BC3K is 23 years old. Where were you for the 1996 fiasco?

[HighPlainsDrifter]

I had no PC and no internet access so missed it. I could only read about it in various computer game mags I’d pick up once in a while as I dreamed of the day when I could finally afford a PC, so I had a little bit of vicarious experience.

[jpinard]

@dsmart

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1179156832520146950

The nostalgic blog from last year’s anniversary

I had very high hopes for the game. Then when I saw all the gibberish on the screen I decided I didn’t have enough time to learn a second language.

[YakAttack]

BTW, what’s so special about the 23rd anniversary? Are you going to make another thread for the 24th anniversary? How about the 25th and 26th anniversaries?

Or is this thread for the 1st anniversary of your bog post?

[Vic_Davis]

I remember standing in a bookstore looking at all these books about HTML and thinking man, this internet thing is going to be such a fad.

[Misguided]

Right? Wish I could travel back in time and study web design.

[Skipper]

I bought it at a software chain store but I can’t remember how long it was post-launch. Strangely, I kept it in my collection and only recently threw it out. Not because of you, Derek, rather, at 50 it was certainly time to clean out my, “old game boxes,” that have moved with me multiple times at this point. I even took a pic of the CD-ROM and posted on a thread somewhere here if I recall correctly.

23 years?!? Damn we are all getting old.

[jpinard]

@Skipper

23 years?!? Damn we are all getting old.

Every time I think of my age, I am terrified of myself.

[Skipper]

Me too man, me too. I lost a friend about two weeks ago who was one year older than me. It was sobering.

[dsmart]

@Rock8man

The first I heard of it was the review in Computer Games Strategy Plus (or had they changed the name to Computer Games Magazines already?). So I never even knew about it as anything but a disaster.

[Rock8man]

Do you know when that preview was from? Just curious. In it you said you’d started working on the game in 1988.

EDIT: Nice, 1992. So you’d been working on it for 4 years, and had 4 more years to go. I don’t think I started reading CGS+ until 1995, so I had definitely never heard of it. In 1992, my only source for what games were coming out was walking into a Babbages at the mall and asking them if a Star Control 3 had been announced yet, and if it had, when was it coming out.

[dsmart]

@rhamorim

I had it imported, even after hearing reports about the, uh, complicated technical state of the game. The guy in the store that imported it for me, having heard of the issues, asked me why I was importing this specific game. I said something like “I’m a voluntary beta tester”. :)

I still have flashes of flying near a wormhole at 5-10 FPS (at best) on my PC, which ran nearly everything else pretty well. I also remember being mesmerized by the scope and ambition of the game. I won’t say I had an easy, fun time with the game (though I did have that occasionally), but the fact that it still lingers in my memory speaks for itself.

Sadly I never tried any of the later Battlecruiser games for any significant period of time. I still have a soft spot for the first one, warts and all, and I’m still waiting for a game with that kind of ambition that also nails the execution. Closest thing to that is probably No Man’s Sky, though that is a very different kind of game with very different ambitions… but it makes me wonder if someday we’ll have a Battlecruiser-like game worth of that first dream.

I moved from Battlecruiser to Universal Combat as a derivative works which I have improved on over the years in order to regain and improve on the premise of the original. It’s currently on Steam, and I am working on an improved version. Links are at http://3000ad.com/games/

[dsmart]

@scharmers

I more or less became Scharmers when the call of USElessNET compelled me to join the BC3K fracas.

lmao!! Yup, I remember. Good times indeed. :)

[dsmart]

@RichVR

I enjoyed reading the usenet stuff. Gotta say @dsmart has mellowed in the ensuing years.

I got old. :(

[dsmart]

@YakAttack

BTW, what’s so special about the 23rd anniversary? Are you going to make another thread for the 24th anniversary? How about the 25th and 26th anniversaries?

Or is this thread for the 1st anniversary of your bog post?

Well when I look back, it’s amazing that I can actually count the years. So there.

[dsmart]

@Rock8man

Do you know when that preview was from? Just curious. In it you said you’d started working on the game in 1988.

EDIT: Nice, 1992. So you’d been working on it for 4 years, and had 4 more years to go. I don’t think I started reading CGS+ until 1995, so I had definitely never heard of it. In 1992, my only source for what games were coming out was walking into a Babbages at the mall and asking them if a Star Control 3 had been announced yet, and if it had, when was it coming out.

Yeah, that preview build was from 1992. It was very rough around the edges, but - shockingly - it ran just fine and enough to show what I was shooting for.

[dsmart]

I have released a version in each of the series for free. The original BC3K runs great in DOSbox

Downloads | 3000AD

[RichVR]

@dsmart

I got old. :(

As we all have my friend. As we all have. :)

[YakAttack]

@dsmart

I have released a version in each of the series for free. The original BC3K runs great in DOSbox

Just wondering, but have you ever considered releasing them as FOSS? Devs do this sometimes, but in the three instances I can think of the games had a relatively active fan community at some point in their histories. And a high volume of further fan modification only happened in one of these cases.

[dsmart]

@YakAttack

Just wondering, but have you ever considered releasing them as FOSS? Devs do this sometimes, but in the three instances I can think of the games had a relatively active fan community at some point in their histories. And a high volume of further fan modification only happened in one of these cases.

I have toyed with the idea over the years, but never really got around to do it primarily because I am still exploiting the IP with other game releases in the series.

[scharmers]

Don’t be coy

You just don’t want us to see that super secret NEURAL NET ™ AI