Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO, has said he’s been trying to pry the rights to some classic PC strategies from the clutches of publishers like Atari.
He’s hungry for a new ‘Baldur’s Gate’ style RPG too and says someone’s ”going to have to do it,” otherwise ”it’s got to be Stardock.” Renegade sequels catch Wardell’s ire too.
”I would never have done those Galactic Civilizations games in the first place if someone had made a Civilization-in-space game,” laughed Wardell, speaking with Gamasutra.
Stardock hearts PC, they’re in love and that’s good for you and me. If they can’t get their mitts on a license that ‘lights their fire’ then they’ll invent their own original based upon their muse.
”I actually pitched Atari on a whole idea for a true successor to Star Control,” he says, noting that it would follow on from Toys for Bob’s Star Control II, and not Star Control 3. ”We just pretend that never happened.”
Master of Orion is another property Stardock has in its sights and would love to get a hold of, they’d base it more off of the second in the franchise as the sequels aren’t too popular with Wardell.
”If you’re making a game that ends with ‘3,’ or Something: The Sequel, it should be similar to the original game,” he argued.
”Don’t go off and say, ‘I have my own artistic vision.’ Okay, good – so call it something else. Don’t ride the coattails of the people who came before you to launch your own artistic vision.” Some developers could certainly do with taking this sage advice to heart.
Stardock is gathering a new internal team that’s throwing around some ideas on what to work on next. ”We’d like to do a roleplaying game too,” he said, and BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic seem to have his favour.
They would approach it in ”the same style of isometric gameplay – not first person – where I have a party that I’m interacting with,” referring to BG.
”I think there are a lot of people who want that. They want to have a party again. They want to have a Minsc-type character in there. You can’t have that interesting banter if it’s just one guy running around.”
