http://www.retroremakes.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/outer-space/. Space, the final front ear. These are the voyages of the Starship WhatamIonabout… ok, well, that’s going absolutely nowhere so I best change tack eh? I must confess that as this sort of game lies outside my usual comfort realm for gaming that I haven’t the foggiest about the original game in question. Which is, for those unable to read my mind, Starflight. Outer Space is a project that seems to have been progressing right under o
Random stuff for your perusal: If you’re in Nashville this weekend and you aren’t going to be watching Spoon, Lil Jon, Feist, The Avett Brothers, and all the other acts playing Rites of Spring on Vanderbilt’s campus, there are still a few other things to check out. On Friday night, Yvonne Buchheim’s Song Archive Project opens at Cheekwood. A German-born artist who teaches drawing in Bristol, England, the warm, intelligent, and thoughtful Buchheim is also a friend of my brother-in-law. At last
Starflight: When Emergent Play Was Only a Floppy Away
by Kyle Ackerman When gamers think about open-ended games these days, the Grand Theft Auto series is often the first sandbox-style series that comes to mind. But my fondest memories of exploring a seemingly-endless world come from piles of floppy disks, back when the Electronic Arts logo was an inexplicable amalgam of cube, sphere and pyramid. In 1986, not long after my chance to search the new world for the Seven Cities of Gold, Binary Systems helped me crew my ship to save Arth (no... not E
The Eskilizer: Showing Love at GDC February 22, 2008 Ok, first off, I just have to say my new all-time favorite recently discovered funny/witty/hilarious domain name of the week has got to be: RockPaperShotgun.com  It doesn’t really matter what the site is, the name alone is entertaining enough - just plain hilarious. Eskil Steenberg, an early contributor to the PicLens concept design team, is back in SF this week for GDC (Game Developers Conference) to demo his latest labor of love - a mul
DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Mega Drive/Genesis, Macintosh
Release date
1986
Genre(s)
Role-playing game
Mode(s)
Single player
Media
Floppy Disk
Input methods
Keyboard
Starflight, a computer game published by Electronic Arts and developed by Binary Systems in 1986, placed gamers as the captain of a state-of-the-art starship created to rescue a dying homeworld in a seemingly barren galaxy. Starflight, the "result of 20 man years" of work, used an in-game planetary generation system that enabled the galaxy to contain hundreds of explorable planets—all on two 360kB floppy disks similar to the system pioneered in Elite (video game). Electronic Arts released the game originally for DOS and Tandy, followed by an Amiga release in 1989, an Atari ST release in 1990, and finally a revamped Mega Drive/Sega Genesis version in 1991. Versions for Apple Macintosh and Commodore 64 were also released. In its March 1987 issue, Computer Gaming World declared it "the best science fiction game available on computer."
Binary Systems built Starflight so that the initial plot seemed, at first, fairly one-dimensional and linear. The end result, however, consisted of a space opera of epic proportions containing shocking plot twists and deep mysteries. The somewhat RPG-like consisted largely of mining, alien diplomacy, and ship combat and managed to enable gamers to, in a sense, re-enact scenes remarkably similar to Star Trek. Moreover, the game contained a subtle underlevel of humor, such as an encounter with the Starship Enterprise, infrequent but consistent messages between two disgruntled smugglers, and a race using binary code to reveal the telephone number of the developers' home office.
Plot
The storyline is set on a planet called Arth, which has a gravity roughly the same of Earth. The inhabitants are made up of an odd and interesting mix of several sentient races that co-exist together in harmony including humans, a reptilian race called the Thrynn, a plant-based race called the Elowyn and an insect race called the Veloxi. There is also a population of androids that performs the society's mechanical work as well. Due to the heavy radiation that has existed for centuries on the planet, all of these races live as a single society far underneath the crust of the planet for as long as anyone currently alive remember. As the small Arthian society becomes more advanced, they begin to discover that the radiation is finally dissipating from the surface and begin digging their way back to the surface. Along the way, they discover the long lost remnants of technology that allows the building of "superphotonic" spaceships that belonged to Arth's original settlers. And with this technology, there are tantalizing bits information regarding the lost history of Arth and how this motley group of different alien races came to colonize this planet and later was forced underground for survival, including the discovery that a terrorist bomb blew off half the Arth's surface and created the deadly radiation that forced the surviving Arthians below.
