams.com and was a coder on h2g2.com. I left the company a year or so before h2g2 was sold to the BBC and the ill fated Hitchhikers game moved to its own company.

What Shim said. Trust the Shim.

Charles, what Shim & Yoz said… …Be aware that Robert Sheckley did in fact deliver a couple of drafts of the novel. This I know 'cos the second draft is sitting in front of me right now :) And had ST gone along that SF satire route, that might have been appropriate. As it was, it ended up in the 'fiendish family entertainment' space, for which Terry's lighter (frothier, if you like) style was more suited.

>try not to depend exclusively on a single creative vision?

I guess if you have an unmatched creative genius like Douglas Adams in your team, that might be the only real option. Especially since a lot of creative geniuses seem to have problems cooperating with other creative geniuses (at least in my experience).

But I generally agree. Just look at Apple.

It must be scary having a company so dependent on one creative mind. But how would Apple look today if they tried not to depend on Jobs so much? My guess- much smaller, much less significant.

Apple seem to be doing just fine without Jobs:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/27Apple-Reports-Reco...

I think he meant had he not returned after leaving apple the first time.

Now it is, but look back at Apple's share prices in 2000 and what Apple was when Steve Jobs came in. It was a struggling company trying to figure out whom to please, their offering of computers is what HP is now: a multitude of options that does could do anything for everyone.

Steve Jobs' personality and drive created Apple and then saved it by having the executive power to focus the brand away from the various iterations of computers to get to one idea: Beautiful products that people want.

Apple have their golden goose now, they just have to flog it. Like Microsoft did. Maybe they will continue to make new breakthroughs with the massive cash reserves they had, but it's hard to imagine they could top what they've already done.

We weren't: Douglas was a seriously important catalyst for the company, but so much of the work we did (some of which carries on now) was the result of the coming together of a fabulously talented and deeply eccentric team of people who complemented, contradicted and inspired each other. We had some bad luck along the way (and created a deal of it ourselves) but the final asteroid was the fact that we were weeks away from a major investment round with an NY investment bank when the dotcom market imploded - to oversimplify a very long story, they then walked away and landed us with the bill for their lawyers and their gold-plated private jets. What goes arounds, comes around: they went down spectacularly in 2008, to general rejoicing.

+100

It was great having Douglas around for ideas and contributions: he did many things for Starship Titanic beyond the core ideas, such as designing puzzles and even composing bits of the score. However, as anyone who ever worked with him knew, relying on Douglas to deliver serious amounts of creative work on a schedule was A Bad Idea. (I ended up writing the introduction page for his own site: http://www.douglasadams.com/introduction.html )

But TDV was made up of some of the most interesting, creative, and downright fun people I've ever worked with. It was a bumpy ride through the first dotcom bubble, but such a fantastic thing to be a part of.

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