Ars Technica War Stories - Star Control II 

- Star Control began with this goofy little drawing. Most of my designs begin this way, with a goofy little drawing. I'm not embarrassed at all to do horrible drawings, but this pretty much says the whole concept. Fighting ships, and then having a strategy game. This was how we laid it out. 

- Hi, I'm Paul Reiche.

- And, I'm Fred Ford.

- We created the Star Control series, including Star Control Two, a science-fiction action adventure where our own love for science almost sucked all the fun out of the universe. 

[playful electronic music] Before Star Control Two, The Ur-Quan Masters, was Star Control One, Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Alliance Conflict - I can't remember. We had a big, long name! And, we began in late '88, early '89. The game industry, back then, was quite a bit different than it is now, and the kind of games people played.

- [Fred] We played Blood Money, Lemmings, Virus.

- It was a transition from the days of computers like the Commodore 64, through the PC, which was, of course, evolving in graphics, up to the Amiga, which was the appearance of this great new computer, with new kinds of capabilities. So, there was this evolution of game developers working on PCs and very small games, to slowly getting larger and larger. But, I wanted to do a science fiction game that combined Space Wars, that high-speed speed action through your fingers, and then, also, a person-versus-person hybrid of strategy and action.

- Paul had agreed to do three games with Accolade, so when I came on board, he actually was trying to run two games at the same time.

- Disaster. [Fred laughs]

- [Fred] Star Control One was a honeymoon period where we were learning what worked and what didn't work.

- And, we started with this premise of, "Let's do the most atomic component of gameplay," which is flying a spaceship and shooting missiles. Pretty much the first thing we made was a two player version of Asteroids. But, we wanted to get the spaceship combat just right. And so, we began building other alien ships. And, it was important to us that each alien ship was highly differentiated, and it began this idea of asymmetric PvP gameplay that we've used over and over since then. What it means is, unlike say Street Fighter, where your characters are supposedly balanced with one another, our ships weren't balanced at all, one on one. One could be very weak, and one could be very strong, 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. And, one game reviewer called it, "Rock, Scissors, Vapor," which I thought was a great expression. 

There's a Battlestar Galactica-like fighter ship, there is a triangular Space Wars-style ship, and those end up being our starting points, and foundations for some of the ships, but then, ultimately, we start telling each other stories about, "Well, why are these guys launched in fighters?" "Well, maybe someone's commanding them to," "Who is commanding them?" "Well, this is the biggest ship, "so these guys need to be leading," "What do we wanna call them?" "They're an old alien race, so let's use the word Ur, "which means old in some ancient language, "and Quan, just 'cause it sounds cool," so, how the Ur-Quan came to be. 

And then, in Star Control Two, we had to figure out, why it was all of these races behaved like this, in a way that makes sense and is interesting. Why is it that you have an alien race named the Ur-Quan that wanna go around enslaving people? That's a bizarre thing to do. So, whereas Star Control One is this tight, strategy action game, but fairly superficial in terms of story, I think we really wanted to go in and investigate those aliens, and that's what, pretty much, led to Star Control Two. 

Star Control Two, from my side, started with taking this idea of, "How do we expand out "into the other aspects of star-faring fantasy?" Whether it's Star Trek, or Battlestar Galactica, or even books from the ancient past, Larry Niven, and Jack Vance, we have, built into us, a sense of what people do when they go out and have an adventure in space. So, it was figuring out, "How do we pull all of that together "in a way that we can actually implement?" And then, "What are the parts "that turned out really boring?" "And, how do we throw them away and replace them?" 'Cause there's quite a bit of that, too. 

So, I wanna give credit where credit is due. Fred did not go down this particular rabbit hole with me about planet generation. You have to remember, in 1991, there was no scientifically proven exoplanet. Now, there's thousands, but, we had a sense of what they could be made of, rock, lithium, hydrogen, helium. I decided the right thing to do was to scientifically, correctly define these new worlds, these new planets, using very limited scientific knowledge I had. We started with, "Well, we know the brightness of the star, "the color of the star, "that gives us the energy flowing off of it." I have this Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology that I go look for equations in, and, I said, "Okay, so, we'll create this theoretical ball "of chemicals and elements, "and then we'll start shining light on it, and that light "will volatilize the lighter elements and chemicals." 

So, the helium will go and enter the atmosphere, hydrogen and then the carbon dioxide will volatilize, and at that point, as it's warming up, when the carbon dioxide goes, all of a sudden, the planet becomes a greenhouse, and it starts heating up very fast. As it heats up, other things volatilize, and you've got Venus, this incredibly hot planet. And, if the sun, radiation falling on the surface of the planet fell below a certain level, it would maybe volatilize hydrogen, but then, that was it, it was an ice ball. 

As much as I tried to program and calculate a cool world where you would have some liquid water, and some vaporous water. Nope, we've got ice balls and Venuses and nothing in between. And, what I was trying to do was recreate global warming models, which are the single, most complicated thing in the world, and so, we did a lot of work on this, and I was seeing the writing on the wall.

