Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

Actually, why don’t we assume that Brad/Stardock errored on the side of geek joy, and not negligence.

“Somebody’s selling the SC rights? OH BOY BOY BOY BOY!!!”
/whips out company credit card

You’ve got the OG creators disputing the rights, and the person that says they have the current rights in this thread talking about it. That’s inherently pretty interesting to a lot of fans.

Heck, the emails between Paul and Fred, GOG, and Atari were darned fascinating.

Yeah the lawsuit is definitely newsworthy. I’m pretty interested when things like emails get posted or when there’s been news in how things are progressing. The 300 posts of parsing legal agreements and documents and arguing about what it does or doesn’t mean (all with the IANAL disclaimer, of course)… not so much.

Not trying to threadcop or anything. I probably just need to take a nap. :)

I would certainly prefer it if the endless IANALing gets into a different thread. I would like this thread to focus on the new game. Granted the thread title is most unfortunately named…

I am interesting and anxious for this game. Though I have been gaming on the PC since the early 90’s, I never played any of the original games & I can’t even remember why …

Those were pre-internet days for me. Spreading the word was quite different back in those days. It was a matter of luck and exposure through stores like CompUSA and knowing the right people.

I’d never heard of Starflight until hearing about it through Qt3 decades later, for instance. But Star Control was installed in my dorm computer lab, so we all started playing it. Then a year later, Star Control 2 came out, and one guy in the dorm got it and jealously guarded his copy protection key (basically the game gave you the coordinates, and you had to name the system). But sometimes we got lucky and got a system which we knew the coordinates for. And then the more we played, the more we knew approximately, where systems were on the map. And the more we played, the more we all fell in love with the game.

Then I went home for the Summer, and my brother from a different university had also played through the game and bought it, and I played through it again on the computer at home that Summer.

It was a strange time. Each game discovery felt special. But I also missed out on a lot of games that I never lucked upon.

That really only changed in 1996. I’d been using the internet for 3 years for research on Chemistry papers, and my roommate during a Summer semester suggested looking up Star Control 2 on the internet, since I was telling him about it in such glowing terms. It had never occurred to me to look up games on the internet until then.

This is one of the ten best thread names on Qt3 and you, sir, are a villain and a cad. Praise be to @Nightgaunt, and may he never falter in his resolve!


@Brad_Wardell How well would the fiction engine you guys are creating handle things like branching paths and randomization? Is it only well-suited to linear (albeit complex and intersecting!) “plots?”

My “GM Brain” from tabletop RPGs is spinning with possibilities here, man. Especially since I am running a scifi comedy game right now and am always looking for new creative outlets. . .

My heart, it aches.

I had it even worse. I had a friend that had a pc, while I had a c64. So I knew about Starflight and watched him play it, and had to suffer for a few years before I got a pc myself.

I’m sorry to tell you this…but it was available for the C64…

Yes, but Starflight was out in 1986. I had a pc by the time it came out for c-64

A year felt like a long time back then :)

Ohhhhh, okay, that makes sense.

To bring it back to Star Control again, I remember freshman year at Iowa State when the first had come out
and we were all gathering in someone’s dorm room to play. Lots of good times.

Brad touches on the art of storytelling in a game and shares a little bit about our Adventure Studio feature in this new dev diary.

Check it out here: https://forums.starcontrol.com/487769/star-controlthe-art-of-storytelling

You are being extremely hypocritical here. You hand wave away claims made in the law suit that, if you were the target of for one of your games you would clearly be outraged about, and then turn around and act all outraged about a legal claim made against your company.

It’s lawyer speak when directed at them, but a personal attack when directed at you. You are “not feeling charitable” because of a “personal attack”, but the literal claim that the creators of star control 1&2 are not the creators of those games is something that they should not react to at all?

Perhaps if you put yourself in their shoes you might feel a lot more charitable. What if someone filed a lawsuit that insinuated that you really have little to do with creating the Galactic Civilizations franchise? Given your public comments on, well, all things to date let’s not pretend for a second you’d be totally fine with that.

Indeed. Greg Johnson has been hanging out a bit on StarControl.com which has been pretty exciting.

I wouldn’t be fine. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have done what they have done up to this point to get into this situation.

Lawsuits are ugly for a reason. They are best avoided.

I remember Fall 1992 very well. I was still in college and starting to work on the OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations. I hate a lot of chocolate wafers. To this day, that is what I associate when I think of Star Control II.

Everything in Star Control is deterministic. Now, because there are so many different variables, the net effect will feel random. But it was important to us that if a player does X then Y then Z in a specific order in a specific way that they will get the same outcome as another player (unless it is a time based mission).

This is why the Adventure Studio is such a big project. That app has a bigger budget than The Corporate Machine had in its entirety. Because none of the missions are randomly generated, we have to make sure each one is handled as a story.

The Maltese Falcon of my college days was the roughly 3’x4’ starmap that was photocopied from the strategy guide, I believe. It was photocopied onto 8.5x11" sheets and then taped together into a Frankensteinian monstrosity. And we’d reluctantly share it with each other, get mad when someone let it get ripped, try to save up money to take it to Kinko’s to make another copy, etc etc.