Stardock Entertainment has acquired the rights to the Star Control franchise in the ongoing sell-off resulting from Atari's bankruptcy filing. Stardock, producer of the popular space strategy games Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations I & II, has announced that it intends to use the rights to produce a new Star Control game, reviving a series that hasn't seen a proper sequel since 1996. According to a press release issued by Stardock, the company will begin work on the game "this year," with a release date to be determined.

The Star Control series—and Star Control II in particular—is an enormously important part of the PC gaming canon. The games are the reincarnation and true successors of the earlier Starflight series, and most modern space adventure games take at least some of their gameplay and humor elements from them (including Mass Effect, which director Casey Hudson has directly attributed to Starflight). At first blush, the news of Stardock's acquisition seems to be excellent for fans of space exploration games.

However, while Stardock has a fine pedigree in the strategy and 4X arena, the company hasn't ever made a game in the same vein as Star Control II, which is not a strategy game at all—it's much more a traditional plot-driven adventure game, just set in space. And, indeed, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell notes that the company wants to create not a direct sequel, but rather an outright reboot:

It won't be a continuation but more akin to a revisit (ala XCOM using Star Control 2 as the inspiration and start back before the earthlings were in any kind of slave shield). We'll be talking more about our plans as we go forward. We won't be making any changes to the existing Star Control games. And Atari doesn't actually own the copyright on Star Control 1/2 so it's not like one could make a Star Control 2 HD or what have you without a license from Paul Reiche. And even if we did have rights to SC 1/2 I wouldn't touch them without his blessing. I think what most Star Control fans are looking for is a new Star Control game where the inspiration comes from Star Control 2. They want a game with fun, adventure and top down ship battles like in Star Control 2 that all play within a fun sci fi universe. Preferably one with Ur-Quan and Spathi and lots of insults.

Hope for a bona fide sequel—one that picks up on the story set up with the ending of Star Control II and ignores Star Control III's existence—has always rested with Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. These days, though, Ford and Reiche are busy producing other enormously successful titles (Ford and Reiche are the founders of Toys For Bob, the company that makes Skylanders). The duo has expressed many times over the past two decades a desire to reenter the Star Control universe (they were uninvolved with 1996's disastrous Star Control III), but the difficulty has always been acquiring the rights to the name, which were held by Accolade.

Star Control II has seen a surge of community interest in the past several years after Toys For Bob released the game's source code, which was reworked by eager volunteers with updated sound and graphics (and full speech, courtesy of the old 3DO version of the game). The resulting game was released as The Ur-Quan Masters (because Accolade still held the Star Control name) and is playable on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Given Stardock's past games and the information available right now, it's impossible to say at this point what form the Star Control reboot would take. The Star Control titles are most decidedly not strategy or 4X games; indeed, the portions of Star Control III that were among the worst-implemented were the ones involving 4X-style resource management (well, that and the damned puppets). Based on Wardell's note, it's clear that the intent at this time is to "revisit" the series prior to Star Control II; ideally, this "revisit" would prioritize the storytelling and plot over all other things. The overriding reason behind Star Control II's multidecade popularity is its powerful, deftly told story, and a new game that capitalizes on the successful parts of the formula and doesn't try to reinvent the proverbial space-wheel would be welcomed with open arms by fans.

We don't need another 4X game or another space strategy game. We don't need a new Master of Orion, because that's been done. We need a new Star Control. Stardock, don't let us down.