The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system.

[2] In the beginning of the game, the player is given a device called Personal Electronic Thing (PET), which serves as a toolbar on the bottom of the screen.

Additionally to conversation with characters through interpreting of user input, the parser often provides hints or explanations that come in the form of pre-recorded speech, which can help the player in progressing in the game.

[5] The main objective of the game is to locate the missing parts of the ship's broken intelligence system in order to repair the starship.

[9][10] Starship Titanic begins in the player character's house on Earth, which is partially destroyed when the eponymous cruise ship crash-lands through the roof.

After exploring the vessel and solving puzzles, the player eventually finds all of Titania's body parts and awakens her, repairing the sabotaged ship and allowing for it to be navigated.

Depending on if the bomb was disarmed, one of two endings occurs: Douglas Adams first imagined the Starship Titanic in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where it is briefly mentioned in the book's 10th chapter.

Adams describes the ship—named after the famous ocean liner—as a "majestic and luxurious cruise-liner" that "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure".

[11][12] Before making Starship Titanic, Adams had previously served as a designer for Infocom's 1984 text-based game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on his successful science fiction series of the same name,[13][14] and had been an advocate for "new media".

[21] In December 1995, The Digital Village arranged a deal to raise seed capital from venture capitalist Alex Catto, who bought 10% of the company's shares for £400,000.

[16] In order to make conversations with characters convincing, The Digital Village's Jason Williams and Richard Millican created a language processor called SpookiTalk, which was based on VelociText, a software developed by Linda Watson of Virtus Corporation.

[26][30] Producer Emma Westecott thought the processor was preferable as common text-to-speech programs "made the voices sound cold and distant".

[32] Williams and Millican modified VelociText into SpookiTalk in order to improve recognition of complicated sentence forms from players, as well as reducing repeated responses, and retaining a character's memory of an object or topic as a conversation progresses.

[35][26] The futuristic, Art Deco visuals were designed by Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, who also worked on the 1995 Oscar-winning film Restoration.

[38] Adams described the ship's interior design as a mixture of the Ritz Hotel, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamun's tomb and Venice.

[51] Simon & Schuster marketing VP Walter Walker estimated that the game had sold over 60,000 copies by the end of April, far below the expected number of 200,000.

[63] According to the company's creative director Jeff Siegel, a DVD version of the game "did not really sell" despite being an alternative to the three-CD original release.

[64] According to Douglas Adams biographer Nick Webb, The Digital Village CEO Robbie Stamp sold the rights of Starship Titanic and all associated intellectual property to Thomas Hoegh's Arts Alliance in September 1998.

[71] Adventure Gamers's Evan Dickens similarly praised the graphics and "beautiful" animation, but criticized the navigation and the parser, writing that the bots "won't understand or respond correctly to a single thing [the player asks]", and called it an "antiquated keyword-recognition system".

[72] IGN reviewer Chris Buckman gave the game a 4.9/10 score, criticizing the lack of a backstory, the movement sequences and navigation, and the obscurity of the puzzles.

[73] Writing for PC Gamer US, Stephen Poole called Starship Titanic "an uninspiring and ultimately tedious adventure."

He criticized the parser as unhelpful and thought there are few characters to interact with, although he praised the puzzles as "involved and challenging" and compared them to those of classic adventure games.

She also criticized the parser for failing to understand context in conversations, and called the navigation and item usage "cumbersome"; however, she praised Adams's humor, the animations and graphics.

[77] Stuart Clarke of The Sydney Morning Herald praised the graphics and the game overall, but said players will "do much scratching of the head and aimless wandering in circles before the mysteries of the Titanic are solved".

[7] GameSpot's Ron Dulin gave the game a 7.1 score, criticizing the lack of a story but praising the humor, graphics and the presence of a text parser as "a nice nod to the days of old".

[5] Paul Presley of PC Zone gave the game a score of 91%, praising its atmosphere as "totally absorbing" and commended it for its humor and presentation as well.

[80] Writing for USA Today, Jeffrey Adam Young rated it three and a half stars out of four, calling it a "hilarious blend of Monty Pythonesque humor and zany wordplay in a sci-fi setting" and praising it for its characters and script.

[81] New York Daily News reviewer Kenneth Li gave the game three and a half stars out of four, calling it "breathtaking" and praising the storyline; however, he offered minor criticism towards repetitive replies in the text parser.

[85] Likewise, the editors of The Electric Playground nominated Starship Titanic for their 1998 "Best Adventure Game" award, which ultimately went to Grim Fandango.