The Death of Two Great Minds is a Z-machine interactive fiction story written with Inform 6 and is © 2001 by Alex Watson. It was a participant in the Douglas N. Adams Tribute Speed-IF event.
In this small tribute game to Douglas Adams, you play as Arthur Dent. Together with Fenchurch and Ford, you have travelled to the planet Preliumtarn to read God's Final Message To His Creation, which is said to be written in thirty-foot high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains.
This solution is by David Welbourn, and is based on Release 2 of the story.
Desert (five virtual locations)
By the way, the IAINSING ON command introduces presumably-humourous misspellings into the story, replacing instances of "ian" or "ion" with "iain" and replacing "x" or "xc" with "ks".
> x Fenchurch. ask her about god. ask her about message.
> ask her about Ford.
> x Ford. ask Ford about message. ask Ford about ANYTHING-ELSE.
> panic. don't panic. kiss Fenny. enjoy myself.
> n. (+1)
> n. n. n. n. (+1)
More Desert
Note that if you fail to take Marvin soon enough (within five turns of finding him), Fenchurch takes the initiative, and she and Ford pick up Marvin themselves.
> x Marvin. ask Marvin about Marvin. ask Marvin about left side.
> take Marvin. (+40)
*** You have won ***
> notes
Mentioned:
The game was originally written by Alex Watson for a 2001 SpeedIF, and later improved upon. Thanks go to:
- Graham Nelson for Inform and the Designer's Manual.
- The SpeedIF organisers for the whole idea.
- Infocom for their brilliant IF writing and inspiration.
- The many authors of IF for their inspiration and the loan of their ideas.
- L. Ross Raszewski for the InvisiHints, DoMenu and AltMenu libraries.
- rec.arts.int-fiction for their help in various past technicalities.
- But especially Douglas Adams, may he rest in peace.
THE DEATH OF TWO GREAT MINDS is provided with a freeware license and NO warranty. This means that you may (and indeed are actively encouraged to) distribute it for free, but you may not provide it in any for-profit collection without my written permission. You most definitely may NOT modify the source code and release it, or represent my work as yours. I am not responsible for any damage to anything caused by use of this product, through user error or my negligence. If you wish to contact me with inquiries about this license, send mail to alexwatson@bigfoot.com.
In that game you scored your-score out of a possible 42, in some turns.
This walkthrough is provided free of charge since I wrote this walkthrough prior to January 2015 when I began my Patreon account, and also because the work it's based on has less than fifteen locations (so I wouldn't have charged for it anyway). I've since reformatted this walkthrough to use my currently preferred style. I hope you enjoy it!
I'm still creating new walkthroughs! Larger ones too! Please visit my Patreon account if you're interested in helping me create more interactive fiction walkthroughs. I appreciate all the help I can get! Thanks again.