First off, it’s a sequel (by the original creators) to a game that clearly helped inspire Mass Effect as well as some of the greatest game designers ever. Second, it’s being made without any of the modern live service, microtransaction, evil tricksy EULA manipulations, and other bullshit plagues of recent gaming. THIRD, the art and music are lovingly hand-crafted and build off of one of the most charming, memorable, and musically brilliant games of all time. AND FOURTH, i want an Xbox port. We’re so close! Only $23k left!!!
Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with SC3 or Origins.
The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that Paul and Fred owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.
When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.
This finally ended in a settlement and work on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.
I mean if Star Control 2 wasn’t vastly superior in every way or you could just erase it from history, the game would have had some charm to it. But comparatively, it was a pretty tragic letdown.
The one good part that I still remember though was the quest where you had to retrieve a Daktaklakpak Data Pak. That tickled me since I’m a sucker for fun wordplay.
Star control 3 was garbage that was star control in name only.
Star control: Origins was made by assholes at Paradox Entertainment that tired to steal the IP from the original creators. The game was basically a pretty soulless carbon copy of star control 2 without the witty dialogue or creative story telling of the original.
Neither of these “prequel/sequels” were made by the original creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III.
That’s why this Kickstarter is fire AF. The OG creators have full control here and are making it with the original vision that made sc2 great!
They even released the original Star control 2 for free on steam in preparation:
Man, Star Control 2 was my favorite game to introduce friends to during the BBS days. Two player melee over a shared keyboard! The music in SC2 was top notch MOD/XM music back when trackers were starting to form a genre. Beeps on computers were the norm but you could hear a drum track over the internal PC speaker in this game. IMHO Tunic is the only game that came close to the wonder and awe of exploration and discovery. Absolutely a masterpiece.
Babu’s game room has my favorite YouTube review. I’ll let the bot pipe the link
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