All right, *campers*, there’s some new news lurking on the horizon for Star Control fans eager to find a new *happy town*. This morning, Stardock founder Brad Wardell announced the official name of the company’s upcoming Star Control prequel: Star Control: Origins. Wardell has also offered up the first public gameplay video:

Today’s announcement also gives us a tentative release date and an early price: the game will be coming to Windows and consoles, and the PC release will be in the second half of 2017. For $35 (£30), players can join the studio’s “Founder’s Program” and get access to the closed beta and some additional developer goodies.

A milieu of new sentients

The announcement has been a long time coming. Ars first spoke with Wardell about Star Control in the beginning of 2014 , about six months after the company acquired the naming rights to the Star Control series from Atari’s bankruptcy fire sale . Since then, Stardock has formed a new studio arm in Maryland and is producing the game in partnership with Oxide Games and Mohawk Games . Wardell is acting as executive producer.

Star Control: Origins, as its name suggests, will explore the time period around the founding of Earth’s “Star Control” organization. The game starts off 69 years before the events in Star Control 2, shortly after the Androsynth Rebellion. Stardock’s press release explains a bit more of the game’s opening:

The game starts in the year 2086 with the unaware humans receiving a distress call from an alien ship that has crashed on the moon of Triton leading to the formation of Star Control, an international space agency dedicated to protecting the Earth. The player takes on the role of The Captain of Earth’s first interstellar ship whose first mission is to investigate the distress signal.

The decision to go with a prequel rather than a sequel seems at first an odd choice, but it’s the result of the complexities of the Star Control franchise intellectual property. Even though Stardock has the naming and publishing rights to the Star Control franchise, it does not have the rights to use any of the Star Control aliens or story material in the first two games. All of that remains the property of original Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Ars reached out to Ford and Reiche for some elaboration, and Reiche responded with this clarifying statement:

Fred and I retain the copyright to all material in Star Control I & II, but we do not own the name "Star Control," which is why our open source project is called, "The Ur-Quan Masters." Stardock purchased the trademark for Star Control as well as the original material in Star Control III, which Fred and I also did not create. Super space-cows? What were they thinking?!

While it’s gratifying to see that Ford and Reiche hated Star Control 3 as much as the rest of us, this means that we won’t see the return of any familiar alien faces in Star Control: Origins—no Chenjesu, no Arilou, and no menacing green Ur-Quan. The company is spinning up all new aliens and an all new story to fill in the gap after the Androsynth rebellion but before the Ur-Quan wars.

As for an in-universe explanation on why those new aliens aren't in the follow-up games, Wardell explains that Star Control might get a little metaphysical. "One of the things we've done with Origins is make it clear that Star Control 1/2, 3, and Origins each exist in their own game universe. Have you ever read the book Ready Player One?" he asked. "We'd like to build Star Control up to being a multiverse where you start the game and can choose which universe you want to go into. A significant part of our budget has been put into developing tools so that after Origins is released, fans will be able to share their own universes with their own stories, aliens, etc."

And where are Fred and Paul?

On the subject of multiverses and the original Star Control creators, they haven’t had any official involvement in Stardock’s project. For the past several years, they’ve been involved in making Skylanders, the combo video game/collectible figure property that continues to almost literally print money. Though the two haven’t ruled out a return to Star Control one day, Stardock’s project isn’t their project.

I’ve passed e-mails back and forth with the pair a few times over the past couple of years, and I can report that trading e-mails with Paul Reiche III is exactly like talking to a slightly unstable Star Control alien—perhaps a Spathi who’s off his meds or an Umgah in the middle of an awesome joke. Unfortunately, it sounds like we’ll have to keep waiting for a resolution to Star Control 2’s notorious cliffhanger ending. Maybe someday we’ll find out what happened next.

Music, passion, and the real sport of kings

But let’s set aside thoughts of a sequel we don’t have and focus on the prequel we’re getting. Star Control: Origins is by all accounts a passion project for Wardell and Stardock, and the developers are going to great pains to ensure that the title works not just as a good game but as a good Star Control game. Of particular interest is the involvement of Finnish composer Riku Nuottajärvi, who was responsible for much of Star Control 2’s iconic .MOD music score. The music in the above embedded video was written by Nuottajärvi, and he’ll be contributing more music to the finished game.

