Trivia / Master of Orion

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• Executive Meddling: Probably the single biggest factor in MoO3's failure, as management blunders at both the design and executive level caused problems both before and after its release. Among these:
  • Art director Rantz Hoseley (his real name) reportedly hated the look of the aliens used in previous MoO games, labeling them as "cheesy" and comparing them to actors in rubber suits. He pushed for the inclusion of more realistic, non-humanoid creatures, while cutting most of the established races, many of which were fan favorites. The in-game explanation for their absence is that they were bombed to extinction by the Antarans, who then performed hideous genetic experiments upon all of the surviving races. Ouch.
  • Rantz also clashed with Alan Emrich, one of the original MoO designers (and at the time, lead designer on MoO 3), over which direction the game should be taken in. Emrich favored a traditional approach similar to the previous games, while Rantz again wanted a more "realistic" depiction of how a complex galactic empire would really be managed (this at one point resulted in a build of the game which used over 100 different GUI screens to keep track of everything). Emrich was eventually forced out early in the game's development, the various gameplay mechanics he had proposed (such as including systems of religion, government corruption, and the ability to explore neutron stars and black holes) were cut, and things went downhill from there.
  • Software piracy was a big concern around this time, and Atari took steps to prevent it; unfortunately, the copy protection software they packaged with the game was so draconian that it actually prevented the disk from being read on optical drives that were capable of burning CDs, which meant that a number of paying customers who had legitimately purchased the game couldn't even install it.
  • After the game was released, Atari created two bare-bones software patches that addressed only the worst of the outstanding technical issues; afterward, support for the game was quickly dropped. The developers claimed this was because many of the programmers who had worked on MoO 3 had either left the company immediately after the game was finished or had since moved on to new projects; as a result, the staff who were brought in to replace them didn't actually know how most of the game code worked, and were unable to fix any bugs.
• Franchise Killer: Master of Orion 3. For a long time, it was nearly a Genre-Killer; it was a long time before any new 4X games were made, and even today, they're no longer AAA titles (except for Civilization).

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