Way back when, lost to the mists of time or at least the mists of 1990, there was an action-strategy title called Star Control. Fourteen different alien races with spaceships that all played differently from each other were divided up between the Ur-Quan Heirarchy and the Alliance of Free Stars, with the tactical aspect being to claim a star system while the action was engaging in one-on-one ship battles. The sequel was a very different game, practically a space RPG set on a giant stellar map where events between alien races frequently happened independently of player influence as the story progressed. Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters is even available forfree on Steam, and still as much a classic today as when it was released over thirty years ago. While it’s worth playing in its own right, The Ur-Quan Masters is also worth checking out due to the sequel being in the works at long last.
Some sequels take longer than others
Free Stars: Children of Infinityhit Kickstarteron April 16 and blew through the first several stretch goals before the end of its first day. It probably helps that the game has a devoted fan-base, but even so the response was far outside of expectations. The Ur-Quan Masters ended on a tease for a new game in the series and despite any CD-ROM evidence that may bepresented to the contrary, like a game that was made with FMV puppets, there was never a true sequel to continue the story.
Star Control II Lands on Steam (Again) as Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
It’s been over thirty years since Star Control II released and it’s still an incredible game.
I recently was able to talk to Fred Ford, one of the series' creators, and Dan Gerstein, who’s been part of the Toys for Bob crew for many years now. Free Stars: Children of Infinity is actually from Pistol Shrimp games, but there’s a whole lot of Toys for Bob in its makeup. We got to cover a lot of ground, so without any further preamble here’s the best parts of a fun and rambling talk:
[Hardcore Gamer] How long have you been working on the new game? I think it’s been since 2017 or so?
[Fred Ford] Well, we kind of got interrupted there. That’s when we set forth from Activision to work on it, because that was the 25th anniversary of the original, or of Ur-Quan Masters anyway, butthe lawsuitkind of brought us up short on that, and we retreated back into our shell for a few years until that blew over. And so I guess, I guess we’ve been working on it since the end of 2020 or the very beginning of 2021. Dan hadn’t hadn’t joined us yet, but he did six months later. And so it’s been a… Well, it hasn’t been a slow burn for us, but it’s been a slow burn for the fans because we were just a small court team to start.
The Kickstarter just launched the other day and it’s done pretty OK for itself.
[Fred] Yeah, I guess. It’s not that I check it obsessively or anything, but I think it’s almost up to $300K, a few thousand dollars short of that.
The Kickstarter response is a lot
I take it the response to the Kickstarter is taking you a little bit by surprise then?
[Fred] You know, I at least speaking personally, Dan maybe knew more than I did, I didn’t really know what to expect. We knew we still had a community, and I think a lot of that was thanks to the fact that we released Ur-Quan Masters to open source and so the the flame was kept flickering. It was an easy place to kind of slide in to already have a community that was still alive and waiting.
You guys were working on yours, Stardock was working on theirs. There was the whole disagreement that then got nicely and peacefully resolved.
[Fred] Yeah, it turns out that when you hire lawyers one of their jobs is to get the best possible terms for their client, which sounds like the right thing to do, but it often leads to kind of extreme positions on each side. We didn’t exactly cut the lawyers out, but when we finally realized that, it probably would be easier to talk directly, that’s when we worked this out pretty quickly.
(At this point for the next question I accidentally mention the previous series name.)
[Dan Gerstein] It’s there because of the agreement we have. We call it Free Stars now. So it’s Free Stars: Children of Infinity. Every fan’s gonna have their own name for it, we acknowledge that!
Yeah, it’s mentally hard to adjust. I played Star Control II back on the 3DO.
[Fred] Yeah. Understood. And yeah, that’s what the whole lawsuit was about, just kind of the unclean mingling of the copyright and the trademark, and so in order to fix that we had to come up with a different name. Or at least brand.
All right, now the new game you said is taking up just a couple of years after the old one?
[Dan] Yeah, the idea is three years after the events of the Sumatra. So you know, there are, of course, many possible ways to end the Ur-Quan Masters. But you know what we want, really for players is to feel like they’re jumping back into the world and following up on the story and the adventure they had. And they’re taking the character that they knew, and they fell in love with, we hope or maybe not, and they get to jump right back into that.
