Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "The Ur-Quan Masters" in English language version.
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Fred Ford: [Accolade] owe us another payment for our portion of the property. They have told us they are going to default on this payment which means we are back to owning the characters and settings. They still own the trademark/name and continue to look for someone to buy it from them.
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. And we had our very first summer intern, Chris Nelson, a guy from Boston University and he was out here and he was a diehard open-source fan and he wanted to port our game to open source and then release it and sort of talked us through the ramifications and the choices we had to make. And he and largely Fred then ended up porting the game to a form that people could launch, but it was by no means beautiful, fast and elegant and then just re-released it. ...
Ford: Chris was responsible for setting up all those connections and he knew dedicated fans who were interested in working on it.
Reiche: And so from 2002 until today we have had like the "Ur-Quan Masters" site, UQM I think, and they've been maintaining it and porting it to new machines and revising the audio and really keeping it alive in the doldrums between 2001 and then 2011 when our games went back on sale at GOG. 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.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Fred Ford: [Accolade] owe us another payment for our portion of the property. They have told us they are going to default on this payment which means we are back to owning the characters and settings. They still own the trademark/name and continue to look for someone to buy it from them.