The game takes place aboard a massive spaceship called the B Ark, so called because it was the second of the three ships (A, B, and C) in the Ark Fleet of the planet Golgafrinchum, intended to evacuate the planet in the face of impending doom, though the particular nature of that doom was never particularly clear. The A ship held all of the great thinkers, scientists, and leaders of the planet. The C ship held all of the achievers, those who actually did things and built things. The B ship held all of the middlemen. And thus it is that we have a huge starship containing cryogenically frozen insurance salesmen, tired TV producers, management executives, hairdressers, and telephone-sanitizers, sent off first because "It was very important for morale that the others could know they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut, and where the phones were clean.". The ship's confused (as usual) crew is constantly looking back wondering why they haven't heard any word from the other ships which were to follow after them. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the matter:

Golgafrinchum is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history. The most mysterious figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling poets of Arium. These Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would lie in wait for small bands of unwary travelers, circle around them, and throw rocks at them....

All this lay in the planet's remost past. It was, however, a descendant of one of these eccentric poets who invented the spurious tales of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

And thus the final survivors of the planet Golgafrincham find themselves hurtling through space toward the planet that would turn out to be the ancient Earth, with a trajectory preset (none of the crew were particularly good pilots, or they wouldn't have been sent away) to land the ship safely, but in a bumpy enough way to completely eliminate its ability to take off again thus imposing the company of this bunch of loonies on the rest of the universe. At least, that was the plan, until a few strange events occur, which throw yet another wrench in the works.

Four other spaceships find themselves parked alongside, inside, and two of them through the B Ark respectively, resulting in the disabling of its control computer, leaving it headed for a deadly crash landing, as well as injecting a few rather interesting characters into the mix. Several of the cryofrozen passengers also wake up, though this is not unplanned. Several of them (and several of the ship's crew) are actually somewhat more competent than they seem, but decided that a group of imbeciles such as those on the B Ark would be easy to rule, and thus hitched a ride in order to become the tyrant of a new planet. They will need to ensure their dominance in game. Other stowaways include two white mice, who anyone familiar with the books will know to be the projection into our dimension of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The mice are here to ensure that the Golgafrinchans don't land on the Earth, which is actually a massive computer of their construction. They do not want to destroy the ship though (since that would also kill them, or at least the part of them in this dimension) but want to redirect it to a different planet. The final new arrivals are several people projected onto the situation by the offices of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by their Chief Editor, who has an appointment to keep with Zaphod Beeblebrox. All of these characters now find themselves under a large amount of time pressure in a ship headed for destruction. To survive they will need to find a way to steer the ship, either to a safe landing on the Earth or to another planet, all while overcoming their initial cluelessness and working on their often contradictory personal goals. Such confusion could only be the result of the operation of the infinite improbability drive...

Andrew Twyman, kurgan@mit.edu
Interactive and Non-Linear Narrative, Spring 1998