This tickled a half-forgotten memory. I was into a few "ASCII" "game engines" when I was a kid, ZZT and MZX. There was definitely a Hitchhiker's game on one of those. Doubt it was official, of course.
Good shout, one of my favorite games is from 2004 and getting it to run properly on "modern" hardware and OS-es is not a super obvious process. PC Gaming Wiki made the process a lot less annoying.
Yeah, from a historical perspective it makes sense to cut down. Maybe not really as of Skyrim and later games, though. GTA games, including ones almost a decade older than Skyrim, manage to have a fairly reasonably high "population" of NPCs.