Star Control: Origins - Brad Wardell Interview

Brad Wardell was interviewed about Star Control:Origins by PCPowerPlay.

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The franchise was recently bought by Stardock, and a reboot is in the works. When we recently caught up with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell the first thing he wanted to impress on us was the magnitude of the production. "It's definitely our biggest project ever."

His team is currently working on the planetary exploration aspect of the game, where you can send a shuttle down to hunt for resources. As revealed in the recent teaser trailer, what was an abstract, 2D game mode in SC2 is now rendered in full 3D.

"From an engineering point of view it's an interesting challenge, because this game has many different parts to it, but it has to be seamless. No-one wants to sit there and wait for a planet to load. You need to be able to go to the spherical planet, land on it, do stuff, have interesting adventures, and then be able to leave in one swoop, and it has to work on a reasonably powerful machine."

To this end Star Control: Origins is being built with Nitrous, the powerful 64-bit engine from Oxide that made possible the spectacular action in Ashes of the Singularity. "People love Star Control, and people ask: ‘Why hasn't anyone taken that basic formula?' Well, it's because Star Control is actually several games put into one. You have the planet exploration, you have the ship battles, and you have the alien story part, you have the star system exploration... it's a lot of different what we call ‘graphical scenes.'

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On top of all that content, Star Control: Origins will also come with an editor that will allow users to create and share their own space oddities on Steamworks. "So if someone wants to make a Star Control 2 or something, I suppose they could [laughs]."

One of the most memorable aspects of SC2 was the music, all of which was created in the MOD file format popular at the time. For Origins, Brad hired the Finnish composer who came up with the distinctive themes for the Thraddash and the Yehat. "We actually are working with Riku Nuottajärvi, who did most of the best-known themes from Star Control back in the day. He was actually just a kid back then. He's obviously an adult now. He's handling pretty much all the music in the new Star Control."