KickStarter Free Stars: Children of Infinity - upcoming Star Control 2 sequel from original creator Fred Ford

[Alex]

Wardell seem pretty even in that comment, actually.

 

[Zombra]

Remember, kids: don't post angry!

 

[JBro]

He's hotheaded.

Wardell seem pretty even in that comment, actually.

Large differing groups of people throughout the industry are driving someone in a stressful position at the head of a company to the deep end. His reactions make sense and are probably pretty warranted.

 

[Elestan]

His reactions make sense and are probably pretty warranted.

"Make sense"? Maybe. But IMHO, someone who is prone to thoughtless outbursts should not be a CEO; the only reason he gets away with it is because he's also Stardock's owner.

But "warranted"? No way; threatening to shut down an established fan community that long predates his company's involvement with the game is absurd. And it's hard to just write it off as a tantrum, because that wasn't the only time he talked about doing it; there's another leaked chatroom log of him saying (seemingly calmly) that the UQM forum may need to go away. That suggests that this was not an outburst, but something he had been seriously thinking about for months (the log was from May, the screenshot from August).

Fortunately, it's doubtful that he has the legal grounds to actually affect the forum before the trial is over...unless the adminstrators had signed the license agreement he told them would "protect" them, which would actually have given him the power to shut them down, and forced them to help Stardock in its lawsuit against Reiche and Ford.

 

[Cael]

Wardell seem pretty even in that comment, actually.

More like petty.

 

[Makabb]

Anyway, why they just won't change the name? Space Control, Galaxy Control, Universe Control, Universe Ruler, Star Commander

 

[lophiaspis]

That vile little community will be eliminated

 

[Cael]

Anyway, why they just won't change the name? Space Control, Galaxy Control, Universe Control, Universe Ruler, Star Commander

$$$ via franchise goodwill. Stardick wants it and is willing to beg, steal, sue, defraud and character assassinate for it.

 

[Cael]

That vile little community will be eliminated

Every day, stardick shows his true nasty colours, but his fanbois still cling on to their hero, attacking and character assassinating anyone who dares to point out the kind of asshole he is. This is turning into a fucking religion.

 

[JBro]

tfw large successful developer offered you the rights to your games on a silver platter, and years later you decide to sperg out and fling shit like a retarded monkey.

 

[Elestan]

Anyway, why they just won't change the name? Space Control, Galaxy Control, Universe Control, Universe Ruler, Star Commander

The "Star Control" name isn't really in dispute. Reiche and Ford don't want to call their game "Star Control" (they called it "Ghosts of the Precursors"), and haven't made any arguments that Stardock can't use the name. The problem is that Stardock is claiming that it controls every name used in the original games, regardless of whether it was registered as a trademark. This includes "Chenjesu", "Spathi", "Arilou", and all the other alien race names, as well as "Fwiffo" (which Reiche used as his handle) and "The Ur-Quan Masters", which is the name of the open-source project.

 

[:Flash:]

tfw large successful developer offered you the rights to your games on a silver platter, and years later you decide to sperg out and fling shit like a retarded monkey.

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them? He claimed that he did, but he also claims to own everything, which is obviously made up, so it's possible he only claims that he offered them the rights for PR reasons.

 

[Elestan]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them? He claimed that he did, but he also claims to own everything, which is obviously made up, so it's possible he only claims that he offered them the rights for PR reasons.

He did, but I think it was because he had buyer's remorse after finding out he couldn't get their copyrights. I wrote my own analysis (with links to court exhibits containing the emails between the two) in an earlier post on another forum.

 

[JBro]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them?

He shared their email correspondence up to right before the beginning of the lawsuit.

 

[Elestan]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them?

He shared their email correspondence up to right before the beginning of the lawsuit.

He shared selected parts of it. For some reason, he left out his original 2013-07-22 email to Paul (which had a lot of detail about Brad's understanding of and intent for buying Atari's assets), Paul's reply (where Paul let him know about owning the copyrights personally, including their use in SC3), Brad's response (where he agreed with what Paul owned), and a number of others that showed how many times Brad asked them for permission to use their copyrights.

From reading just the emails Brad posted, one could easily get the impression that Paul sprang his copyright claims on Brad by surprise in 2017, instead of telling him up-front in 2013.

My earlier linked post contains links to the recent court exhibit that provided a more complete record.

 

[Infinitron]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them?

He shared their email correspondence up to right before the beginning of the lawsuit.

He shared selected parts of it. For some reason, he left out his original 2013-07-22 email to Paul (which had a lot of detail about Brad's understanding of and intent for buying Atari's assets), Paul's reply (where Paul let him know about owning the copyrights personally, including their use in SC3), Brad's response (where he agreed with what Paul owned), and a number of others that showed how many times Brad asked them for permission to use their copyrights. My earlier linked post contains links to the recent court exhibit that provided a more complete record.

Oh hey, Derek Smart is in that thread. Isn't that just perfect.

 

[Cael]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them?

He shared their email correspondence up to right before the beginning of the lawsuit.