About 100 years after spaceflight is first discovered on Arth, an archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a superluminal starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. An independent company called Interstel develops a number of new starships based on this technology, and the player becomes the captain of one of these. The main goal of Interstel's ships is to find new resources, especially exotic metals required to build more ships, and also more endurium, thus generating profit for the corporation and its shareholders. Also, the ships are to seek missing information about Arth's history, ancient artifacts, find coordinates for useful fluxes that allow instant transportation across the galaxy without the consumption of valuable endurium fuel, and build relations with the other space-faring races along with other planets with optimum environments for potential colonization. Finding colonizable planets in the galaxy is particularly lucrative in the game.
In the game, we learn that a large construct known as the Crystal Planet is slowly moving through the galaxy. The planet causes nearby stars to flare up and destroy all carbon-based life in the system. The player must explore solar systems, gather clues, special artifacts that grant access to the planet, and ultimately find the planet and destroy it before the player's home system flares.
Arth was once a wonderful planet that was uninhabited by any sentient race. The current Arthians were once members of what is now called "The Old Empire," which was an empire of humans based on Earth and their allies including the Veloxi, Elowyn and Thrynn. When the empire was collapsing due to multiple threats including invasions by the Uhlek and Gazurtoid races along with solar flares, a secret society of scientists and far-seeing intellectuals gathered members of each race to colonize a few of the best uninhabited planets in the galaxy. This group dubbed themselves Project Noah and often sent fleets of android-piloted ships to first secure these planets. The player can even encounter some of these android fleets in game. Also in the game, Interstel has built a space docking port that orbits Arth and this serves as the player's main headquarters and refueling station at the beginning of the game. Also this port is where the player can train his crew, outfit his ship, gather funds by selling off whatever was found on voyages, and claim rewards for planet colonization recommendations. In order for the player to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, the player must gather enough funds, staff a good enough crew, construct a strong warship and build relations with other races to unravel the Empire's history and find important locations of artifacts necessary for destroying the Crystal Planet. Along the way, the player can also discover the mythical planet Earth, which turns out to be the homeworld of the Old Empire. Ultimately, it turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings that are being destroyed on a widescale level when they are burned up as fuel for interstellar starflight. Since their metabolisms are extremely slow due to their crystalline makeup, they consider the other races like humans to be like a disease and the Crystal Planet was built by the crystal race as the remedy...
Legacy
Starflight spawned a sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, and was very much the spiritual predecessor to the more popular, but similarly-themed Star Control 2. An unofficial sequel released without the Starflight name due to the inability of the designers to gain the rights to the title from Electronic Arts is the lesser-known Protostar.
By 1996, when the DOS version of the original game could no longer be purchased, existing copies of the game were having problems running on contemporary computers due to the prevalence of much faster CPUs than it was designed for. Fan websites and discussion groups have been active since that time, mostly trading tips on how to get the game to run on a modern computer, or else reminiscing about how fun the game used to be.
A fan-driven effort to produce another sequel has been in the works since 1999 called the "Starflight III Project". Some members of the original development staff volunteered their time as consultants on the project.
Starflight - The Lost Colony is a sequel slated for release as freeware in March 2008 under the banner of the original Binary Systems. The timing for The Lost Colony parallels Starflight I, but the setting is in a different part of the galaxy, with new alien races, a new homeworld called Myrrdan, and new gameplay. It was developed by a team of volunteers and game development students from the University of Advancing Technology. It is for Microsoft Windows, but Linux and Mac are planned to follow in mid-2008.
