At the start of November, we asked our community to share anything and everything they had to help us celebrate 30 years since the original release of The Ur-Quan Masters, including a request for stories. We wanted to highlight some of your own tales for how you experienced the game and what you have to say after all this time. This is just a small sampling of some of the favorite things we heard.
It’s amazing it’s been that long. I turned 13 in November 1992. A friend of mine had a copy of the game, and I spent days at his house, us playing it through, marking down coordinates and looking for hints in dialogue. Hour upon hour of Melee battles. I bought one of the SC1+2 CD compendium copies a year or two later.
This game had a significant impact on my life. I was one of the original (and probably still the longest serving) users on the EFnet #starcontrol IRC channel. I met my first long term girlfriend through there, we spent a few years together. I moved overseas because of the girl I met, discussing the game I loved. I travelled the world and grew a love for that, before eventually heading home and meeting my now wife. However, every decision, my career, love of travel, significant life experiences; so much of it can be traced back to me playing Star Control II when I was (just) a teenager.
Back in 2005 there was a cult following for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It ran on it’s own flavour of Linux. So, naturally, I asked someone to port UQM to it. And they did (easily if I recall).
Author’s Note: I also was a member of the Nokia tablet cult and vaguely recall showing UQM running on my N800 to the TFB crew. That thing ruled!
I don’t know how unique my story is, but I played the hell out of Star Control on my Sega Genesis from my tween years until I went off to college. Still have the cartridge and game box.
Didn’t discover UQM until I was in college and had access to unlimited broadband and file-sharing sites. (Sorry.)
It’s the game that changed the way I thought about games. From a narrative that began by discovering the war I spent my childhood winning had been lost to learning that the Ur-Quan I had been killing by the hundreds had a twisted, but not illogical, rationale for their actions, it changed the way I viewed what storytelling in games could be.
You know what the amazing thing is? I was a teenager in the 90s when I first played UQM (well, Star Control 2 then). I was always a scifi nerd and had cut my teeth on Space Quest (who still loves a good Sierra adventure?) and StarFlight 2 (closest thing to Traveller we’re ever going to get, honestly). So I’m at the mall at the local Electronic Boutique (anyone remember those?) when I see this box on the shelf. “Star Control 2, huh? I don’t even remember there being a Star Control 1. Hmm. Well, didn’t stop me from buying StarFlight 2, so…” I get home and start playing and I’m hooked instantly. And then I found the lander bug. Oh god. How embarrassing. The amazing part, though, is that the lander bug didn’t ruin the game. I mean, OK, I can give myself infinite money to buy up ship modules and escort ships… but I still have to go solve the puzzles and beat the bad guys.
Now for the even more amazing part… here we are 30 years later and I still take that game out probably once a year to do a playthrough because it’s still fun. Unlike other games where you beat it once and you’re pretty much done with it, I can keep coming back to UQM year after year for more enjoyment.
I was 12 when SC2 was released which my older brother had purchased and forbidden both me and my younger brother from playing the game. He did this by keeping the galactic map hidden in his room which you needed to answer the copy protection to boot up the game.
So what I did was wait for him to leave the house, and then snuck in his room with my younger brother to find the map and make a hand drawn copy. I think it took 2 or 3 break-ins to finish it because we did not rush and wanted to make sure it was as accurate as possible.
So throughout our entire youth we used our hand drawn map to play the game. Overall it worked pretty well but I know a couple stars were slightly off since I remember failing the copy protection a couple times.
It also survived me taking it to college and moving out of state for my first full time job. I believe the map is still in a box of stuff in my basement since I could never bear to throw away a relic like that and when I return home in a week or so I can try to find it to post a photo.
I remember playing this many, many moons ago with the coveted sound card duo, Sound Blaster AND Gravis Ultrasound. SC2 was one of the first games to support the GUS and the music was amazing. The gameplay was intuitive. The storyline was compelling. Everything a game should be.
I still fire up UQM once in a while and it’s just as fun as it ever was. Kudos to Paul and Fred and team for making a true classic. Next time I see a Druuge ship I will happily trade a few crew for some vichyssoise, and a few more for Wimbli’s Serving Ladle to distribute it in your honor. Just don’t let the crew know…
Sending in the Umgah vs Sa-Matra fight because it is a crowd pleaser.
