Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Stardock To Helm New Star Control

It was going to take a mighty piece of news indeed to get to me to forget about all the triple-A releases that I totally can't afford this month. Luckily, such news has been delivered.

Gamasutra is featuring an interview with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock (Galactic Civilizations) in which Wardell says that their next games are going to be a new Master of Orion and a new Star Control.

Better still, the new games are going to be based on Master of Orion 2 and Star Control 2. The horrible third iterations of those franchises will be discarded like the chaff they are. ("We just pretend that never happened," says Wardell.)

But how, you may ask, will Stardock secure the rights? No-one cares! If big fistfuls of money won't let them put the Star Control name on a new box, then they'll go down the Bioshock route and make one of those "spiritual successors" that are all the rage these days. And, you know, that's fine by me.

Stardock is on my big list of developers worth trusting, a list notable for absences like "Midway" and "Sega", and this is pretty much the best news ever. Ever.

Now, take everything I've said above and go and blog it. And tell your friends. Your friends, and also strangers. It is not an over-reaction to use YouTube. I say this because wishing things sometimes makes them true, and candy-filled space unicorns only appear to people who believe in them, and suchlike. True story. And once you've done all that word-spreadage, come on back here, so I can mention that, actually, these appear to just be options that Stardock is exploring, or thinking about, rather than actual new game announcements. And you can hear that, and put on your pouty face, and we can all go drink ourselves happy.

This is the way news works.

(Read the actual interview.)

UPDATE: Zounds! I realised this article was totally lacking context. Some among you may not even know why this is great news. So, to fill you in, let me say this: Star Control 2 was the most awesome game ever made. I think it shot Hitler. With a crossbow. In space. A sequel would be like if it had done all that while riding a dinosaur. That should clear up the confusion. Thanks.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Star control 2 was indeed an awesome game. I wasted a lot of time playing that back in college.

A proper sequel (where the precursors aren't cows) would be awesome.

-Nick

Zoid said...

And the better news? Star Control 2 is now re-released as open source (ie free).

do a google search for "The Ur-Quan Masters". It's the name for the re-release, but the game is exactly the same. If you use linux, you can download it straight through the OS (i found it through synaptic on Ubuntu).

So many memories :-) I'm such a fan of abandonware...

Greg Tannahill said...

I'm familiar with The Ur-Quan Masters; that's the sort of path I'd expect a "spiritual successor" to go down.

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