The Third Doctrinal War -- Stardock, Reiche/Ford, and Star Control

If you encounter SC1 as I did, as an opportunity for one-on-one melee combats with a friend/sibling, it’s amazingly entertaining. Seriously, one of the very best games I played in the 16-bit era. It was like Archon but with way more variety and scope in the tactical encounters.

By all accounts SC2 eclipsed it, but due to the vagaries of time/age/money/platform, it’s the first one that got its hooks into me and earned my affection.

This whole situation could use fake documents that are taken seriously until it is realized that they use fonts only available in OS/2 Warp and then P&F prove in court that literally no one except Brad has ever installed it in history.

I installed it. It had kick-ass DOS emulation. That was the only way I could get F:FE to run for any length of time

I installed Warp and kept a 486 running it long past its useful date. My first real job was OS/2 development.

I had the original GalCiv on it too. I have no doubt if there were playtime stats for it I’d be in the top 1% of players simply because I held onto that OS/2 box for so long. I think I still have the disks for both warp and galciv in a box somewhere.

Y’all are ruining my joke. I also installed it at some point.

I did not literally believe that a significant IBM OS effort was only installed by one person on the planet.

Of course. We’re just engaging in a little nostalgia.

OS/2 was the shit.

A real shame Microsoft backed out of that venture.

That’s a whole debacle worth a huge thread in and of itself. At the time it really felt like MS was just using the project to learn from IBM how to create a semblance of a real operating system. It seemed like a pretty calculated backstabbing.

And as not to further derail the thread that’s all I’ve got to say about OS/2.

We should start a thread in HW about operating systems we wish would have survived. :)

OS/2 was pretty awesome, especially when going up against Windows 3.1. If I remember right, took as many floppy’s as a Wing Commander game…

I totally read that in Forrest Gump’s voice. Was that intentional or just a happy coincidence?

A happy coincidence. As you must realize, with your avatar I can’t help but read all your posts in Boss Hogg’s voice, which leads to odd results sometimes.

Hahahahaha, I feel you man.

@dsmart - seeing how the vast majority of us in this thread are neutral, why is it we’re all going to weep? The only thing that would make me weep is if either was going out of business.

Yes - several. At least 2 contacted me due to my Twitter coverage of the fiasco. And I already knew one of them from in the industry.

That’s not how that works. We already indemnify Valve/Steam when we sign up for their service.

nathan_fallion

I’m calling it now. P&F have agreed to team up with Brad/Stardock. They’ll share 50/50% ownership of the Star Control franchise and together will launch a new mobile game called Star Control: New Beginnings.

Well unless I missed something, the general consensus here seems to be that Stardock has no leg to stand on, Brad is trying to steal someone else’s IP, P&F can totally make a Star Control game etc. No?

I worked on OS/2. In fact, back in the day, that’s how I got connected to Brad outside of Usenet.

No.

Stardock has some legs to stand on, how much value they could get in damages is considered questionable.

No one thinks P&F can make a STAR CONTROL game. That’s a ludicrous summary. People generally think they can use some subset of the aliens and things from previous games. No one in the world thinks they can call it Star Control.

I do think Brad did steal other people’s IP and I think it’s other people’s IP as he’s said it here himself many times.