Trivia / Star Control

• Acting for Two: Some of the voice actors in the 3DO version do multiple voices:
  • Rick Betz plays both the Ariloulaleelay and the Druuge.
  • David Bryce voices the Kohr-Ah, Ilwrath, Shofixti and Spathi.
  • Greg Johnson, in some real Mood Whiplash, voices the Orz, Pkunk and Utwig.
  • Paul Reiche III voices the Mycon and the Talking Pet.
  • Madeleine Wild, besides voicing the Syreen, also does the voices of the Zoq-Fot-Pik and the VUX.
  • Larry Zee does the voices of the Melnorme, Umgah and Ur-Quan.
• Ashcan Copy: The 2007 Flash game was created for Atari in just four days so they could retain the trademark.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: The VUX (including the explicitly male ZEX) are voiced by a female actress, Madeleine Wild.
• Dueling Games: With Electronic Arts' Starflight series. Note that Paul Reiche III is credited in the Special Thanks for Starflight while being one of the co-creators of Star Control, and Starflight's lead designer, Greg Johnson, also took part in the development of Star Control II, so the developers probably don't feel any need for animosity between fans of both games. (For that matter, fans usually like both games.)
• Dummied Out:
  • There is an exotic element called "Charon dust" listed in the game files, but it is not actually placed anywhere in the game world.
  • Of the 15 Star System classifications that exist in the game, The "Orange Supergiant" classification was never used.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Fortunately averted in the case of Star Control II. The executives wanted to release the game in a buggy and highly incomplete state with placeholder dialogue everywhere. The developers spent 6 months of their own time and money to finish the game, rather than have the unfinished version released.
    • It does turn out SC2 didn't completely escape this, though; see What Could Have Been, below.
  • How Star Control 3 came to be in the first place. The publisher wanted to get a third game out, but only held the rights to the name, and not the content. The creators who held the rights to everything else finally gave in, reasoning that it was better than having a new game under the same name with nothing carried over from previous titles.
• God Does Not Own This World: Though in a somewhat unusual way. Toys For Bob does have the rights to the setting and the games themselves^note except apparently 3 — that seem to go with the Star Control branding, meaning that as of 2014 Stardock holds that right. They seem to agree with fanon and Toys For Bob on the matter of its canonicity.; they just don't own the "Star Control" branding itself. Hence why they could make a freeware version of SC2 with no legal problems, but had to call it "The Ur-Quan Masters". This is also why, once Children of Infinity came to be, the franchise-as-owned-by-Ford-and-Reiche became "Free Stars".
• He Also Did: Wait, you mean these are the same developers as Skylanders?
• Orphaned Reference: The Rainbow worlds form an arrow pointing to, functionally, nothing. ^note You're told that it's the Galactic core, and it's implied to be related to the fate of the Precursors, but there's nothing there for you to interact with on a game-mechanical level. Word of God is that there was going to be a Developer's Room there, but they never came up with enough jokes to finish it.
• Rereleased for Free: The Ur-Quan Masters is a lawyer-friendly version of this for the second game.
• Science Marches On: The game was made long before Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet and those outer Solar System bodies as large as it like Eris were discovered. Something similar can be said of other kinds of planets (Super-Earths, close-in orbiting giant planets, etc) known to exist orbiting other stars but not present in the game, as the proliferation of these planets wasn't clear at the time the game was developed (in the early 1990s, exoplanetology was still in its infancy).
• Throw It In!:
  • Paul Reiche III said in an IRC chat that the Orz language evolved from some of Erol Otus' randomly scrawled notes (which included the first appearance of *happy campers* and *Jumping Peppers*).
  • Many years later, during the SC2's 30th anniversary celebrations, it was revealed that Erol, in turn, was inspired by the (in)famous non-sequitors of James Danforth "Dan" Quayle (who was a very contemporary politician at the time of development), and said Quayle Nonsense™ played a huge role in both the overall vibe of the Orz and at least one of their phrases is a direct Quayle quote.
    Erol Otus: "It seemed like... I don't know if it was, he didn't seem to be able to speak very well? Or maybe he was channeling a completely different universe."
• Urban Legend of Zelda: The manual clearly showed a collectable Ilwrath Cloaking Device on the inventory screen; no such item exists in-game, but that screenshot led to years of rumors and speculation.
• Vaporware: StarCon, a fully 3D sequel for the PlayStation vaguely similar to Colony Wars. The Harika were one of the confirmed races.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ports of Star Control III were planned for the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, but were cancelled during development. The game's soundtrack used the Midi format to make it easier to port to these systems.
  • The Kzanti in Origins have a 3D ship battle model and animations unlike every other minor race in the game, implying they were going to be a major race at one point.
  • During the 30th anniversary celebration stream, it was revealed that the original plan for the Captain was for them to be completely off-camera, with things like their gender identity left ambiguous so that any player could insert themselves into the role of the Captain. Accolade, however, wrote all the ad copy as if the Captain was a man (and then "lightly" encouraged TfB to follow along), and as a result Reiche and Ford made slight edits to the final version and manual of SC2 (particularly in the ending) to accommodate that interpretation. An attentive reader can note many places where the more identity-agnostic writing still survives in full (and the fairly last-minute nature of the change caused a few unfortunate characterization issues).
  • Originally, Paul Reiche did a huge amount of research into what kinds of planets would logically form around various types of stars according to astronomy, and intended for SC2's map to be randomly populated "realistically" with stars and planets. Ultimately it was decided this was WAY too complex for the technical limitations of the era, especially for a detail the vast majority of players would never appreciate. It does, however, explain a few things, like the extremely low number of life-bearing planets in the game and the various planet classifications (Cyanic, Alkaline, Telluric, etc.) that have no bearing on gameplay^note Plus that no giant (save Epsilon Gruis) or supergiant star has an Earth-like (as in, water world with Earth-like temperature) planet orbiting it and how, as noted in the main page, the relative abundances of the different types of stars matches more or less the ones thought to exist in Real Life in our galaxy.
• Word of Gay: The Androsynth, according to Paul Reiche III. It's subtly indicated even in the original material — look closely at their in-game art, and you'll notice that they have little pink triangles on their uniforms.

---