[Fred] Yeah, we kind of wanted the new game to be a comfort food for the old fans who have been waiting for a sequel, and the reason they were waiting for the sequel was they loved the original and so we wanted to give them a nice soft landing. But we’re hoping to update it to kind of current sensibilities of gamers, to make it more approachable for new fans.
One of the most impressive things about The Ur-Quan Masters back in the day is how it didn’t feel like just one big story, although obviously it was. It felt like 75 little stories, all bumping up against each other all at once. How hard is that juggling act to do from the narrative side of things.
[Fred] It was difficult. One nice thing about games back then is there was kind of no blueprint for anything. So you just had an idea and you didn’t know that it was supposed to be impossible or hard. You just said, well, OK, how am I gonna do this? And there’s nobody to tell me how and nobody to tell me I can’t do it. So we just kind of did it. It was difficult. Back then it was a two year development, which was long, back then, and some of that was exploring possibilities that didn’t pan out and some of it was just the scope of the game was big.
How would you figure Free Stars is going to compare in terms of overall size, old to new?
[Dan] Do you want the real answer or the joke answer?
I’d like the joke answer.
[Dan] Well, we have our new star map design. If you’re familiar with the game it includes a one thousand unit by one thousand unit star map that you fly around on. Our new star map is twelve hundred units by twelve hundred units, so exactly two hundred by two hundred units bigger.
[Fred] Inflation.
A mathematically surprising larger universe
A twenty percent increase… No, wait…
[Fred] But of course, you travel four times as fast, so in reality, no, that’s just confusing.
-Editors note- Math time! 1,000 x 1000 units for the original is 1,000,000 square units, 1200 x 1200 for Free Stars is 1,440,000 square units. The increase in map size is actually 44%! It may be four times quicker to get where you’re going but there’s still a lot more space for points of interest to distract you along the way.
[Dan] The non-joke answer is, you know, I’m a big speed running fan and I’ve seen how fast someone can complete the Ur-Quan Masters, but game length is such an interesting thing. You could have a whole talk about it, but we want enough of just what you’re talking about. There’s so many stories that you can get invested in. The metaphor I like to use with the team is they’re like presents. I grew up Jewish so I had Hanukkah, and so I got eight days of presents in a row, and they were never that great. It was just like, ooh, lots of little things.
So for the story to feel good, you have to feel like there’s always another present to open, as opposed to a really big present that you spend forever playing with. So our length and size of story, we don’t want it to be too bloated because then, you know, people are just gonna feel like they have to spend forever and it’s an epic saga. We want players to feel like they can get into a story, enjoy it, appreciate it, and then see how it connects with the other stories that they find out about.
Now going back to the going back to the original games, the jump from Star Control, which was more of a tactical game to Ur-Quan Masters, which was a narrative game, how exactly did that occur? That felt like a huge shift in genre between the two.
[Fred] Yeah, well, it was. And in fact, I mean, it’s funny that you bring up the word genre because back then no one could categorize like our games because the first one was action strategy. I mean obviously you can categorize it as that and then the Ur-Quan Masters was action adventure or role-playing or whatever. So you can categorize them like that. But most games didn’t mix what you would call genres back then, they were just one thing, and so we kind of confounded the people of the time. And there weren’t a lot of ruts back then. There was no first person shooter yet, as good as close to being there.
The first one was the first time that Paul and I had worked together too, so we simultaneously had to define our rhythm together as well as make something. From his Archon fame, Starcon was Archon in space. The first one instead of sort of like a chess board, there was that starfield that you fought over. So with that first that first game under our belt and having learned our working relationship…
You did get hints of a back story in the first game, even though it was action strategy, there were stories to set up the strategic battles that you engaged in and there were little back stories about all of the aliens, certainly in the manual and stuff like that. So there was already an embryonic story there and we just decided to go for it in the second one with both our our improved working relationship and… Yeah, let’s do something that we love to do.
Alright, now obviously it’s like 20 some years later…
[Fred] Thirty plus.
Settling on an art style
I’m just going to go crawl into a coffin. Anyway, 30 years later, and interestingly enough, games now go from quite happy to look like an old eight-bit game or a Game Boy Color game, and there’s even a PlayStation One era vibe kicking around, but obviously from what you’ve shown off with Free Stars, it’s a little bit more modern, but how modern are you going to go for the look of the thing? Just because there’s so many options available in terms of retro, new, full polygonal with AAA production values, and everything in between all being viable options now.
