Background information
In the beginning
In the year 1992, Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford created
the game Star Control II. The players loved it. And Accolade,
the publisher, realised that there was more money to be made, and
ordered a sequel.
But Paul and Fred weren't ready for that. They had just spent
the last six months working long hours without pay after
the project ran late, because they didn't want to compromise on their
vision. And for the sequel, Accolade wanted them to do the same amount
of work for the same pay.
So Star Control 3 was created by a different team, and while the
result wasn't all bad, to those who played Star Control II it
was a disappointment.
The fans never forgot Star Control II, and a true cult
following began to form. There have been fan-made Star Control
games, Star Control screen savers, Star Control fan fiction,
Star Control remixes, Star Control role playing games,
Star Control paintings, even a project to make a Star Control
movie (it's still ongoing), everything a rabid fanboy could think of.
But also the mainstream gamers hadn't forgotten about
Star Control II...
Ten years went by since Star Control II was first released.
While Paul and Fred — now together known as
Toys for Bob —
would have liked to return to the Star Control
universe, reality had always made that science fiction.
They had now however regained all the rights to the game except for the
name itself, and in the summer of 2002, as a gift to the fans,
they released the Star Control II source code as
Open Source.
From the fans arose a team that set out to adapt this code for modern
computers and for other languages. It didn't take long for word of
mouth to reach the players, all over the globe. They weren't just
the people who fondly remembered playing the game ten years earlier,
but also a new generation, gamers who were prepared to look beyond
the dated exterior.
Since then, the game — now known by the sub-title of the original,
The Ur-Quan Masters
— has been downloaded hundred thousands of times [1],
by Windows, Linux, and Mac users alike. And the fan base is larger
than ever.
And now, a new chapter in the history of Star Control may be in the making.
[1] The exact number is hard to estimate. For the numbers for SourceForge, the official download site, you'd have to add the counts for the installers (for Windows), the source files (for those who compile from source), and the MacOS .dmg files, for all the releases (the other files go with those files). Then there are third party sites that distribute the game; download.com comes at hundred thousand all on its own. Linux distributions also usually have their own packages. And then there are those people who don't download at all, but get the game from DVDs that came with magazines.