- They were on the page.

- And, I think, there just came a point where I just had to say, "Fred, this ain't working."

- Well, did the description just now sound interesting? Even if we went to all that work to accurately recreate what it was to make an atmosphere and to have it totally accurately modeled, the user would not appreciate any of that. You'll notice a pattern here, when I don't believe that something is worth it, I'll let him do it. [laughs]

- I fall for it, every time, like Lucy and the football. So, we sat back, and we said, "Okay, we gotta make cool planets."

- We still needed to tell a story, and that meant that some of the planets had to be special in some ways, beyond just procedural generation.

- I think, the problem with games that focus purely on procedural generation, is that it's impressive at first, and you're awed by what they've done, but then, the differentiation and meaning just declines. We just cut to the chase. You've got Treasure World, you've got the Ruby World. You've got the Cracked Planet. All of a sudden, they become stories. "I went to the Cracked Planet, "and I dodged the magma chasm," "I went to the Ruby World, and was blinded "by the glittering light of the star "off the surface of the planet." "That sounds good, yeah, I'll go there." And, we've got this really cool rainbow planet that didn't look like anything sensible, so, we're like, "What is that?" "Maybe that's an alien waste dump, "where they put crazy alien waste that's rainbow colored." 

A lot of the material, of the elements and the chemicals that do occur in space, we ended up using those as generated pickups on the surface of the planet. So, there was enough of this reality-ish material to make you feel like you could suspend your disbelief that, "Yes, there's a Ruby Planet, "and, yes, there's zirconium down there." It's enough real to make you enjoy it, and not think, that, "This is nonsense." 

So, the controls in Star Control, you have buttons that are rotate left, rotate right, thrust forward, fire, and special. However, they introduced a very specific problem when we translated them to the PC.

- The reason it was a problem is because we really wanted to support two people playing on the same keyboard. As they were using their keys in quick succession, and sometimes, multiple keys would be pressed simultaneously. On PCs, that's, in theory, allowed on their keyboard, but what we discovered fairly quickly was that each keyboard could be different, and different keys could be locked out. So, somebody might be turning left, but couldn't thrust at the same time.

- We didn't experience this keyboard problem for months. Maybe almost a year. And we would play every day, and it wasn't until we actually started sending versions of our game out to be played elsewhere that we started hearing these reports of problems that we'd never seen. So, when you think about what you could have installed on your computer now, it's software. Back then, it was almost all specialized hardware that really differentiated machines, and so, it was this complete flea circus of possibilities.

- We solved it in the easiest way we knew how, which was to supply an additional program along with the game that allowed them to probe their keyboard, and see which keys all be pressed simultaneously without locking somebody out. And so, they were able to configure their keyboard, hopefully, in ways that worked for them, so that they weren't playing Twister on the keyboard. That allowed them to then play without interfering with each other.

- Success is about moving people, about having what you do affect their lives in a way that's positive. And so, when we would get letters back from people, talking about how, for example, a hurricane hit their house, and they had to go live with their friend, and it was miserable, but the thing that got them through it was playing Star Control with their friend. That's worth its weight in gold to how you feel in your life.

- Star Control Two and Star Control One have always been near and dear to our hearts. It's the first things we worked on, first things we poured our passion in together. We have some die hard fans, as a result of those two games, and we wanted to service them, and lay the groundwork for our return.

- So, The Ur-Quan Masters project, the open source release, the game we created as Star Control Two, that really kept our game alive in the doldrums between, say, 2001 and 2002, and then 2011 when our games began to be sold again, through Good Old Games, known as GOG, which is an electronic distributor of classic games. 

So, we formed a corporation of Toys for Bob. As the years went on, we started working on games like Pandemonium or The Horde. We got this idea from Activision, "Hey, why don't you make a game for the Wii, "why don't you make a game for kids, "and hey, we've got the Spyro license now, "would you like to use that?" So we said, "Yes, we can do this. "We love Spyro, the Wii is awesome, "and we can make the greatest thing ever." And, that turned into Skylanders, which we couldn't have done without Activision, because it required factories and thousands of people, and skills in making plastic, and the ability to risk tens of millions of dollars on inventory. But, ultimately, it all paid off.

- I think, if you work on what you love, and we truly do love Star Control, you are much happier with your life in general.

- I would say the biggest lesson is, live up to the promise you make to yourself and your partners about what it is your creating. Don't let reality intrude any more than it absolutely has to. Because, and I'm not the first person to say this, success lasts. Mistakes you'll also remember, you'll never be able to fix them. If you have to go through pain, if you have to go through some short-term disappoint with folks in order to achieve something great, something that matters and that you believe in, do that. People will forget that pain. People will forgive you, but, you will have that for the rest of your life, and so will everybody else who's played your game. So, make those sacrifices. That was a little abstract. It made sense to me, but I don't know if it made sense to you guys.