Star Control

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This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

This wiki-page speaks with the voice and authority of the Ur-Quan!

Star Control is a series of science fiction adventure video games developed by Toys for Bob, back when they did something other than make overpriced Happy Meal toys to scam children with. Their plots revolve around the struggle between the cultures of the known galaxy and the militant Ur-Quan Hierarchy of Battle Thralls. Both games in the series are legendary for their strategic gameplay, killer music, high-quality (for the time) graphics, shockingly deep background, and endlessly entertaining multiplayer. What the fuck are you waiting for? Go play it. Nobody's selling the games anymore. Stardock managed threatened GOG into giving them the revenue from sales of Star Control I & II instead of Toys For Bob/Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, so feel free to pirate the shit out of them.

Star Control

The original Star Control (subtitled Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict, Volume IV) was a simple two-player turn-based strategy game, where you play as either the Alliance of Free Stars or the Ur-Quan Hierarchy in one of nine (15 in the Sega Genesis version) scenarios, building colonies, mines, and attack ships in a trippy-looking star cluster map. Instead of relying on a bland, non-interactive mechanic like unit stacking or random chance for combat, battles are resolved with a game of Spacewar! Each species has a unique ship with its own weapon type, attributes and a unique special ability (like an energy shield for the Utwig Jugger or a crew-stealing "hypnotic field" for the Syreen Penetrator) that can turn a battle on its head when used well. Hit points are fluffed as crew members, as we all know that any damage inflicted on a starship is redirected straight to the nearest occupied console. You could also skip the strategy layer and play "Melee mode," which is just you, your enemy, and two fleets of ships to slam into each other.

Star Control II

After the rousing success of Star Control, Toys for Bob took a page (along with several devs) from the venerable Starflight series and tore the world wide open, making Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters: an exploratory adventure game that dumps you into a mostly unexplored galaxy and leaving you to make allies and enemies as you see fit on your quest to defeat the Ur-Quan, generating much win in the process. You take the role of a human colonist descended from a research team that discovered a Precursor starship factory on an unexplored world at the close of the war with the Ur-Quan. Having lost contact with Earth, the colony launches you into space in what is essentially a Precursor tugboat (which, while absolute shit at combat compared to the escorts you can get, is still an awesome flagship) to figure out what the hell has happened in the decades since their landing.

You immediately find out that the Alliance lost the war, Earth has been enslaved (though slavery is a loose term, everyone is free to fuck around on the surface, except for 2000 humans sent into orbit to work as bored gas station attendants to Ur-Quan ships rotated yearly), and the Ur-Quan are nowhere to be found except for a probe message that gives vague warnings. Linking up with Earth's Hierarchy starbase, you set out to gather the resources and allies you need (battle cries of "GENOCIDE! MINING! GENOCIDE! MINING!" optional) to take the fight to the Ur-Quan and liberate the galaxy. To say any more would take away from the sheer awesome of the discoveries you make along the way, but you're basically set free to do whatever the fuck you want; Star Control II set a standard for player freedom that had never been seen before and arguably has never been seen since. And the plot turns out to be a rare "good Grimdark" story rather than an Edgefest of author's childhood catharsis, where the seemingly cruel villains, the Ur-Quan have a very tragic past that turned them insane prepared from one of the developers' college thesis on childhood trauma and consequences.

In 2002, faced with the fact that they'd never make another Star Control game again, Toys for Bob released the resources and source code for the 3DO version of Star Control II, which featured voice acting (minus a few lines, see below) and enhanced graphics over the original PC version; this has become The Ur-Quan Masters, a untrademarked subsequently trademarked by Stardock sourceport of the original game for modern platforms. Get it. Get it now.

Tips & Tricks

• TAKE. NOTES. This isn't your fucking JRPG cancer where everyone has a glowing neon sign over their heads telling you what to do next, you'll be given locations and coordinates once and it can be wasteful or impossible to have them given to you again. Keep a notebook or text file and record anything that seems important.
• There is a time limit. Because of a dev oversight this is never mentioned in the 3DO version, and therefore it's not mentioned in The Ur-Quan Masters without a mod. You have until the year 2159 (four years) to win the game "cleanly." If you don't make it because you spent two years gathering minerals or something, then bad things happen although you can still retrieve the items needed to win the game if you're quick enough to avoid hitting the "real" time limit shortly afterward.
• The Flagship is initially VERY bad at combat. Your Ion-Bolt Gun is very shitty and very expensive, and while you can fix this later if you're caught without escorts early on you might as well reload. Sell it as soon as you can and use the resources to build actually useful things like storage upgrades and take as many diverse and high-tech escort crafts to your hangar as possible. THEN find new technologies and get yourself two modules of hellbores, 3 shiva furnaces, 4 guidance modules and 3 dynamos, and watch Ur-Quan shit themselves the moment you fire.
• Knowledge is power, guard it well. There is a godsend race that sells technology for abstract things. Without spoiling, hunt exotic creatures, photograph exotic planets and search massive stars for a funky merchant ship. They also sell direct clues on how to win the game. And ask the human captain about EVERYTHING. Ask EVERY race about EVERYTHING until they get bored. An alien's rumor of a certain "ghost" constellation blinking six days in every six months can be a whole new riddle with a reward.
• Read The Fucking Manual. There are a lot of hints in there about what to expect from the different aliens, and you're pretty much guaranteed to waste valuable time in the middle of nowhere if you don't consult the paper starmap included with the game to see where everyone lives. What's more, don't be disappointed if you literally lose the game after doing all this. There is a spoiler-rich star chart on the internet for those that don't have the time...
• Know your limit. You'll often find situations that are just too dangerous for you at the moment. Remember, your escape unit is there for a reason. Don't waste resources chasing minerals or fighting ships you can't handle. That said, fortune favors the brave. The ultra hot planet with minerals or that strange, crashed Ur-Quan ship might save you a lot of time...

