Star Controller

Game Developer is a monthly magazine that concentrates on professional video game development topics.  Anyone who is a game developer in the USA can get it for free, while everyone else can pay for the printed or digital copy.

Portions of Game Developer can be viewed online for free.  It is because of this that I have been able to find an article titled “2010 space is the place”, written by Jeffrey Fleming.  The article briefly describes 7 open source science fiction games, what’s great about them and where they can be downloaded.  Here’s a snippet of what Jeffrey said about Star Control II before explaining how it evolved into the open source port known as The Ur-Quan Masters:

Combining open‐world training, exploration, and combat with a deep and cleverly‐written dialog system, Star Control 2's vast universe was given extra charm by a quirky graphic design that included art and music contributions from old school TSR illustrator Erol Otus.
‐ "2010 space is the place", Jeffrey Fleming, Game Designer, Jan 2010

TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) was the original company that created Dungeons & Dragons.  They have been purchased by Wizards of the Coast who now own the franchise.  Erol worked as an artist for various Dungeons & Dragons manuals.  At that time, Paul Reiche III also worked as a game designer for D&D before entering the world of video game design.

This reminds of me of the PC Gamer Top 100 article I wrote before and I’m impressed that Star Control II got mentioned in a 2010 magazine so soon.  Who knows?  Maybe we can rally enough votes to get Star Control II in PC Gamer too.

I’d like to thank Jeffrey Fleming for including The Ur-Quan Masters in his article.

Links
Vote Star Control II and 4 other games for PC Gamer Top 100

P.S.  Did you know that Erol did the voice of the Chmmr and Paul did the voice of the Mycon and Talking Pet?

(Comments have been disabled for this article)