Starflight 3
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Showing my age here but are there any 80s/90s Starflight fans here?
It’s quite possible I wouldn’t be the Freelancer addict I am today without Starflight as it was the first ever space exploration, action, sell stuff and upgrade your ship kind of game I ever played and owned. Of course in reality Elite had far more in common but sadly I never got to play that as a kid so for me it was Starflight haha.
I came across the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) Starflight as a kid and eventually managed to own a copy that I played for years when I was around 13-14yrs old. I used to love getting out the galaxy map and working out where I’d explore wondering what aliens I’d meet and what sort of planets I’d find to land on and explore.
Didn’t find out until years later (when they invented this little thing called the internet haha) that I had been actually playing a remake of an old 80s PC & Amiga game and that there was a Starflight 2 sequel out there too. Like so many great old game series it’s been dead for like 30years now and then suddenly out of the blue a crowdfunding campaign has been announced now in 2018 headed by the original SF1&2 lead designer Greg Johnson!
Announcement vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJy-fZ-BJvY
hJy-fZ-BJvYThey’ve started a ‘kickstarter like’ funding campaign over on Fig (never heard of Fig until now but it seems okay) here:
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/starflight-3 -
Well it looks like it was all for nothing sadly. Just over a day to go and the Starflight 3 crowdfund is barely over halfway. 30 years waiting for a sequel and its fails due to not enough media attention. So many thousands of SF fans out there (SF1 was apparently the first ever game to go platinum with 1mil sales back in the 80s) that never got to hear about this. Such a shame!
But there’s still hope as Greg & Anthony said in a recent podcast that they’ll look at improving the demo and may try a crowdfund again in the future or secure a publisher. If you’re a big Starflight fan and you come across this thread long after it’s too late, come join the starflight facebook group and they’ll let you know the next time anything happens with SF3 (if there’s a next time sigh ) plus the group is following a rather impressive Starflight 1 remake from a ex-bethesda employee so all is not lost for us old SF fans!
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Well here we are 3 years on and unfortunately there hasn’t been another attempt at a Starflight 3 game crowdfund or a new demo. However recently the first ever Starflight Anthology book was released and to celebrate that occasion something really cool happened! I run the Starflight fan communities so as a ‘thanks’ I got invited to take part in a group video podcast interviewing non other than Starflight lead dev and creator Greg Johnson himself!
I was a nervous wreck as I don’t normally do live stuff, and I think I was the only non-American on there so people were probably wondering what I was saying half the time lol, plus on top of that my giant 46" screen was glaring on my face making me look like a bloody ghost haha… but in the end I had a blast as it was so cool to talk to one of the creators of a game I played so much as a kid, not to mention getting thanked by him for my Starflight community work! Greg was a super nice and humble guy and he told so many great stories about creating Starflight, and his very popular ToeJam & Earl console games, along with his consultation work on the Star Control games and Spore which many of us didn’t know about! He even discussed the possibility of a Starflight and Star Control crossover game which would be pretty crazy! And sure enough he confirmed that the original Starflight games were heavily influenced by Star Trek heh.
He also confirmed that the dream of Starflight 3 is not dead and that just a week ago he was on the phone with someone trying to secure funding for it. He talked about his dreams of what the sequel could be and he showed openness to trying another crowdfund campaign. We did our best to assure him that the Starflight fan community is in a WAY better state then it was back in 2018 when they last tried the crowdfund as back then all the big old Starflight forums were gone and there was only around 100 people in my ‘new’ Starflight Fans Facebook group so there was just no one to friggin tell about it! That’s up around 400ish members now, plus I’ve since created a Starflight Fans Reddit group which is closing on 100 now, and best of all there’s the Official Starflight 3 Discord I help out on as a moderator which is now up to a massive 800ish members, so that’s over a 1000 starflight fans that weren’t around in 2018 so we’re getting there! The games sold millions of copies back in the day so there’s certainly still plenty of long lost Starflight fans out there though! If there’s any Starflight old timers lurking around here I hope you come join the gang!
Anyway, here’s the video podcast if anyone is interested. I posted a comment on youtube with timestamps of interesting topics should people wish to skip to stuff that interests them…
There was more I wanted to say on there but yeah… obviously the podcast wasn’t about me haha… but I got to say most of what I wanted. Really the only big thing I didn’t get to say on the podcast was that I’m excited to read the new Starflight - Tales From The Starport Lounge anthology book (I’ve ordered it from Amazon but it hasn’t arrived yet as it’s probably on a slow ship heading for Australia lol!). I’m not a huge book person but I just had to get this as like I said earlier in the stream video it’s amazing how playing a game and reading a book about an adventure set in that same game universe really enhances the experience. The game makes you love the book more and helps your imagination visualize the aliens and places they’ll go to in the book. While vice versa the book makes you love the game more as it adds so much depth to the game universe and makes you crave going on your own adventures similar to the ones these new characters your reading about are going on. They both really buff and lift up each other to a whole new level forming this equilibrium of awesomeness haha! I had that experience with the Starflight manual short stories as a kid, and I had it in the years since with other games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Witcher, and the X Universe series space games that all have novels or short stories set in the same universe. So hopefully I’ll like the new book and get to have that experience again with Starflight! Once thing’s for sure, I already know I like the cover haha!