More to the point, Wardell also assures me that the gameplay and storytelling style of Star Control 2 will be respected and mirrored in the new game—something that was sorely absent in Star Control 3. The old Star Control 2 is one of the finest examples of a “space exploration-adventure” sim, a genre that has been tragically underserved for more than two decades. Although modern titles like the Mass Effect series take some of their inspiration from the genre, the holy gaming trinity of Starflight, Starflight 2, and Star Control 2 stands alone, with no modern games quite managing to emulate that same mixture of beautifully crafted storytelling in a massive, open-space universe.

Star Control: Origins aims squarely at that place, but it also includes another Star Control staple: space melee combat. Arguably one of the most memorable features of the series, the previous games’ melee and “super melee” functions let players pick ships and face off against each other in heads-up combat on the same computer, with one player occupying the left half of the keyboard and the other player on the right. Although Star Control 2 veterans might remember Frungy as the sport of kings, the series' melee mode sucked down hours and hours of my life. Competitive Star Control melee let me imagine myself as a world-class video game athlete years before pro gaming was a thing.

Origins will continue the grand Star Control melee tradition and will also add netplay. "We intend to make Super Melee a pretty big part of the game from a multiplayer point of view," Wardell told Ars. "It'll be an expansion on what was in Star Control 2, except we would like to support more sophisticated battle arenas and up to 8 players. We picture there being a lot of different modes for Super Melee, ranging from classic to Dota-style super melee."

Release dates and early access

As mentioned above, Wardell is targeting the second half of 2017 for the PC release of the game, with a console release to follow. A final price hasn’t been announced, but for $35 (£30), interested gamers can join phase two of Stardock’s Founder’s program, which gets early access to the game’s beta, along with “mod tools, private journals and more.”

The first thing members of the Founder’s program will have access to is the multiplayer version of Super Melee, the head-to-head space combat portion of the game. Wardell indicated that Super Melee is planned for the fall of 2016, and more early access pieces will follow after that.

"This will be, by far, the biggest game we've ever done," said Wardell. "It has been a challenge to make sure this feels like a Star Control game. If it weren't for Paul and Fred, I probably wouldn't have become a game developer in the first place," he continued. "So it means a great deal to me personally that we make something that lives up to their standards. A lot of people forget that Paul and Fred didn't just do Star Control 1/2. They also made Archon, Mail Order Monsters, and of course Skylanders. They may be the greatest game designers in history."

Update: This evening, I received a note from Paul Reiche III via carrier pigeon, which I assume was written in a secure bunker paid for by mad Skylanders cash. The note contains a few corrections on games that were and weren't written by Toys For Bob. Rather than posting just an excerpt, I feel like it needs to be reproduced in full, so you all can see with your eyes what I've seen with mine.

Hi Lee, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed your article, but how do I actually write an email to you now? The standards you have set for my amusing incoherence are so high that I don’t know if I can hit this target reliably under such pressure. Now, every email I send, whether to you, the head of Activision or to my local Comcast knuckleheads, will be scrutinized for babbling genius. All is lost. Now I must return to moving irrigation pipe in Ogallala, Nebraska… and I am fairly famous there for how poorly I once did that job, just so you know. But with that preamble, let me move on the ‘full amble’ – a couple of clarifications relating to your article and some of the comments from your kind and clever readers (I also think they are generous, but I we’ll just have to see what I get in the mail). Fred and I did form Toys For Bob almost 28 years ago to create Star Control I & II, but not III. After that we made other cool games which either: a. Included lots of young Japanese ‘witch girls’ several of whom had magical make-up kits.

b. Employed Kirk Cameron. We are still working off the karma points.

c. Allowed you to fight a roaring, farting, angry, magical rhinoceros against a jet-powered, bomb-dropping ‘Killcycle’.

d. All of the above. Choose this answer. Archon and Archon II: Adept were created by Jon Freeman, Anne Westfall and Paul Reiche III (that’s me). Murder on the Zinderneuf, which no one has mentioned until now, was created by Jon Freeman, Robert Leyland and yours truly. Mail Order Monsters and World Tour Golf were created by Evan Robinson, Nicky Robinson, and again, me. Adios! -Paul

And...there you have it.