Personally, of the 25 ships, I think that Shofixti, Druuge, and Shofixti were the most interesting to do, but this is the one that exceeds expectations the most because most SC2 players I know don’t like the Umgah ship that much (SC1 players give it more respect).
One member of the community even asked to write about the precursor (haw haw) to UQM as part of the game’s legacy:
Around 1994 when I was about 7, a friend of mine introduced me to the DOS game “StarCon”, as he called it. I was captivated by the variety of ships and he gave it to me on copied floppy disks. (Yes yes, I know – I have bought it legitimately twice since!). With the internet still not much more than a marginal novelty at the time, I did not find out SC2 existed for a few more years.
Star Control 1 is not a masterpiece like SC2/Ur-quan Masters is, but it is still an interesting and unique game. It introduced the Spacewar-style combat with more than half of SC2’s ships. Instead of customizable teams, you have Alliance vs. Hierarchy outside of Practice mode. However, the main part that SC2 does not fully supersede is the “Full Game”, a combination of turn-based strategy with action combat. The turn-based structure is simple but still has a good amount of options and mechanics. You have basic resource management, three different types of buildable installations, and can find Precursor upgrades for your ships through exploration. Of course when enemy ships meet at the same system, they will fight it out Melee-style. A few ships also have strategic abilities, such as the Mycon regenerating without colonies.
All four Xs of the 4X genre are there in some form, and there is even a rudimentary scenario editor (the game comes with nine – the Genesis version adds six more but no editor). Though actually, with its clean straightforward mechanics and three-actions-per-turn system, SC1’s strategy mode feels closer to a modern board game than a PC 4X game in some ways. I didn’t fully understand the mechanics of the full game until I got a manual with a legit copy bundled with SC2 a few years later, but I was still fascinated by it and enjoyed messing around in it.
The story, while a small background element of SC1, still manages to produce the feeling of a universe with depth. It has a classic old-school manual of the sort that doesn’t really get written anymore, with the Hierarchy/Alliance race descriptions amusingly written as intelligence reports from the opposite side. Add the in-game scenario intros, pilot animations and captain names, and the ship specs, and there is some pretty good worldbuilding for a game where story isn’t very important. SC2 would go much further with this foundation of course, and having the Ur-quan win the SC1 war in SC2 was a great way to follow it up.
SC1’s combination of turn-based strategy and arcade action is still pretty unusual today – not many games use it, and a large portion of those that do involved Paul Reiche in some capacity! There have been attempts to revive it as a UQM mod or standalone game, but none have ever gotten very far (I very briefly tried once when UQM was new before realizing I was way out of my depth as a programmer). It’s an interesting part of Star Control that is often forgotten, and hopefully some day SC1’s Full Game mode can come back in one form or another.
Joel, North Carolina
Thank you. Thank you for creating an imaginative, funny, good looking, and fun to play game in Star Control 2. Thank you for putting your livelihoods on the line and finishing it to your satisfaction. Thank you for pivoting later on with your new hires and bringing it to the 3DO, which brought it to many new fans. Thank you for taking a risk and investing in it again, to create Ur-Quan Masters for the community. Thank you for stepping away from the studio you built to give the Ur-Quan Masters universe another adventure. Thank you for posting, streaming, sharing your tools, and spreading your philosophy of finding the fun, and otherwise letting us behind the curtain as you create Ur-Quan Masters 2.
My first Star Control 2 was the CD-ROM compilation, and I loved it from the get-go, immersing myself in the single player adventure mode. I’m not sure how I made it through all the battles, since I wasn’t good at Super Melee, but I loved gathering resources, building and flying around in my overpowered flagship. I loved filling in my picture of the universe by talking to all the different aliens, and getting a sense for the gaps where the mysteries were. And I loved that there were still mysteries at the end, giving us the ability to paint into them ourselves.
In college, I hosted the Unofficial Star Control (2) Page, taking over from Matthew Green in 1996 and passing it to Alex Weekley in 1998. (This exists again nowadays on the star-control.com fan site.) I remember that Fred and Paul actually emailed me about it — that email later got lost in a HD crash, and that’s the only file I still miss. I also discovered, by happenstance, the October/November 1994 issue of Computer Artist magazine where Gene Bodio from PCA Graphics published renders of the art he created for the 3DO version. I’ve always wanted 3D models of Star Control 2 things, and I did recreate the Space Station in an early version of 3D LightWave. One of these days, I’d like to 3D print my own SC2 swag.
