With Star Control: Origins now less than 60 days from release I thought I’d spend a few minutes writing up a status report on some of the murky legal issues between us and the designers of Star Control II.

As many of you know, Stardock acquired the Star Control IP from Atari in 2013. This acquisition didn’t include all of the copyrights to the second game in the DOS trilogy. Notably, it didn’t include the art, source code or music.

Stardock was able to team up with Riku and Dan, the two primary composers of the SC2 music but until recently, we were led to believe that the art copyrights were held by the two designers (Paul Reiche and Fred Ford). We recently discovered that that wasn’t the case as it turns out SC2 was a collaboration in which each member continued to own what they created. I.e. the others weren’t employees or contractors.

For us, this only makes it clearer that we shouldn’t try to touch the SC2 game copyrights with a 10 foot pole. At one time, we had hoped to license those copyrights to have the classic ships in Fleet Battles and to depict the Orz as they were in SC2 for a cameo.  Unfortunately, this would be impossible.

For example, the Orz was created by multiple people who we now have learned each maintained possible copyrights for their individual contributions. Like I said, Not even with a 10 foot pole.

That doesn’t mean the Star Control aliens won’t be in Star Control games. That just means we can’t rely on how they were expressed in Star Control 2 because those expressions are owned by...well..someone.

This is also why there hasn’t been a Master of Magic II btw. No one knows who owns what. At least with Star Control we own the trademarks and have rights to the music and own the overall franchise. Plus we own Star Control 3 which, despite its foibles is a superset of the aliens in Star Control 2 (other than the  copyrightable elements that Paul Reiche personally owned at the time which, might now be limited to certain aspects of the UQM universe lore). Nevertheless, it’s all too messy for us to feel safe touching.

I realize some of you are disappointed at how things have progressed with regards to Paul and Fred. Most of you are aware that Stardock did not originally plan to include the classic Star Control aliens in Origins.

Unfortunately, after Paul and Fred chose to try to cancel the Star Control trademark while simultaneously sewing confusion as to authenticity of Star Control: Origins, Stardock had no choice but to lock down its IP. Since Stardock owns the Star Control related trademarks, the lawyers recommended perfecting those trademarks by registering them.

In addition, you can’t just trademark something, you have to use it in commerce. Regardless of whether the classic aliens were used in commerce sufficiently before to establish trademark rights, the classic games are no longer for sale and we currently have no plans to return the classic games for sale even if the dispute is resolved.

Therefore, we have begun releasing the soundtrack to Star Control: Origins with featured DLCs for each alien with the original music as well as with remastered music by the original composers. This gives players a taste of the amazing work that Riku, Mason and Dan have done.

Each DLC also includes artwork and lore which we hope will persuade fans and Paul and Fred that we are not interested in expressing the Star Control aliens in future Star Control games they way they were in SC2. They don’t just look different, they have a different characterization and lore (SCO takes place in a different universe).

Some fans undoubtedly would prefer we copy the SC2 aliens. Unfortunately, even if we could, we wouldn’t (other than the ships, I do miss the classic ships but alas those are in limbo). The alien lore and stories were designed to essentially climax with sc2: the Ur-quan masters. By contrast, SCO is being designed with a long term story arc in mind. This will become more obvious in the months to come.

Just as the authors in SC2 (and later SC3) had their take on the Star Control aliens, so do the writers and artists working on SCO. The talented writers and artists at Stardock are not interested in “copying” what was done before. The needs of the story and lore determine what aliens are in and how they are depicted.

Could Stardock have called the Vorlon-like alien species that projects itself into our facet looking like what they think we expect aliens to look like something else? Sure. But since it is now forced to do everything it can to protect its trademark rights in Star Control they will be the New Arilou. This helps Stardock defend itself from a party that seeks to cancel the IP that it paid hundreds of thousands to acquire and followed it up by investing millions more into over four years. It also allows fans to see how the Arilou in the Origins universe develop. 

While it’s very unlikely that the SC2 Arilou was anywhere near developed enough to be protected as its own character, Stardock has taken great pains to ensure that it’s Arilou expression is not a derivative even of the behavior. This is something critics here already have observed in that we are taking the Star Control aliens different direction given the story arcs planned for SCO. 

Incidentally, as long time GalCiv fans know, the gc aliens went through the same process when we moved from OS/2 to Windows. Those changes were even more dramatic owing to much more dramatic changes to the background lore (mostly regarding the Altarians needing to look like humans and thus the old Altarian design got rebranded as Torians).

Similarly, which Star Control aliens show up and when will be determined by the needs of the story and lore.

In the meantime, we look to feature remasters of the classic alien music along with the originals provided by and often remastered by the original composers. 

More:

https://www.stardock.com/games/starcontrol/store

Cheers!