Starflight

About Starflight

Starflight (1986) is Binary Systems' open-ended space exploration RPG for Electronic Arts, 270 star systems and 800 procedurally generated planets in which a captain from Arth slowly uncovers why stars are flaring.

Starflight in Depth

The game begins at Starport, orbiting the planet Arth, where the player trades minerals, artifacts and Endurium, the crystal that fuels the ship, and hires a crew from five species for six posts: captain, navigator, science officer, engineer, communications officer and doctor. Skills improve through paid training, and a well-trained science officer, for instance, learns more about planets and spots aliens from further away. The ship starts with engines and a little fuel and is upgraded with weapons, armour and shields.

There is no set path: the player can mine, fight, trade or talk to aliens freely. Every one of the 800 planets in 270 systems can be scanned and landed on, though gravity above 8 g destroys the ship; on the surface a Terrain Vehicle drives across a Mercator map searching for minerals, lifeforms and ruins. The richest income comes from logging planets fit for colonisation. Continuum fluxes allow instant, fuel-free jumps. Aliens may be cautious, friendly or hostile, each race with its own speech, and the player's stance, such as arming weapons or choosing a tone of greeting, changes how they react. Gradually the story emerges of an Old Empire, a lost Earth and a Crystal Planet making stars flare and destroy all life.

Making Starflight

Rod McConnell and EA's Joe Ybarra conceived the project in 1983, and McConnell assembled Binary Systems: lead designer Greg Johnson, programmer Alec Kercso, Tim C. Lee on graphics and programming and Bob Gonsalves on sound, all first-time game designers. Dave Boulton, who had the idea of using fractals to generate a universe, quit early, calling it too ambitious. It took three years and "fifteen man-years", was nearly cancelled more than once and came out about a year late. Johnson said that "just by happenstance I ended up creating a very open ended system", and it is one of the earliest sandbox games and one of the first to generate its planets procedurally.

EA released it for PC on 15 August 1986, with later versions for the Amiga, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Mac and a revamped Genesis edition in 1991. It sold over 100,000 copies by December 1987 and eventually more than a million. Computer Gaming World named it Adventure Game of the Year for 1987, and Orson Scott Card called it "the standard against which all other space-exploration games must be measured". Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula followed in 1989.