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A novel entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, based on the game, was written by Terry Jones. The book follows a group of three humans who are taken aboard the Starship when it crashes on Earth and returns to the planet Blerontin where it was launched, with various subplots including an on-board bomb, a love-triangle between the characters, and an attempt to commit insurance fraud by the investors in the ship. The book received mixed reviews, many reviewers pointing out that, while Jones' writing was humorous, it compared poorly to Douglas Adams' style, focusing more on slapstick and camp than Adams' other work. The book is available for free online, with all the words in alphabetical order.
The Starship Titanic and "existence failure" were first mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". This may suggest that the game takes place in the same fictional universe as the Hitchhiker's Guide stories. However, details regarding the ship's construction in Life, the Universe and Everything do not match those in the novel Starship Titanic. If a player in Starship Titanic mentions characters or quotations from the Hitchhiker's Guide series, the game will accuse the player of mixing up different universes.
Prior to the game's release, the publishers launched a web site purporting to be that of an intergalactic travel agency called Starlight Travel, which in the game is the Starship Titanic's parent company. The site combined copious amounts of Python-esque writing (by Michael Bywater) with methods commonly associated with alternate reality games to generate interest in the site, and in the game, long after the initial site visit. A typical example of this occurred when a site visitor filled out a personal information form, including email address and "favorite frog" (from a convenient and long, drop-down list). Approximately one week later, a spam email for something other than Starlight Travel would arrive, and would include a reference to the specific frog that the visitor had selected. Another example involved a series of three emails; the first called the reader's attention to a password-protected area of the Starlight Travel site, the second urged the reader to delete unread, any future emails received, as confidential information was being erroneously emailed, and the third revealed the confidential password for the restricted site: "1".
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