Star Controller

Note: These lyrics are not guaranteed to be accurate as I had a very difficult time understanding the words.  If you can provide a more accurate interpretation, please post a comment.

Floating here so long
Solar sensors are all gone
Drifting aimlessly in outer space

All the multi-colored stars
Shining brightly near and far
They head fast and fade without a trace

With our telescoping eyes
Looking upward to the skies
And see the things that we can see
Are you reading me?

The streams are too long
The coordinates are wrong
And we can’t remember why we’re here
Abandoned here alone
We don’t know which way is home
And communication is unclear

Were suspended up in space
Disappeared without a trace
And we don’t know if it’s night or day
But you know we’re lightyears away

Star Control
We’re 10 million miles from home
Where do we go from here
A light in confusion
We’ve run out of options
Tell us where do we go from here
We need to be told
Star Control

Our creation was your dream
We were more than just machines
When you programmed us to think like men
Your ambitions ruled your mind
And you’ve perfectly designed
All communications have all reached the end

Were suspended up in space
Disappeared without a trace
And we don’t know if it’s night or day
But you know we’re lightyears away

Star Control
We’re 10 million miles from home
Where do we go from here
A light in confusion
We’re out of the box
So tell us where do we go from here?
We need to be told
Star Control

Star Control
We’re 10 million miles from home
Where do we go from here
A light in confusion
We’re out of the box
So tell us where do we go from here?
Nowhere to go

Star Control

We’d love to be told

Star Control

Star Control

10 million miles from home

Waiting here all alone

Star Control

I subscribed to Google Alerts for “Star Control” a few years ago.  From these alerts, I can find new articles related to Star Control.  In addition, there can be spam and even eBay auctions selling a Star Control game.  Throughout the years, I have noticed that I occasionally see an eBay auction of an album from a band called Dollar, containing a song called “Star Control”, which caught my attention.

When I first discovered this, I naturally became curious and tried to find the song.  It wasn’t on YouTube, MySpace or any of those sites. It was quite hard to find. I just never thought much of it. Anyways, I finally found the track and it was something completely unexpected.

I admit I’m not a music expert and that I know very little about the 70s and 80s.

Dollar's first album, Shooting Stars (1979) From right to left: David Van Day, Thereza Bazar

From what I’ve read, this song appeared in Dollar’s first album, Shooting Stars, released September of 1979. This is 11 years before Star Control 1 was released and 4 years before Archon. It was 4 years after Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody.  It was before I was even born!  So this song has nothing to do with the Star Control we all know and love.  Dollar also covered The Beatles song “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”.

The Very Best of Dollar (1982) - A quick cash-in for WEA records. It contained the same songs as the first album including Star Control, with "I wanna hold your hand" added. Star Control is on 7 of Dollar's albums, most of them compilations.

The vocals in this song are heavily distorted to sound more robotic. I’m a fan of electronic artists such as Daft Punk and MSTRKRFT who have used robotic voices in their music.  However, I had a very difficult time understanding the words to this song because of the heavy distortion.  Based on the other songs I have heard from Dollar, this is the only they have which uses this type of distortion.  It does not seem to be a very popular song because it’s hard to find and the lyrics are not listed on Dollar’s website despite their other songs.  I was lucky enough to find a forum thread where people have discussed finding the correct lyrics to this song and it was very helpful in my own attempt.

This song tells the story of either a robot ship or crew member who is stranded in space and contacting Star Control to be rescued.  It has an overall sad expression and maintains a science fiction style to its composition.  It made me think of the Mmrnmhrm because of their robotic nature, not that it it was related.  I thought of “robots” and “Star Control” and Mmrnmhrm popped up in my mind.

I’d like to thank those who posted in the forum about finding the lyrics to this song; without it, this would have been more difficult than it already was.  If there’s anyone out there who was curious about this song, I hope this answers your question about what this song sounds like.  In summary, I think it was an interesting coincidence.  Speaking of coincidences, while Nintendo was designing controllers for the Wii, they had a prototype with a star button on it, dubbed the “Star Controller”.  It was quickly scrapped in favor of the Wii remote, nunchuk and classic controller.

Links
Official Dollar Website
Star Control Lyrics Discussion
Dollar – Shooting Stars
Mystery of the Nintendo Star Controller Revealed

Tags: Uncategorized // 5 Comments »

After realizing that my RSS reader PHP script stopped working, I went to toysforbob.com and read a quick news update on July 12.  It is a statement confirming that “Above and Beyond” is not the game they are working on and that it has nothing to do with Star Control:

Latest Project

It’s been a while! We’re still working on a game that we think is really awesome and fun, but we can’t talk about it just yet. We would, however, like to clear-up some rumors that have been circulating about a new Star Control game we’re supposedly making called “Above and Beyond”: they aren’t true! The game we’re currently developing has nothing to do with Star Control, but it’s still really exciting and we can’t wait until we can talk about it officially. Stay tuned!

I can’t wait to see what kind of awesome and fun things they have put together in their new video game. Glad to see that it’s not Above and Beyond. I always assumed it was a rumor and at least it threw TFB in the spotlight for a brief moment.  We still have another TFB mystery in our hands and it’s great to hear TFB reiterate that it is awesome, fun and exciting.  It’s so awesome, fun and exciting, that they were given extra time to polish it and make more changes.

I know a few weeks ago, Lukipela wrote about his face-to-face conversation with Paul Reiche over a cup of coffee about what he can tell us about his super secret project.  Some of the many talents of TFB include keeping secrets and plugging leaks:

“…we were so close to announcing that word did break accidentally on a few sites. We yanked the news as fast as we could, but then it started to spread (seemingly automatically) like the zombie virus. It took us a number of days to stamp it out and I still have a number of Google Alerts set-up in case we missed its brain admit comes back to life.”

“I can’t say anything concrete and I must mix in some outright lies. While not in any universe we’ve worked within, the new game is perhaps exactly what one would expect from our studio. If you like Melee or Mayhem, there will definitely be a part of the new game you enjoy.”

- Paul Reiche

Needless to say, Lukipela wrote a very engaging article about his chat with Paul. It’s a must-read for everyone! Nicely done, Lukipela.

With regards to the RSS parser I made, I’ll have to add some extra exception handling to deal with some things I didn’t expect.

Whatever they are working on, I hope it leads them on a path to creating more awesome, exciting and fun games that they have control over.

Links
Toys for Bob
Coffee with Paul Reiche

Tags: Announcements // Add Comment »