Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Star Control 3" in English language version.
Fred Ford: Star Control II, well and Star Control I have always been near and dear to our hearts. It's the first things we worked on, the first things we poured our passion in together. We have some diehard fans as a result of those two games and we wanted to service them and lay the groundwork for a return and keep the games in the fronts of their minds as much as possible so that when we were finally able to return to it we would still have a living audience.
Paul Reiche: There was a confluence of events that helped this. One was Accolade stopped selling the game and we stopped earning royalties right around your 2000 and that triggered the termination of their exclusive right to sell our game. So we got our game back. What we didn't have was the name Star Control. That was a trademark that the publisher owned and we negotiated back and forth with them, but ultimately we weren't able to come to terms for the name. So we decided, well we can't use that name, let's give it a new name, so we used the Ur-Quan Masters ... So the "Ur-Quan Masters" project, the open-source release of the game we created as Star Control II, that really kept our game alive in the doldrums between say 2001 or 2002 and then 2011 when our games began to be sold again through Good Old Games, known as GOG, which is an electronic distributor of classic games.
Fred Ford: Star Control II, well and Star Control I have always been near and dear to our hearts. It's the first things we worked on, the first things we poured our passion in together. We have some diehard fans as a result of those two games and we wanted to service them and lay the groundwork for a return and keep the games in the fronts of their minds as much as possible so that when we were finally able to return to it we would still have a living audience.
Paul Reiche: There was a confluence of events that helped this. One was Accolade stopped selling the game and we stopped earning royalties right around your 2000 and that triggered the termination of their exclusive right to sell our game. So we got our game back. What we didn't have was the name Star Control. That was a trademark that the publisher owned and we negotiated back and forth with them, but ultimately we weren't able to come to terms for the name. So we decided, well we can't use that name, let's give it a new name, so we used the Ur-Quan Masters ... So the "Ur-Quan Masters" project, the open-source release of the game we created as Star Control II, that really kept our game alive in the doldrums between say 2001 or 2002 and then 2011 when our games began to be sold again through Good Old Games, known as GOG, which is an electronic distributor of classic games.
Paul Reiche: ... it wasn't entirely clear to us as we were making it how large of an audience there was, or if that audience would react to it and they really did. Pretty dang fast after we released it we started looking in the pretty primitive online forums and finding out that people were having fun. And they were starting to imagine beyond what we'd put in there, asking questions that we hadn't answered and that's super inspiring.
Fred Ford: Although we intentionally asked questions in the game that we didn't answer, which created a sense of, what happened, this wasn't on the main path, but something happened here. And to this day people speculate about what we didn't answer.
Reiche: And one of the biggest mistakes we see when people have tried to make sequels of our work is the sequel is all about answering the questions we set up from the first game and that is not a good idea. I mean, a little smattering of that is fun, but the whole point is to extend that mystery and keep you going, keep people hungry for the adventure.
Paul Reiche: ... it wasn't entirely clear to us as we were making it how large of an audience there was, or if that audience would react to it and they really did. Pretty dang fast after we released it we started looking in the pretty primitive online forums and finding out that people were having fun. And they were starting to imagine beyond what we'd put in there, asking questions that we hadn't answered and that's super inspiring.
Fred Ford: Although we intentionally asked questions in the game that we didn't answer, which created a sense of, what happened, this wasn't on the main path, but something happened here. And to this day people speculate about what we didn't answer.
Reiche: And one of the biggest mistakes we see when people have tried to make sequels of our work is the sequel is all about answering the questions we set up from the first game and that is not a good idea. I mean, a little smattering of that is fun, but the whole point is to extend that mystery and keep you going, keep people hungry for the adventure.
