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/.

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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.

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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.)

Howdy folks—my name is Lee, and I’m helping the Pistol Shrimp crew out with some of the writing on UQM2. I don’t post much—or, uh, ever, at least until now—but as we head into the holiday season and begin to take stock of the things we’re thankful for, the thing that sticks out for me is how thankful I am for The Ur-Quan Masters, and for all the other video games that manage to be so damn good that they carve out a permanent spot in our heads. Truly, is there anything quite like a wonderful interactive story, told well, with a fabulous cast of characters to befriend?

We’re barreling toward the 30th anniversary of UQM’s original release, which will roll around on November 30 of this year, and Fred and Paul and Dan and Ken have a bunch of cool stuff in work to show you guys. For my contribution, I wanted to tell the story of how I came to the Star Control universe, and then I wanted to show you guys a bunch of pictures of my original retail box, and all the stuff that came inside of it.

“Remember how it used to be…”

1992 feels simultaneously close and also terrifyingly far away. I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, and miserable even though it was the early 90s and I really didn’t have anything to be miserable about. The Cure released Wish and suddenly we were all in love on Fridays; in theaters, we begged our parents to drop us off so we could watch Encino Man, My Cousin Vinnie, and Army of Darkness while throwing popcorn at each other. And it was a banner year in PC gaming—Wolfenstein 3D, Dune II, Aces of the Pacific, and The Legend of Kyrandia all hit the shelves.

I vividly remember walking into the friendly neighborhood Babbage’s—the same Babbage’s I’d get a job at two years later—and being floored at the box I spied on the shelf. It was unexpected. It was shocking. It was awesome.

Of course I knew what Star Control was—being a DOS gamer of a certain age, I’d run across the game on the local BBS scene and, ahem, acquired a copy in a somewhat extra-legal fashion. Starcon‘s melee was a huge hit at my house, and being the older brother, I was the reigning champ and nigh undefeatable with my ultimate weapon, the Arilou Skiff. Much of my memories of the summer of 1991—the memories that aren’t pool-related—are filled with Ur-Quan explosions and the PC speaker beeping victory songs, set against a backdrop of long lazy afternoons that all eventually ended with my brother and me abandoning the computer for the pool. (Where we usually tried to drown each other, which my mom saw as an improvement over yelling at each other over the computer.)

But I knew nothing about a sequel. A sequel to Star Control? Would there be new ships to melee with? New aliens to blow up?

After successfully badgering my dad into buying the game—I was fourteen, it was 1992, and I had maybe five bucks to my name—I discovered that the sequel was far more than just more melee. Borrowing some of the most successful bits of Starflight and Starflight II (including Starflight designer Greg Johnson!), UQM was instead that most rare of things: a true space exploration RPG. There are a few more such games today, including and especially Starflight/UQM spiritual successor Mass Effect, but the genre remains disappointingly sparse. The few games that do fit into that niche tend to be cherished—and with good reason.

The Ur-Quan Masters is a rare thing. If you’re here, I don’t need to tell you how good a game it was (is!), but it is worth emphasizing, at least briefly, just how magical it was to have a story this well written and a universe this well-realized tumble out of four floppy disks. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a perfect game, but it is a supernal one. And it’s been locked in my forebrain since.

Boxing day

For whatever reason—probably because I don’t like to throw computer games away—that game box is still in my closet, having followed me through a half-dozen moves. And for folks who perhaps weren’t lucky enough to be around when the game came out, or who didn’t have a chance to buy a boxed copy, I wanted to take some pix of the box’s contents. There’s some great stuff in there.

One important caveat: I didn’t take any pictures of the original or deluxe maps of hyperspace. The original map definitely deserves a place in these images because it came in the original box, but it and the deluxe map (which came with the clue book) have been up on my office wall for several years and are folded up right now in a different spot in the closet. I can totally pull them out and take some additional pictures if needed, but rather than move a ton of boxes out of the way, I figured I’d just let ’em stay where they are.

(All images in this piece are clickable—if you want to read the tiny text, just click a for full-res version.)

So, here’s the box! It’s a big sturdy full-size software box, rather than the little flimsy half-height boxes that started showing up a few years later.

And here’s a big hero shot of everything that came inside of it—everything except the galaxy map, as noted:

Four floppy diskettes to rule them all!

The manual:

A “what’s in the box” inventory card, a warranty registration card, and a disk exchange form if you happened to need a 5.25″ floppy version of the game instead of the 3.5″ diskettes that came with the retail packaging. (It’s entirely possible that someone in 1992 might not have a computer with a 3.5″ drive—my family didn’t until the end of 1991!)

Two order forms: one in case you decided you needed a copy of the original Star Control, and the other in case you needed either the official cluebook or an actual-for-real Ur-Quan puzzle! (I have grilled Fred & Paul about this puzzle, since I’ve never seen one, but they both insist they have no memories of promotional items from decades ago. Alas.)

This one’s fun: a “manual addendum,” full of last-minute info that didn’t quite make it into the manual. (Most games also had a README.TXT file on the distribution disks for truly last-last minute stuff, too.)

Prodigy! Remember Prodigy? You don’t? God, I’m old.

It’s not a retail game release without a catalog and a “what’s new” guide!

And, finally, although it wasn’t included in the retail packaging, here’s a few pix of the game’s official clue book, chock full of secrets and inside jokes from Fred & Paul:

And that’s it! Hope you’ve enjoyed the walk down the lane of forgotten retail box delights. Here’s to those games that keep us all coming back for decades—games like UQM. Happy 30th anniversary to the end of the Doctrinal Conflict, and cheers for three decades of wonderful memories. May they soon be joined by many more!