Star Control

A ZX Spectrum screenshot

Star Control is a combination of a strategy game and real-time one-on-one ship combat. The ship combat is inspired by the classic game Spacewar!, while the turn-based strategy is inspired Paul Reiche III's 1983 game Archon.[1]

Players begin the game in one of 15 different scenarios, on a rotating star map. The player has up to three actions per turn, which are used to colonize or fortify worlds, explore new stars, and so on.[2] These colonies provide resources to the player's ships, like "starbucks" and crew.[1] The goal is to move your ships across the galaxy, claim planets along the way, and finally destroy your opponent’s star base.[2]

When two rival ships meet on the battlefield, an arcade-style combat sequence begins.[2] The different ships are deliberately imbalanced, and match-ups have a major influence over combat.[1] There are 14 different ships, with unique abilities for each.[2] Ships typically have a unique firing attack, as well as some kind of secondary ability. Both actions consume the ship's battery, which recharges automatically (with few exceptions). Ships have a limited amount of crew, representing the total damage a ship can take before being destroyed.[1] This ties into the strategic meta-game between combat, where crew can be replenished at colonies[1]

During combat, the screen frames the action between the two ships with an overhead view, zooming in as they approach each other. The combatants try to outgun and outmaneuver each other. There is a planet in the middle of the battlefield, providing a centre of gravity, which players can either crash into, or glide nearby to gain momentum.[1]

The story is minimal compared to the sequel, described mostly in the game's scenario introductions, and the lore in the manuals about the two warring sides. The game can be played by one player against the computer, or two players head to head.[1]

Paul Reiche III, Fred Ford, and Rob Dubbin give a postmortem of the game's development at GDC 2015

Star Control is the first collaboration between Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford.[3][4] Reiche was seeking a programmer-engineer, and Ford was seeking a designer-artist, and so mutual friends had arranged for them to meet at a gaming night.[5] One of the mutual friends who helped introduce them was fantasy artist Erol Otus.[6]

Originally called Starcon, the game began as an evolution on concepts that Reiche first created in Archon: The Light and the Dark, as well as Mail Order Monsters.[4] The vision for the game was science-fiction Archon, where asymmetric combatants fight using different abilities in space.[5] In this new game, the combat sequences would be inspired by the classic game Spacewar!,[3] as well as the fundamental experience of Star Raiders.[7] As Ford and Reiche were still building their workflow as a team, the game took on a more limited scope compared to the sequel.[5]

Fred Ford's first prototype was a two-player action game where the VUX and Yehat ships blow up asteroids, which led them to build the entire universe around that simple play experience.[4] They built on the two original ships with many additional ship and character concepts.[3] The asymmetry between the combatants became essential to the experience. Ford explains, "our ships weren't balanced at all, one on one... but the idea was, your fleet of ships, your selection of ships in total was as strong as someone else's, and then, it came down to which matchup did you find".[8]

Although the story does not factor heavily into the gameplay,[1] the team developed character concepts based on the combat abilities of the ships.[5] Paul Reiche III describes their character creation process, "I know it probably sounds weird, but when I design a game like this, I make drawings of the characters and stare at them. I hold little conversations with them. 'What do you guys do?' And they tell me."[3] The team would begin with paper illustrations, followed by logical abilities for those ships, and a character concept that suited the ship's look-and-feel.[4] The cowardly personality of the Spathi were inspired by their backwards-shooting missiles.[5] A more robotic ship inspired an alien race called the Androsynth, whose appearance was imagined as Devo flying a spaceship.[4] Having designed a larger ship that launches fighters on command, Reiche and Ford decided this would be a dominating race.[8] These antagonists would be called the Ur-Quan, with a motivation to dominate the galaxy to hunt for slaves, and an appearance based on a National Geographic image of a predatory caterpillar dangling over its prey.[3] The Shofixti were inspired by concepts in David Brin's The Uplift War. Reiche and Ford asked themselves who might be uplifted by the Yehat, a fierce warrior race, and decided upon the Shofixti as ferocious super rodent.[5]

A technological limitation at the time was the limited number of colors, which required that they create settings for CGA, EGA, and VGA monitors.[5] A separate team ported a stripped down version of the game to the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad, which meant reducing the number of ships to 8, not to mention the introduction of new bugs and balance issues.[9] Additional problems were caused by the number of simultaneous key-presses required for a multiplayer game, which required Ford to code a solution that would work across multiple different computer keyboards.[5]

The game was ultimately ported to the Sega Genesis.[10] Because it was a cartridge-based game with no battery backup, the Genesis port lacked the scenario-creator of its PC cousin, but it came pre-loaded with a few additional scenarios not originally in the game.[11] Whereas the Star Control initially featured synthesized audio, they discovered the digital MOD file format to help port the music to console, which would later become the core music format for their sequel.[5] It took nearly 5 months to convert the code and color palates,[11] leaving little time to optimize the game under Accolade's tight schedule, leading to slowdown issues.[12][13] Also, the port was not authorized by Sega, which led led to a lawsuit between Accolade and Sega of America.[5] Sega v. Accolade became an important legal case, creating a precedent to allow reverse engineering under fair use.[14][15] This led Sega to settle the lawsuit in Accolade's favor, making them a licensed Sega developer.[16] Released under Accolade's new "Ballistic" label for high quality games, the game was touted as the first 12-megabit cartridge created for the system.[10]

Reception
Review scores Publication Score CGW [17] MegaTech 90% Sega16 8/10[10]

The game was a commercial success at the time, reaching the top 5 on the sales charts by September 1990.[5] The game was also well-received critically. MegaTech gave the game 90% and a Hyper Game Award, but noted that it was "not quite as much fun on your own".[18] In a 1992 survey of science fiction games, Computer Gaming World gave the title three-plus stars of five, stating that "Despite (or maybe because of) its lack of depth, it remains an enjoyable challenge".[19] A 1994 survey of strategic space games set in the year 2000 and later gave the game three stars.[17] In 1996 the magazine ranked it as the 127th best game of all time, stating "Space War enters the 90s with a touch of humor."[20] Entertainment Weekly gave the game a B and wrote that "if wreaking havoc in distant galaxies is what you do best, I can think of no better game for you."[21] The game was voted the 1990 "Best Science Fiction Game" by Video Games and Computer Entertainment.[22] Video Games & Computer Entertainment stated that "Reiche and Ford's action-strategy tour de force is one of the most absorbing and challenging science fiction games of all-time."[23]

As the first game in the series, Star Control has a legacy of its own. Retro Gamer describes it as "the seed from which the vastly expanded narrative found in Star Control 2 grew", with numerous "elements that gave Star Control 'soul'".[9] Polygon mentioned it in their top 500 games of all time, with its flexibility "as a melee or strategic game, it helped define the idea that games can be malleable and dynamic and players can make an experience wholly their own".[24] It is responsible for creating the Ur Quan, as "one of the all-time villainous races in the history of computer games".[3] Founder of BioWare Ray Muzyka cites Star Control as an inspiration for the Mass Effect series of games, stating that "the uncharted worlds in Mass Effect comes from imagining what a freely explorable universe would be like inside a very realistic next-gen game."[25]

The legacy of the original Star Control is also its foundation as for the critically acclaimed sequel, Star Control 2.[26]

• Starflight

• Creators of Star Control - developer blog
• The Pages of Now and Forever - a fan site
• Star Control at MobyGames
• Star Control on classic reload