Douglas and I, it turned out, were both fascinated by the prospect of trying to anticipate what readers might type into their computers under various circumstances and coming up with witty—and, hopefully, surprising—prepackaged rejoinders. Luckily, I had met Marc Blank, co-creator of Infocom’s groundbreaking Zork adventure game, and was able to introduce him to Douglas—a meeting that, I’m proud to say, helped pave the way for Infocom’s eventual publication of Douglas’s marvelous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game (which he wrote in collaboration with Steve Zeretsky), and set the stage, many years later, for his award-winning resurrection of the text-adventure format with Starship Titanic.

It wasn’t long before Douglas and I discovered several more common passions: the Pythons, Beyond the Fringe, and The Goon Show; the then newly-released Macintosh computer; the Weekly World News (the funniest tabloid on the planet); and the remarkably eclectic music of Procol Harum and their pianist-lead singer, Gary Brooker, whose work, we instantly agreed, had—with the exception of “A Whiter Shade of Pale”— never really gotten the attention it deserved. (I was amazed to learn that the group’s “Grand Hotel”—one of my favorite songs of all time—had been the inspiration for Douglas’s second Hitchhiker book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.)

The reference to Procol Harum brings to mind an incident that demonstrates what many of Douglas’s friends regard as perhaps his most seductive quality: his unflagging ability to get us to do things that we were secretly dying to do, but somehow thought were indefensibly silly or irresponsible. I was sitting in my New York apartment one afternoon in the early 1990s—just a day or two before I was to fly across the Pacific to Japan to meet Douglas (and a few hundred others) at an international conference sponsored by Apple Computer—when I received a breathless call from him: “If I can persuade Gary Brooker to have dinner with me in London the day after our meetings are done with, will you promise to fly back to New York via the U.K and join us?”

“Have you actually ever met Gary Brooker?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he confessed. “In fact, I’m not even exactly sure how to find him. But England is a small country. . . . So then, will you promise?”

I did, and the next thing I knew—having traveled three-quarters of the way around the world in less than a week—I found myself sitting with Douglas, his wife Jane, and a somewhat puzzled Gary Brooker at the Adams’s dinner table in Islington. We happily peppered Brooker with questions about his career and work, and it turned out (why should it have been a surprise?) that Douglas—there was apparently nothing he couldn’t do well—actually remembered some of Gary’s songs better that Gary did, and sat down at the piano to remind him how to play them.