Description
A long time ago, a great empire comprised of Humans, Velox, Thrynn and Elowan ruled the stars. The Empire's currency was an energy source called Endurium. But something happened and this empire is no more. Furthermore, the small colony world named Arth has forgotten this heritage and technology. 1000 years have since passed and the people of Arth have rediscovered archaeological evidence of their empire. Using these discoveries, they create spaceships and form the Interstel corporation to govern the fleet. It's time to take the first steps back into space... but could it be the same enemy that destroyed the Empire still exists?
Starflight is a space exploration game. The player must first form a crew, assign their positions and customize the spaceship before blasting off from spacedock. Once out into space, the standard interface allows access to different crew members and navigation. The entire galaxy is unknown and it's up to the player to travel to distant planets to explore and land on them. Using a top-down interface, a planetary lander will venture out with the task of finding minerals and biological data to transport back to Starport. These resources can then be used to train crew members and improve the ship. Different alien races control the galaxy and it will be up to the player to engage them diplomatically or engage them in combat. Successful exploration of the galaxy and alien cultures will yield clues and new leads as to the fate of the Empire.
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User Reviews
There are no reviews for the Atari ST release of this game. You can use the links below to write your own review or read reviews for the other platforms of this game.
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Trivia
The inside tri-fold lists notes from the game designers:
The Dream: "Back in 1982, we approached Electronic Arts with the idea of creating a universe on a disk that would let people experience the feeling of exploring the universe. It was an ambitious idea. We knew it would require a lot of time and the development of some new technology. We were more right than we knew."
The Cutting Room Floor: "We rewrote the game several times as we struggled to achieve our goals. We wanted the universe to convey a gigantic sense of space, complexity, and life. And we wanted an exciting fantasy role-playing game, with a wide spectrum of character interaction and activity. It seemed like whenever we were close to finalizing the script, we'd find another way to make the game more fun."
The Planet Builder: "About nine months after we started the actual programming, we came up with the idea for the fractal generator. A fractal generator so powerful that it could create surfaces in space. It took 6 man-years to create the technology, but it gave us the ability to cram 800 complex and unique planets into each game, instead of the 50 we'd had before. There are so many that even we haven't explored them all."
The Aliens: "To find the right names for each race, we wrote long profiles and histories for each, then tossed random syllables at each other for several days. To handle their languages, behavior, and combat-action, we had to devote months to building a sophisticated artificial intelligence system. We threw away the communications module three times before we had exactly what we wanted. Sometimes we wondered which would come first, flying to the stars in Starflight, or flying to the stars in real life."
Breathing Ammonia: "Once the fractal generator builds a planet, the eco-system generator creates environmental conditions for it, like gravity, atmosphere, minerals, and temperature. Once we took a journey back to Earth, only to find the eco-system generator had given it new continents and an ammonia atmosphere. It took two years to perfect the technology."
15 Man-Years Later: "The last several months were spent tying all the various technologies together. Because of the program's complexity and scope, the play-testing alone took months. But all that time and effort has proven worthwhile. We had a vision of what an outer space fantasy game could be, and now that vision is a reality."
The Starflight reference card lists this helpful hint if playing on an original Compaq "luggable":
Compaq(tm) users with an external composite monitor should type Control-Alt-< at the DOS prompt before starting Starflight to activate the composite display output.
This means that Compaq users could play the game in 16 colors (instead of the CGA 4-color palette) as long as they hooked up a TV or composite monitor to the composite output.
Not really trivia, but worth mentioning again for impact: Starflight (and the sequel) contained over 800 planets, each with specific artifacts and minerals to find and mine--all on two 360K diskettes (which also had to share space with program code and graphics) and without needing more than 256K of RAM. Consider the following: You could go to any arbitrary planet, find a cluster of artifacts and take only one of the artifacts in the cluster, leave the planet, spend another 20 hours exploring other planets, fighting battles, saving the game, etc., then go back to that same planet and find everything exactly as you left it, including the cluster of artifacts with only one taken! This was (and still is) an astonishing technical achievement! (Want to really picture something? Imagine this same technolgy--8088, 720K of storage space--and apply it to today's typical computer. Now
that would be one humongous universe to explore!)
The advertising on the back of the box was a shameless ripoff of Star Trek. This is unfortunate, since the game itself was
not a ripoff of Star Trek (although it shares certain elements with it).
Electronic Arts re-issued Starflight packaged in a box (as opposed to the album-cover packaging) with proper EGA support a couple of years later its initial release, but this version had an extremely limited distribution and is considered very rare. The gameplay in this release is also slightly different, which is seemingly unintentional because the gameplay differences conflict with established rules (shields stay up in nebulas, etc.)
Starflight and Starflight 2 were written in a mixture of Forth (!!) and assembly.
There is
way too much trivia to list in this field; please consult the Related Sites for this game.
