Free Stars: Children of Infinity is a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters (aka Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters), the open source remake of Star Control II.[4] Created by Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford at their studio Toys for Bob, the first Star Control was released in 1990, and its sequel followed in 1992.[5] Both games received numerous awards,[6] where Star Control was hailed as one of the best games of all time,[7] while Star Control II earned even more "best game" rankings through the 1990s,[8] 2000s,[9] and 2010s.[10]
In the early 2000s, the copyright to the first two Star Control games reverted to Reiche and Ford,[11][12] but not the trademark to the name Star Control.[4][13] This led Reiche and Ford to remake Star Control II as The Ur-Quan Masters,[14] which they released in 2002 as a free download under an open source copyright license.[15] Meanwhile, the trademark in the Star Control name passed between a series of companies, after original publisher Accolade was in acquired by Infogrames Entertainment,[14][16] which was re-structured and re-branded as Atari,[17][18] who later sold the trademark to Stardock in a 2013 bankruptcy sale.[19] The respective parties agreed that Reiche and Ford owned the copyright in the games Star Control and Star Control II, while Stardock held the rights to the Star Control name through trademark.[20][21][17] After a lawsuit, the parties agreed on the same separation of rights, with Stardock using the Star Control name, while Reiche and Ford maintain the rights to continue the story under an alternate title.[13][22] As part of the lawsuit settlement, Reiche and Ford agreed to a mandated quiet period.[22]
New studio and game
In 2021, Fred Ford, Paul Reiche III, Ken Ford and Dan Gerstein co-founded a new game studio called Pistol Shrimp Games,[2] allowing them to begin development on a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters.[3][23] and continue the story from Star Control II.[13][24] In April 2024, they announced that this sequel would be called Free Stars: Children of Infinity,[23] shortly after re-releasing The Ur-Quan Masters under the name Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters on February 19, 2024.[25] The debut trailer for Children of Infinity launched on April 4, 2024 on GameSpot,[23] leading to a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter on April 16, 2024, which has ended on May 18, 2024, collecting more than 650 000$.[1][26] The game reached its crowdfunding target in less than four hours.[27] Since the game continues the story from Star Control II as envisioned by the original creators, some journalists have called the game "the real Star Control 3”.[13]
During the course of development, Fred Ford created a game development tool called Simple, which was integrated into the open source game engine Godot.[28] In summer 2023, Paul Reiche and Ken Ford departed the project and ceased their involvement.[29] The release of the game is planned for August 2025.[2][30]
^Wen, Howard (11 August 2005). "The Ur-Quan Masters". linuxdevcenter.com. O'Reilly Media. Archived from the original on 2016-03-16. When the original developers of Star Control 2 contacted the online Star Control fan community, they presented an enticing question: if they released the source to the 3DO version of Star Control 2 under GPL, would anybody be interested in porting it to modern-day computers? Michael Martin, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student at Stanford University, answered the call. After removing proprietary 3DO-specific components from the code, the developers released the source for Star Control 2 to the public.
