Starflight series news

[Blake00]

Showing my age but are there any 80s/90s Starflight fans here? Growing up with Star Trek I dreamed of a game where I could command a starship exploring a huge galaxy encountering aliens and landing on strange worlds. Starflight was the first ever game that granted that wish (before all the good Trek games finally came along) as it had hundreds of different planets to explore and lots of strange aliens to either battle or trade with in space. Naturally I’d call my ship the ISS Enterprise and give all my customized crew members Trek names Eg the Captain would be Kirk, Science Spock, Engineer Scotty, Communication Uhura, Navigator Sulu and Doctor McCoy. Unfortunately I’d run out of positions after that, sorry Chekov haha! Although in the early game when it was too expensive to train up your crew you could use reasonably skilled androids in the roles so naturally they got called Data lol. I grew up playing the 90s SF1 remake on Sega MegaDrive/Genesis (pic below) and eventually got my hands on SF2 for Amiga... most people probably know the 80s PC & Amiga versions more.
 

After SF2 the series had been dead for like 30yrs yet amazingly in 2018 Greg Johnson tried to crowdfund a new Starflight 3 sequel. Greg was the creator and lead developer of the original Starflight games, and he also created the popular ToeJam & Earl console games too. But sadly the SF3 crowdfund attempt failed miserably as the fan community was in a bad near dead state and almost none of the mainstream gaming media sites covered it so one knew about it!

Well 3 years on there unfortunately 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 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!
 

Edited August 3, 2021 by Blake00