Brian Fargo possibly lets news of a Starflight remake slip
Careless talk costs spacecraft.
This may well be one for the "wild, unsubstantiated rumours" pile, but it shows how easy it is to suddenly drum up hype for the return of a long-gone game these days. It appears as though Brian Fargo, current boss of InXile and creator of games such as the original Wasteland, let slip that someone -- seriously, we don't even know who -- is making a remake of the classic 1986 PC game Starflight, news that has gotten an already space-flight hungry PC gaming horde into quite the tizz.
It seems as though it all went down while Brian Fargo was weighing in on the current release Hellblade, which has drawn some discussion over its permadeath mechanics. Someone else pointed out that the original Starflight was even harsher, and Fargo responded saying that "we need a Starflight remake", and when asked if his company had one planned, he responded with the above tweet. Brian Fargo has not made any further comment on the tweet, which might suggest that this info is possibly on the QT and very hush-hush.
If someone is indeed remaking Starflight, whether it actually is InXile or somebody else, then they certainly have quite the task ahead of them. The original Starflight is seen as one of the definitive space exploration RPG's, taking place over a huge galaxy where you could land on planets and mine the terrain for materials, engage alien races in diplomacy, have a good old fashioned fight and uncover a huge underlying plot surrounding an ancient race destroying the galaxy, one star at a time. The sort of game that's almost too big to comprehend, one where you can play the game exactly however you want, and one that took "fifteen man-years" to develop according to the game's original team. Rebooting such a game, one of the true innovators in the sandbox genre, is certainly no mean feat.
Of course, there is a fairly good chance that all of this is a storm in a teacup -- we do not know who's making this supposed Starflight reboot, nor do we have any idea how far along development is, or...well, basically anything at all aside from a single tweet by a respected developer in the PC gaming world. But this is a genre where games have been somewhat thin on the ground, at least until the recent arrivals of the likes of Elite: Dangerous, not to mention the masses of hype generated by the eternally in development Star Citizen. This genre is one of the PC's showpieces and always has been, and it's hard not to be enticed by the prospect of such a major name making a return.
