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.

30 years though. That must mean I’m getting old!

forthegoats, Reddit User

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).

I’ll never forget playing UQM on the bus.

hedgecore, Reddit User

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.

markparisi, Reddit User

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.

Here’s to another 30 years of UQM (and to UQM2).

mct1, Reddit User

Loved playing and found out about the game on a demo Cd for 3DO.

Loved the story and clearly recall telling off the arilou on one go and regretting not having hyperspace jumps.

I replayed it back in 2003 or 2004 on the pc port and it was still just as good.

Really looking forward to the next iteration.

m1stercakes, Reddit User

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.

pravis, Reddit User

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…

Prawnsinaspix, Reddit User

We received a few notes by way of email too!

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). 

Edward Oakley, Sa-Matra Battle Fanatic

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.

mazrim-taim / Todd Pederzani

Have your own story to share too? Let us know or add to the Reddit thread!

As part of our 30 year celebration, we were honored to hear from Greg Kasavin — creative director of Supergiant Games and author of one of our favorite articles about UQM — who graciously shared some thoughts on the game and its impact on him after these 30 years.

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Happy 30th anniversary to one-of-the-greatest-games-of-all-time-if-you-ask-me, Star Control II! I’ve been an avid game player ever since, and can still safely say that, all this time later, I’ve still never played anything quite like it.

StarCon II‘s unique blend of action, exploration, and role-playing, and its spectacular science-fiction world filled with weird, wonderful, sometimes-scary, sometimes-funny alien species created an unforgettable and incredibly inspiring experience for me. And, unlike many other great games from that early-’90s DOS era, it still holds up really well, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the team behind The Ur-Quan Masters project, who have ensured this classic game can still be played and enjoyed.

I grew up wanting to become a game developer, playing everything I could get my hands on. But StarCon II stood out as one of a special few games that truly sparked my imagination and made me think “I wish I could someday work on something that could make others feel the way this made me feel.” I’ve now worked on close to 10 different games, many of them quite different from each other, though let me tell you… StarCon II remains a constant source of inspiration, both spiritually when it comes to finding a distinctive tone, and often practically as a design reference, too. Whenever I’ve been in design brainstorms and we’re thinking about interesting, imaginative player abilities, I always think of StarCon II.

When I was reflecting on this anniversary recently, I decided to fire up Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters for old time’s sake, start the campaign for the umpteenth time, play some of the awesome Super Melee combat mode. I still vividly recall many things about the game, such as how the Pkunk Fury starship has a chance to resurrect itself amid a glorious/hilarious Hallelujah!, and oh, the music…. But some details came back to me, such as how that same Pkunk ship regenerates its energy by ceaselessly insulting the opponent (“Loser! Idiot! Jerk!”). I laugh at almost nothing these days but busted out laughing at that, just as I must have when I was a kid, as the joy and imagination of this game came rushing back all in that one little aspect.

It’s difficult to single out the best part of StarCon II, which is part of why it’s so good. But for me it’s that great big personality that ultimately shines through. Of course its personality wouldn’t have meant as much if StarCon II wasn’t a blast to play. But the vibrant tone, the confident balance between absurd humor and serious high-stakes space opera, all of that helped open my eyes to what games could be.

The Ur-Quan Masters project is testament to the fact that this is a deeply loved game, and I hope many people out there will be playing and enjoying it not just another 30 years from now, but far into the future. If nothing else, it’ll give everybody something to do once the Ur-Quan arrive in the middle of the next century and cover our planet in their slave-shield and all that…!

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Greg Kasavin is creative director at Supergiant Games, the small independent studio behind Hades, Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion. He has done the writing and contributed to the design of each game.

As part of our 30 Year Anniversary for The Ur-Quan Masters, we asked the community to share any fan art they had created with us. We received so many submissions through email, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. With three decades under your belt, you had so many things to share with us, and some of our community members even created new things just to celebrate with us! We wanted to take some time to share as much as we could back with the world in a virtual museum gallery to highlight you, our amazing audience who have helped keep the game alive for all of this time.

We certainly didn’t capture everything out there, but we want to say again: “we wouldn’t be here without you!”. Thank you for sharing your love with everyone.

Digital and Physical Art

Tweets Galore

Videos and Music

Projects, Games, Mods

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Alien Apparel

Talen Lee wrote to let us know they’ve been making t-shirt designs based on UQM for the past few years. Represent your favorite (or least favorite – we won’t judge) species in style.

Got More?

If you are seeing this and want to submit more of your own creations (or are *frumple* Dan missed one of yours), please let us know!

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!