Star Control "Not3"

Toys for Bob were unwilling to work on any Star Control sequel on a shoe-string budget after working for several months without pay to finish SCII, so for the third game the higher-ups at Accolade hired Legend Entertainment, known for interactive fiction (think Zork) and graphic adventure games (first-person adventure games).

And right from there a problem becomes apparent. A studio known primarily for adventure games is making a non-adventure game, and it resulted in a 4X Strategy-RTS hybrid welded on top of SC game, and it didn't quite work. But at least with their writing pedigree they wrote a good story, right? Wrong. Half of the script is directly lifted from the second game with no change in context, most of the new stuff don't hold a candle to Ur-Quan Masters, and many old favorites races got less than stellar treatment. And all of this made worse by pre-rendered puppet graphics that were already dated back then, and is horrible today.

The only good thing that can be said about this game is when in the rare moments the writing is good, it is good enough to be praised by Toys for Bob. For instance the Precursors are revealed to be Ortog - Space Cows - which, although skub for the fanbois, T4B agreed was funny and in the spirit of SC1-2. It's still officially non-canon, though but you can fuck around in Super Melee or single player to try out the new ships in combat.

Star Control: Origins

When Accolade went belly-up, they got bought up by Infogrames, who later renamed themselves as Atari, and then they went bankrupt and sold a lot of their IPs to cover their debts. The Star Control trademark and IP for the third game, but not the copyrights to the first two games as those still belong to Toys for Bob, were sold to Stardock, a software studio/publisher known for Galactic Civilizations, Elemental, and Sins of a Solar Empire.

With the rights to the name but not the content, Stardock were basically making a Spiritual Successor that just happens to have an official name attached to it, resulting in the not-quite-prequel, not-quite-alternate-universe of humanity taking the first step into the interstellar scene, meeting new friends and enemies. The game takes some story cues from Star Control II, the fighting mechanics of Spacewar, and the planet exploration and ship customization of EA's Spore.

At one point, Stardock requested help/a license/input from Toys for Bob, who refused. Toys for Bob then announced they were starting development on a sequel of The Ur-Quan Masters (very specifically not Star Control) titled Ghosts of the Precursors just as Origins was entering early access. Since then, Stardock and Toys for Bob have countersued one another over who owns Star Control's copyrights/IP, with Stardock going so far as to hijack Toys for Bob's license to GOG to sell original PC versions of the first 2 Star Control games and claim that the actual creators of Star Control were a nameless team of programmers for Accolade. The fact that they sued Toys For Bob in a lawyer-assisted fraud scheme (see below) and then tried to release DLCs based on their work (which they didn't and still don't have the rights to) probably burned that bridge anyway.

All of this has fucked with their lawsuit, according to recent legal documents, as seen here.

Ghosts of the Precursors

The maybe-sort-of sequel to Star Control II, should it ever be made. With the toys-to-life fad playing itself out, Activision has apparently allowed Toys for Bob to get back to work on Star Control.

...except then Stardock sued Toys for Bob claiming that they didn't make Star Control and that the whole franchise is totally theirs because they pried the trademarks from Atari's cooling corpse, after 4 years of assuring Toys for Bob that they weren't going to lay any claim on the content of the previous games because they didn't and don't own the copyrights to their content. They also attempted to trademark almost every name associated with the classic Star Control games (and very specifically "Ur-Quan Masters") in a blatant assassination attempt against both Ghosts of the Precursors and the Ur-Quan Masters source port. You can learn how Toys for Bob created the series in this extended interview. You can also read Stardock founder Brad Wardell (under the alias Frogboy) try to defend his company's actions on the UQM fan community forums here.

On June 11, 2019, both parties announced that they settled out of court.