Throughout the month, we have been thrilled to hear from people who were inspired by The Ur-Quan Masters. We had the good fortune of getting in touch with a fellow developer — Alex Mosolov, creator of space adventure game Starsector — who joins us to generously share his reflections on UQM after these 30 years.
Originally written on November 20th, 2022. Cover image from https://fractalsoftworks.com/2013/02/05/painting-the-hound-and-the-hangar/.
When Dan reached out a couple of weeks ago to see if I might want to say a few words about The Ur-Quan Masters and what it meant to me, it felt a little surreal. If I had to name a game that’s had the most influence on me creatively, and on shaping what I want out of games, then UQM would be it. Being asked to talk about it now feels like coming full circle.
My first real introduction to video games was at my mom’s work, in the very late 80s and early 90s. I was around 10 years old at the time, and this was the only place I had access to a PC (an Intel 286, I believe? the memory is a bit hazy; but: definitely 5 inch floppy disks as the medium of choice), and I’d be lucky to get a couple of hours, a couple of times a year. The original Star Control was one of the games I played a lot, then (the original Warlords was another favorite). A lot of the time between those all-too-infrequent visits was spent thinking about games, playing them in my head, and drawing in my notebooks.
Fortunately (and, perhaps, embarrassingly), my grandparents saved those notebooks, and now I get to share a couple of these drawings with you!
Here, it looks like I’m conceptualizing different ship ideas. Yes, the one in the top left is clearly a hand-cranked meat grinder. No, I don’t remember what I was thinking.
That one aside, we have some kind of charged bolo behind what I can only assume is an Ur-Quan prototype, a ship that’s clearly spawning two limpet mines (because one just isn’t annoying enough), and some kind of Mycon-Androsynth hybrid blowing what I seem to recall was supposed to be a bubble of plasma. And a few others, also with inspiration clearly taken from the original SC ships.
Looking at that picture, I think the frame of mind I was in was “coming up with other ship ideas that would work within the game”. Modding it in my imagination, if you will! And then playing it, in the same place, since: no regular access to a PC!
This one (on the left side, obviously) is from a bit later – months? A year? What strikes me about this one is how close this is to Starsector as it is now – a top down view, a ship with turreted weapons, missiles visibly mounted on the hull. What looks suspiciously like a Reaper-class torpedo, coming in hot. As I very vaguely remember, this was an evolution from the Star Control designs, a “wouldn’t it be neat if…” sort of thing. What’s funny is, by the time I’d started work on Starsector, I had forgotten all about these, but it was all apparently lurking in the back of my mind. The one on the right is a Lasher-class frigate, from Starsector. It’s almost the same ship!
Later, when we had a PC at home, I got my hands on The Ur-Quan Masters – I have vague memories of convincing my mom to buy it at a store, some kind of Best Buy equivalent. I wish I remembered more about playing it in those days, but mostly what I’m left with is feelings. How it felt to realize that every single star on the map was somewhere I could go. How it felt to be able to actually land on a planet and fly the lander around. How it felt to gather resources, to plan an expedition, to try to make it come out with enough profit in the end to keep going. How it felt – during what I thought was a routine resource-gathering landing – to find an energy signature and something incredibly important to the story, just, randomly! How it felt to realize that the world isn’t static, when the Kohr-Ah showed up. How it felt to discover quasi-space, and that it was only accessible from hyperspace during a certain time, and that it had been there all along!
A lot of the story stuck with me, too. I think there’s a quality to it where it doesn’t explain too much – just sets up these evocative situations, and lets your imagination fill in the gaps. The Androsynth and the Orz, cosmic horrors from “outside”, that are also very helpful, non-threatening, and can become your allies. Finding out that the Ur-Quan – the bad guys! – are sympathetic (or at least understandable), at least from a certain angle. The absolute hellhole that is Druuge space. What little is hinted at about the Ilwrath; imagining what life on their planets might be like. The horror of a Mycon Deep Child destroying the Syreen home world. It’s so good, I think, in large part because it lets your imagination tell much of the story.
In the end, the way the game has made me feel – both through its story and its mechanics – is what’s had the most influence on me creatively. Trying to recreate a game from your childhood is a fool’s errand; the same things won’t make you feel the way they did 10, 20, 30 years ago. But you can try to aim to make a different game that gives you those kinds of feelings, and that’s been my goal with Starsector. In many – most! – cases it’s vague and you wouldn’t really see a connection with UQM unless you knew it was there, and it’s more of an overall influence rather than something that maps more closely, in any case.
In other cases, it’s more overt – for example (spoiler alert!), there’s a hidden pocket of space in Starsector called “Alpha Site”; it’s accessible from hyperspace from the start of the game and has some interesting (and dangerous) things in it, and the player is only pointed to it some ways along the main story line. That feeling of “oh, I could’ve gone there any time I wanted to, had I known it was there” is very much a direct attempt to recreate the feeling of finding out about quasi-space in UQM.
And, of course, if you ever see the planetary shield in Starsector, you’ll know what it’s about. That one is not an attempt to recreate any sort of particular feeling, it’s just an out-and-out homage.
There have been many other inspirations and influences along the way, of course – and hopefully an original idea or two somewhere in there! But looking back now, it’s clear that 30 years ago, The Ur-Quan Masters is the game that set me on the path to making Starsector.
Do you want to play a space game full of exploration and adventure from a glorious top-down view (with an extremely active modding community)? Go check out Starsector, available for purchase and still under development from Fractal Softworks. (And Dan strongly recommends SsethTzeentach’s glowing review for the uninitiated.)