He shared selected parts of it. For some reason, he left out his original 2013-07-22 email to Paul (which had a lot of detail about Brad's understanding of and intent for buying Atari's assets), Paul's reply (where Paul let him know about owning the copyrights personally, including their use in SC3), Brad's response (where he agreed with what Paul owned), and a number of others that showed how many times Brad asked them for permission to use their copyrights.

From reading just the emails Brad posted, one could easily get the impression that Paul sprang his copyright claims on Brad by surprise in 2017, instead of telling him up-front in 2013.

My earlier linked post contains links to the recent court exhibit that provided a more complete record.

Lies, more lies and outright fraud. People who still defend that criminal need to get their heads examined.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Is there any proof that Wardell actually offered the rights to them?

He shared their email correspondence up to right before the beginning of the lawsuit.

He shared selected parts of it. For some reason, he left out his original 2013-07-22 email to Paul (which had a lot of detail about Brad's understanding of and intent for buying Atari's assets), Paul's reply (where Paul let him know about owning the copyrights personally, including their use in SC3), Brad's response (where he agreed with what Paul owned), and a number of others that showed how many times Brad asked them for permission to use their copyrights. My earlier linked post contains links to the recent court exhibit that provided a more complete record.

Oh hey, Derek Smart is in that thread. Isn't that just perfect.

You can't spell "dead in 90 days tops" without Derek Smart.

 

[LESS T_T]

Let's have a good thing in this thread:



Article has interesting photo gallery showing docs and art: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/video-how-star-control-ii-was-almost-a-much-more-boring-game/

Video: How Star Control II was almost a much more boring game
Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III tell us all their game design secrets.

Welcome back to "War Stories," an ongoing video series where we sit down with game designers and ask them to tell us about game development challenges that almost sank their projects. In previous instances, we've been lucky enough to get some time with the likes of Lord British (of Ultima fame) and Paul Neurath (of Thief), among others. This time, we've scored big: we tracked down the creators of the Star Control series—none other than Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III.

Star Control was a fun little Space Wars-alike, but it's the second game in the series that truly became famous. Star Control II is the last—and many would say best—entry in the sorely missed Starflight-style space exploration/RPG genre that flourished in the 1980s and '90s. That pedigree is strongly represented in the game's form—in fact, Ford and Reiche even had the assistance of Starflight alum Greg Johnson in fleshing out aspects of SC2's design and dialog.

Control them stars
For the few Ars readers who might not have played Star Control 2 (or its later open source re-release, The Ur-Quan Masters), it might be difficult to see why I'm so effusive in praising a game that turns 26 years old next month. And I admit to no small amount of personal bias here, as SC2is one of my favorite games of all time. But the game is just so damn good—from the tight plotting, to the wonderfully written and varied alien dialog, and especially the beyond-addicting two player melee combat with hilariously unbalanced ships.

After talking with Fred and Paul, it quickly becomes obvious that the reason for SC2's enduring legacy is the two head designers themselves. They hauled out boxes and boxes of original game design documentation showing carefully hand-drawn dialog trees and plot maps; while we lingered hungrily over the collection, they talked in detail about the game, as if they'd just been working on it last week rather than two-and-a-half decades ago. Paul is effusive and almost bubbly, while Fred is more taciturn and tends to let Paul run, interrupting only when corrections are necessary. (The more I watch them, the more I'm reminded of the Zoq and the Pik talking to each other. Or maybe the Fot and the Zoq. Whichever the two were that talked.)

Enjoying the sauce
The main war story that Paul and Fred lay out—one that deals with a programmer's desire to rely on generation and simulation wherever possible—works because it's kind of a timeless problem. You might hear the same thing from a developer today, and the solution would likely be the same now as it was then (that is, to realize that simulating the entirety of a planet's formation and evolution just to get some interesting scenery is probably more trouble than it's worth). It's an excellent design lesson, and rather like "don't touch a hot stove," it's one that most developers have to learn for themselves.

But in gathering the footage for this video, we realized that Fred and Paul were a veritable fount of '90s game design stories and that the two of them are connected in a fascinating web to a bunchof other influential developers of the era. There was no way we could pack all of this into a single video, and so we're deep in production on another video piece we're tentatively calling "Six Degrees of Star Control," which we expect to have done in a few more weeks.

Nothing about Ghosts of the Precursors except caption on this art:

Design study for the "Mark II," which presumably we'll be flying when Paul & Fred get around to making Ghosts of the Precursors.

 

[Incendax]

Great video, but I feel bad for Fred.
He always ends up the Jaime Hyneman in these interviews.

 

[MRY]

That's just the pencil art for the Mark II illustration that appears in SC2, nothing new:

 

[LESS T_T]

That's just the pencil art for the Mark II illustration that appears in SC2, nothing new:

I was just pointing that, from the article, only the caption mentions the existence of GotP. (Yeah, not exciting.)

 

[MRY]

Oh, yeah, and I also realized that your post was a billion years old.



I enjoyed the interview, though. Had been mentally mispronouncing Reiche's name all this time.

 

[Elestan]

A document filed at the Trademark Appeals Board today indicates that the parties have reached a settlement. Terms are not yet known, other than that P&F are no longer opposing the "Star Control" mark.

 

[MRY]

Can’t wait for the official statement!