I had no idea Starflight was even ported to the C64. My 12 year old self would have been very interested in that information. But how could it be the best port with that system’s limitations? (I also prefer the C64 ports of some games, like Ultima III/IV, but I was under the impression that Starflight was designed for something like 256k.)
You’re right, though. Learn something new every day. Probably by the time the port came out I had already stopped pining for Starflight and moved on to other things…
Wonder when and where the game came out originally? I ended up playing the Mac ports of Starflight 1 and 2 around the end of '91 and into '92, in glorious 8-bit color on my then super hot Mac SE/30 with a 640x480 non-multisync Seiko monitor, which cost around $500 back then (in 1991 dollars, gulp). I was already 30.
Whoever coded the port of Starflight must have been very good at their job because I felt at the time it was one of the more technically advanced C64 games I had played. Starflight for the C64 came on multiple floppy disks so perhaps that’s how they managed to bring most things from the IBM version, but yes, some things just weren’t possible with the limited memory. The PC version had the ability to show viewports of planets’ surfaces that even the Amiga port couldn’t do.
For years after I sold my C64, I wondered if I had just worn my rose colored glasses too much and it wasn’t THAT great. But I was pleased to notice (in emulation) that even some arcade games on the C64 were not only better than their Amiga ports but played considerably faster. Many of the boys over at the English Amiga Forum even wax nostalgic over just how many C64 versions of games were superior to their Amiga ports.
Yup, '86, Starflight 2 came out in '89. The final port for the game I believe was for the Genesis in 1991, which is considered the best version of the game.
I just learned a fun fact related to Brian’s link above to the tie-in story collection for Starflight. Apparently the Robert Silverberg story is a reprint of Through The Time Lens which appeared as a short story in the manual for the Sega Genesis (MegaDrive) version from 1991. People seem to rave about that story - including Brian, I think - and no wonder, if it was written by a top-tier writer of serious science fiction that started his career in the 1950s (but only wrote formula SF for pulp magazines and publishers of juvenile novels until the early 1960s when he switched to adult science fiction which became comparable to the stuff written by the best writers in the genre until his rather dull Jack Vance-flavored novels of the 1980s ie Lord Valentine’s Castle).
Silverberg’s science fiction of the 60s and 70s like Born with the Dead was frequently brilliant, however, and even after 1980 he did write the occasional first-rate SF short story/novella despite the mostly tedious novels. TTTL must have been one of his better works of that period. I think I’ll go read that story now even though I haven’t read any SF for years lol
I sometimes wonder what would have happened had EA ported Starflight during their early strong Amiga support period rather than late. I have a hunch that the port may have taken fuller advantage of the Amiga’s abilities.
Friends, Space Game Junkie is turning ten next month, and to celebrate I’m hosting a game jam for devs to make fun space games that I’ll stream on the day of. If you know any devs that might want to participate, please direct them here, and thank you.
That’s debatable. No amount of clever Copper tricks can make up for the Amiga’s slow 68000. And few software houses had Demo-level programmers that might have pulled it off.
Yeah the manual for the Genesis version is the best because it includes the text from the original manual, that story, and the hard-to-find hint guide. It’s basically the definitive documentation for the game, and why it’s worth owning a copy even if you don’t have a Genesis.
Yes, very nice and comprehensive manual, I noticed. I read the Silverberg story in the manual and it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment though in all fairness it was commissioned to appeal to a much broader audience than the typical niche of science fiction literature. Still, it was unmistakable Robert Silverberg with flashes of his fine sardonic wit, especially the description of the perpetually poor crew falling into a planet’s gravity well and being so physically torn up by it that they had to use all their bank credits & savings to buy medical replacement limbs and body parts lol I wish Silverberg had gone into more detail about the vast ancient alien structure (clearly influenced by Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time) near the end of the story that contained the artifacts.
