Please start making special editions like the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy again

I started writing this piece as a sort of "oh, this was cool!" bit of game archaeology after seeing a post from Scott Krol - who shares consistently fascinating bits of ephemera on video and tabletop games - on the physical bits that came with 1984's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy adventure game.

"Infocom, known for their brilliant text adventures, was the first company to put physical items in with their games," writes Scott. "In fact, Infocom were attributed as the first to coin the term “feelies” for physical goodies that came with the game".

That's two great facts for the price of none, that is. The actual bits were excellent too: I'm still not tired of packets that contain absolutely nothing but a label saying there's something invisible or imperceivable inside. If there's more fun you can have with the contents of a cheap plastic baggy I don't want to know about it. You can read more about them here.

I say I started writing this piece as that, because I actually found something better along the way, hanging in RPS archives in much the way that bricks don't. Victoria Regan's edition of 'gaming made me' on Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide adventure game. It's a beautiful piece for many reasons, but two stood out to me especially.

First, Regan's characterisation of human dressing gown Arthur Dent made me appreciate the story's cosmically put-upon protagonist in ways I'm not sure I have before. "His willingness to lie down in the path of an oncoming bulldozer showed courage in the face of randomness," Regan writes, admiring his "stoical response to a sea of surprising events". I wouldn't have used the word stoic or even courageous because I've had the Simon Jones television portrayal of Dent stuck in my head for most of my memory-having life, screaming about jumping up and down on boiled bits of councilmen and threatening to lose his lunch every twenty minutes.

But you know what? I'll buy it. Given Arthur's circumstances, anything north of not just laying on the floor shaking is effectively heroism. I actually really like this framing of the entire story as a battle between Dent's sense of himself as respectable Englishman vs. all the incomprehensible nonsense a vast and futile universe can throw at him.

But my favourite part of Regan's piece is her description of her and her brother's motivation to keep struggling through a famously obtuse adventure game as "the urge to find out what was hidden", a vanishingly precious feeling in an age of games that are not only laid bare moments after release,but also pre-mythologised - by advertising hype campaigns, and also the contemporary incarnation of these same goody-laden game editions - to the point where our own unique personal experiences are all but denied to us, smothered by expectation and iconography (I am not allowed to decide who the Doom Slayer is, this £200 statue has done my thinking for me.)

Most tat is equally impractical, but there's something about these old Infocom feelies that feels less grossly insistent on their value or power. They're humble, almost sarcastic about their own existence. Beautifully useless objects, but also wonderfully un-standard. The standardisation of video game collectibles feels like a natural state for an industry that postures rivalry but actually feeds into itself more often than not: collecting ephemera is vast and messy, collecting statues feels like the sort of thing a bankable demographic might well do. Thus, statues for all. Give me more proud uselessness, I say. More tat that knows what it is.