[Fred] Well, they’re not all viable. Not with a small team. So with a small team, you can’t really reach for the AAA thing. Maybe if our our Kickstarter blows up completely we could shift course.
You know we’re making a sequel to a 30 year old game and we still have fans that have kept the light alive as mentioned earlier. So we wanted to make something that was a recognizable sequel to the first one but also approachable by new gamers. Will we succeed with sort of the middle ground there? I don’t know, but that’s what we’re trying.
[Dan] Yeah. And to add on a little bit, you know one of the things that I found really true and successful working with Fred and Paul over the years, we have a running joke which is we just make the same game over the over and over. If you look at Skylanders, it has a ton in common with The Ur-Quan Masters if you use the right lens. But we really embrace kind of a diverse look, and it helps that none of us are artists so we can just say this casually and then have artists help us actually execute it. But with what we’ve shown so far and what we’re doing, not only is it streamlined like what Fred is saying, but one bit of feedback we would get is “Oh, no pixel art?” and well, we could have done that, but what we’re trying to do, and this is somewhat intentional, is take some of the best stuff that we love personally from all kinds of different games from the past 30 years and put it together.
So I would say the way we’re approaching, making our ships is a somewhat modern take, but it’s not as modern as it could be. We could modernize it more, but we’re still kind of straddling the middle ground. We love the bright colors that you would get and that was, of course, technical limitations and things like that. So finding the middle ground where, it’s like Fred said, recognizable and you go “Ohh, it’s that game, I remember that game!” But even if you’ve never played old games, it still looks like it has a style and it’s different and it stands out and it has recognizable elements.
And you maybe look at something and go “Well, that’s not usually what space looks like! I’ve seen space in other space games, but this space looks different.” Hyperspace is a great example where just the red space everywhere is kind of unusual and if you know the game, you know that means. But for other players like that’s just intriguing. I hesitate to use the word timeless but that’s the kind of thing where we wanna like pull those things that really convey story and place and find ways to express them with more modern technology.
Not really relevant to the conversation at hand, but mentioning Skylanders, I just remembered, I got to go out to the Toys for Bob office for the Spyro Trilogy press event, and just remembering those shelves and shelves and shelves of Skylanders toys.
[Dan] Yeah, we had to rent a whole new office just to store Skylanders. (That’s not true but it feels like it.)
[Fred] I usually say sorry to people who say they they bought a gazillion toys. But I’m not really sorry and it’s not because of the money that made, but… Skylanders was special in that you actually got a physical totem for your trouble. I’m sure you were a kid one day, but there’s probably a magic toy you had in your past that you either wish you still had on your shelf, or maybe you still do have on your shelf. And so I feel like we really gave value to the kids who bought those toys.
(Bit of a break for non-interview talk that ends up back at the Kickstarter and its current status, without a graceful way to make it look like a seamless conversation.)
[Fred] We’re still kind of stunned by the Kickstarter.
I was actually really pleased to see the response so far. Just stretch goal, stretch goal, stretch goal, stretch goal, stretch goal.
Open source is the best source
[Dan] This is a true story – I had a content schedule with updates that we were gonna be posting to get people interested and different things on the Kickstarter. We had to entirely rearrange the schedule because it was built around “Well, the stretch goals will be hit slowly and over time”, and I’m not posting any updates because we have to address all the stretch goals so actually, everybody completely disrupted our Kickstarter schedule. Good job everyone!
Regarding stretch goals, I did want to talk about one of them. The completely open source one that obviously is at pipe-dream money, but… You’ve always done a really good job of supporting the fans. I mean, most developers for something like the free Ur-Quan Masters(ed note- This was more about when the game was freely released as a fan project years ago, not the free Steam version from earlier this year.)wouldn’t go around promoting it. They’d cheerfully turn a blind eye, just happy with people playing rather than actively promoting and getting behind it. So the open source thing does tie into that nicely.
[Fred] Yeah, it does. I mean, it is a bookend to to the open source thing we did in 2002 to release our Ur-Quan Masters.
Obviously $4.4 million, that’s quite a lot to get to. But if you were somehow able to achieve that, would that just basically mean that after two years the game was open to everybody?
[Fred and Dan together] Yes.
[Fred] Well, not just the game. Yeah, I mean, too, the engine too. And that’s why it’s priced so high is because it’s our current livelihood and we’ve worked hard to create a a really a unique technology, I think and to just give that away as another $20,000 seems seems a little cheap.
