Startopia

Development

The game originally attracted the interest of publisher Psygnosis, but the team settled with Eidos based on their chemistry with that company.

Mucky Foot was founded by ex-Bullfrog members, so it's not too surprising to find a lot of Startopia's features borrowed from another Bullfrog game, namely Dungeon Keeper 2.

Easter egg

If you zoom up on the Workstations in the Laboratory, you can occasionally see the "Blue Screen of Death". The Turraken scientist will shake with anger and bash his fist against the screen, getting the Workstation back on track.

Movie reference

Slight spoiler: the speech given to the player during the end scene may sound familiar. It is based on the speech Darth Vader gives Luke Skywalker after their battle on Bespin in the Star Wars movie.

Patch

The English voice acting of the in-game AI adviser VAL, which was voiced by William Franklin, was considered so good that shortly after the German release a "patch" was made by fans, which replaced all the German voice acting with the English one. The file is about 300MB, which was quite a large amount back in 2001.

Sales

According to the developers, the title scraped together a disappointing amount of 110,000 units sold.