Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Startopia is the best management game you’ve never played. No, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to that other person, the one who didn’t play it. And especially to that other guy who never even heard of it. One of just three games created by taken-before-their-time Bullfrog offshot and Urban Chaos dev Mucky Foot, it took the Dungeon Keeper/Theme Park model to the stars, with greater complexity and nuance and grand galactic vistas to warm the cockles of one’s soul. Inevitably, it didn’t sell well. With slightly eerie timing, given we were only yesterday cooing at the inadvertently similar-in-concept Maia, this oft-forgotten space station sim has just been granted a new lease of life on GoG.
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Do you miss Quinns? We miss Quinns. His gangly form is still making his way around the world with only a backpack and a delightful girlfriend to keep him safe. He may be gone, but is clearly not forgotten by Eurogamer, who’ve published a retrospective of Mucky Foot’s finest hour, Startopia. He says things like…

It was Babylon 5 run by the Muppets, which is about as flippant a comparison as the game itself.

Which certainly sounds like Quinns. Anyway, read more here and wish for Quinns to hurry on home. And while we’re talking Mucky Foot, I’m reminded of the article I wrote about their rise and fall a couple of years back. You can read that too.

Since Jim and Alec can’t post today due to ECM attack on RPS’ Bath headquarters (apparently), it strikes me as a good time to get this out of the world. When I was chatting to the Mucky Foot guys for the retrospective feature I wrote about them at the Escapist, Guy Simmons forwarded me a grab of their prototype of ER Tycoon (Mucky Gary Carr being an architect of Theme Hospital, of course). The story of why it didn’t happen is in the main article, but shots of games that never made it – in fact, were never even announced – are always sad things for me. Little snippets of alternative history…

Thanks to Guy for sharing. Of course, if there’s any Devs who’d like to drag something from the vault, our doors are always open. Metaphorically, obv. Burgulars, stay clear.

A random law of blogging. Things lead to other things. In this case, my piece on Mucky Foot lead to Try.Lee in the Escapist’s comments thread pointing out Ex-Foot-programmer Tom Forsyth released a highly unofficial graphics patch for Startopia, illustrating some Shadowbuffer jiggerypokery we don’t quite understand. He suggests it runs too slow to play, but that was a few years ago, so hopefully the ever-marching power of PC will defeat that problem. He also stresses it’s VERY EXPERIMENTAL. Get it from here. Worth looking at the grabs, if only for Tom’s notes. I particularly approve of the rhapsody about GeForce-1 totting street urchins with tears running down their cheek at the end.

The Escapist’s Post-Mortem issue is live. I contributed a piece about Mucky foot, describing the birth and descent of the makers of Urban Chaos and Startopia. It’s quite the story. This does the VH1 Behind the Music approach, talking to the four primaries and them recalling all the inspired and foolish decisions they made, with the benefit of hindsight. It also includes details on games which you probably won’t be aware of (Their Punisher? ER Tycoon?). There’s a mass of other material specific to Urban Chaos and Startopia which I’ll spin into Making Ofs down the line, but this sad and human story’s enough to be getting on with, yeah?

And while you’re there, Nick Pirocanac’s examination on the incredibly resilient Allegiance community is well worth a read and Erin “EASpouse” Hoffman’s tale about Black9′s cancellation is so enormous that I may have to write about it later. People occasionally ask me why I don’t go into development. The idea of spending years of my life on something then this happening is Reason No 1.