heavily indebted to Arthur C. Clarke's
Rendezvous with Rama (again) and to Larry Niven's Known
Space stories, from which it borrowed red and blue stepping discs.
Level 9's ‘Snowball’ (Mike, Nick and Pete Austin, 1983),
set on an interstellar colony ship, and Peter Killworth's ‘Countdown
to Doom’ (1984) for Acornsoft and Topologika, set on Doomawangara
(a hostile planet, not a region of the Australian outback), are equally
steeped in golden-age science fiction.

More often, the future became a vehicle for comedy,
usually in the form of sending up or camping up traditional science
fiction, with one notable exception. Douglas Adams's radio series
and novel The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the Three
Men in a Boat of the 1970s, achieved enormous success. To computer
hackers it became a devotional text, like the Monty Python sketches
it owed considerable debts to,5 especially insuccess but describing himself in the credits as a member
of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and a man who remains a
name in the games industry today:

I amassed a pretty substantial library on the history of
the atomic bomb … I went to the Trinity site [of Oppenheimer's
first test] itself, visited Los Alamos and a lot of museums and I talked
to a couple of people who were actually there … I wanted people,
when playing the game, to feel their helplessness. Because that's what
I felt when I was reading and talking to these people and seeing these
places. You could just feel the weight of history on you.

‘Trinity’ is not altogether dark, nor
innovative in its basic mechanics, with an extensive slice of
‘Zork’-like terrain and some mischievous animals. A black
cover with mushroom cloud wrapped