I actually thought $4.4 million seemed a little low, honestly.
[Dan] Well, it’s like Fred said, it’s the bookend. The open source release helped keep people interested in this. It helped make the game accessible.
I grew up on a lot of open source software and I have more Linux devices in my house than Windows devices. It’s powerful to see what open sourcing can do for all kinds of projects. And we use Blender in our workflow and Blender is open source, and that was a result of somebody putting a high price at the time, one hundred thousand dollars, to free a piece of software into open source.
So you know I don’t want to speak entirely for you Fred, but for for my part, games are about making the world better and giving people positive experiences. If we can do that and still support our own work and ability to continue to make more games and more things that we’re interested in, then yeah, it’s it’s just kind of a win win and it’s also an exciting talking point, even if it’s a dream. Look, everybody dreams of winning the lottery or things like that. And so having that and actually stating it as a stretch goal and saying “I don’t think we’ll get here”. But it’s fun to talk about and it’s fun for us to state our intentions and kind of express our values. That excites me.
[Fred] Just a little earlier, you were talking about falling into the coffin. If you’re falling into the coffin, where does that put me? I assume I’m older than you are. I don’t see a ton of decades left in my career as a game developer. I’m not saying that Free Stars: Children of Infinity is my swan song, but this technology might be, and so couple that with the bookending of the open sourcing of Ur-Quan Masters and it’s kind of my gift to the industry that that gave me my career.
Now you’ve been doing this for decades on end…
[Fred] Yes. My first game, I hesitate to tell you, was in the mid ’70s.
A very long time in the trenches
No, I remember the ’70s arcades. You are older than me, but not that much. Speaking as someone who grew up in the arcades of the ’70s and ’80s.
[Fred] Paul and I both were at Berkeley at the same time for college, and there was a place called the Silver Ball. And that was tremendous.
There’s not a lot of people who’ve been in gaming as long as you have. I mean, Jeff Minter is one of the only other people I can think of. So basically, once Children of Infinity is wrapped and complete you’d still be going on to do more, right?
[Fred] At this point, yeah, that’s my intention. We’re not ready to quit yet, but I also realize the horizon is getting closer.
So would you be thinking that this is basically less your 40 hour a week job going, you know? Obviously not for Children of Infinity with a major Kickstarter behind it, but like things you do after would be more things you’re going to do for your own entertainment or are you still going to be going for the big commercial releases like Children of Infinity is looking to be with the console stretch goals looking fairly attainable.
[Fred] I don’t know. Dan and Paul and Ken and I were working for our corporate jobs for decades before this, and so this is our first chance to go kind of independent again. And we’re gonna take stock of how this finishes up and figure out what’s next from that.
One thing we’ve all learned over the course of this because we’ve been in the industry for so long and we’re all such veterans of it, and we’re all getting old, is that personal calculus changes and maybe changes more rapidly at this time in your life when you’ve had a satisfying career, and maybe you have grandchildren and maybe you have… You know, there’s just other things that can pop up in your priority queue. I love doing what I’m doing right now, and I’m glad I’m doing it, so continuing to do it seems seems very attractive at this point.
[Dan] Just to jump in, one thing. We had a wonderful conversation with Tim Cain and he said he retired and he likes runninghis YouTube channelbecause he wants other people to make games so that now that he’s retired, he finally has time to play them. That spoke to me very deeply, but I could appreciate that as sort of an end goal. “I need to educate more people to make games that I want to play so that now that can actually play them!”
There’s always the backlog of the last, you know, 50 years as well. I don’t even like to think of all the things I haven’t looked at.
I’ve got just about everything I can think of, all the points I wanted to cover have been covered here. Is there anything that you’d like to add about the new game, or for that matter, the entire history of doing this for the last thirty, forty, fifty years?
[Fred] Speaking personally again, it’s never boring. You know, the technology is changing all the time. The tastes of the gamers are changing all the time, you never know what’s gonna be successful. Financially, Ur-Quan Masters was one of our least successful games in terms of money. But it’s had the longest legs of any and clearly it’s beloved by the response we’re getting from the Kickstarter and the community so you just never know. And which is why we couldn’t predict what the Kickstarter would be like either.
Free Stars: Children of Infinity is currentlyrunning on Kickstarterwith two weeks left at the time of this writing.
