John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) not only featured the best spaceship ever, it was also the most influential science fiction movie from the ’70’s with “star” in the title. Its design not only prefigured George Lucas’ sordid triangle fetish explored to unsavory detail in his subsequent trilogy about argumentative robots, but also SpaceshipTwo for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. The movie was also co-written by and stars Dan O’Bannon, who would return to the theme of carnivorous beachballs in “Alien” and “The Thing,” though handled here with considerably more plausibility and menace. Dark Star was also the first film to use prohibitively expensive CG and stuntwork to convincingly depict vertical action sequences in low-grav environments and the first sf film to evoke zero comment from NASA. Its psychotic onboard computer stuff also predated Kubrick’s 1968 landmark 2001 by -6 years.
But more even than most films, Dark Star is about a spaceship. As every child-sized fan of blue-collar fictionalization now knows, its crew’s mission was to roam around the universe blowing up unstable planets unfit for colonists like the ones in WALL-E if they’d had a destination. We’re given to understand that Dark Star’s crew is, like the society of when it was made, near insane with boredom and mutual loathing. What little we’re shown of the ship’s schematics underscores these impressions: a shared barracks whose principal recreational component is a rubber chicken; a dark closet; a turret; a captain made of ice; and a workspace even human centipede segments might have found a little close for comfort. Talk about wormholes! Even the Antarctic researchers in the Thing at least had Lets Make A deal reruns and their bourbon-flavored chess.
But back in 1974 this seemed the best way for our species to experience the majestic infinity of the universe. Forty years later, we now know that the reality will be much smaller, and ultimately cost almost as much as John Carpenter’s 1974 Dark Star.
I start the game by distributing the crew around the ship. Captain Neema Strof starts on “C” Deck in Pod 3 near the risor. Science Officer L.J. Gepidus is on “B” Deck, as is Maintenance Officer Najeb Kelly, although he’s all the way down the hall at the other end. Ground Survey Officer Blnt Skraaling and Biology Officer Hesiod Charybdis (I am not making any of these names up) start together up on “A” Deck, in the same pod no less.
If God hadn’t created Christopher Walken, we would have to invent him. And did no one tell David Warner how awful the dialogue is? Because not only is he trying to sell it, he’s actually selling it. That’s an English actor for you: so much better than the material deserves!
Finally, Clive Owen asks the question on everyone’s mind back in 1996, when Privateer II was released. Spoilers, by the way.
When I was in college, I lived in a fraternity house and one of the rules for living in the house was that you had to have your class schedule posted on your door should an emergency arise. This was before the time of cell phones and social networks. No there were not dinosaurs roaming the Earth at the time, as difficult as that may be to believe.
The first semester of my senior year I was student teaching, so my schedule had large blocks of open time in the evenings, time that was usually spent on my friend Ron’s computer playing games. I played so many games that someone in the house took to writing “DOOM” in every block of free time on my schedule. I would have been pissed if it weren’t so accurate. However, had they really wanted to nail down my activities, every block would have been filled with “Wing Commander: Privateer”.
Privateer was the first space sim I ever played. Hell, it was the first real space game I played, period. When I was a kid, I played my fair share of Defender, Star Wars and Space Invaders in the arcade as well as hours and hours of Space Quest. But Privateer was a whole new world. For a kid raised on Star Wars in the theater and Buck Rogers on TV, being able to pilot my own ship and look out of the cockpit, juking and diving as I tried to keep a pirate in my sights and blow him to space dust was like nothing I had ever played. Unfortunately, my inexperience with the genre translated into some dicey situations, namely when the alien probe chased me through multiple meteoroid laden systems after I stole their cool ass green gun. I’m not proud of this fact, but when I fled the aliens, I had to enlist the aid of a fraternity brother to toggle the afterburner as I worked on not smashing into asteroids. Thanks Micah, you were a real life saver.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Privateer let me get a taste of the Han Solo life. Winging into a space station, picking up materials, both legal and illegal, and making my way to another system to unload my wares was just as exciting to me as fighting off pirates or shooting Kilrathi. I may not have understood how the game tied into the Wing Commander universe and it would be a few more years before I played another space sim (Wing Commander IV, for the record) but Privateer got its hooks into me good, making me a bona fide fan of the genre.
The history of gaming is distinct, I think, from the history of gaming ideas. Gaming has been such a fragmented hobby that very often people weren’t aware of their peers’ ideas, leading to a lot of reinventing of the wheel. This struck me the other day when I was reading an excerpt from “Designing Modern Strategy Games” by George Phillies and Tom Vasel. Phillies is an old hand from the days of 1960s boardgaming, but what grabbed my attention was not about him, but about someone else. A guy named Sid Sackson. The excerpt below comes from that book. The “I” in the excerpt is Phillies.
Once upon a time, [I] had the good fortune to visit the greatest American board game designer, Sid Sackson, at his New York home. Sackson had by far the largest collection of traditional board games in the world. (He did not collect board wargames.) He estimated to me that he had 20,000 distinct titles. I can confirm that almost every room of his house was filled from floor to ceiling with games, including shelves in the middle of every room except the kitchen. He also had various game fragments, such as the cover of Race to the North Pole, a nineteenth-century game about a race to the North Pole via Montgolfier balloon. The collection was carefully organized, so that he could find whichever game he wanted almost immediately. Sackson’s game library was backed by a set of notebooks, so that when I described design elements of games from my board wargame collection, he rapidly inserted those details into a notebook and indexed them.
I have never heard of Sid Sackson, even though he wrote a column in the 1970s in Strategy & Tactics magazine, and has a Wikipedia page. That is almost certainly my loss. But if someone like me who plays (or at least knows about) a fair number of boardgames has never heard of the greatest American designer of such games, you can at least make an argument that someone should be doing a better job of spreading this information around. Oh, for those notebooks! So many designers were working in a vacuum, oblivious to all the game mechanics Sackson catalogued, reinventing wheels and warp drives.
But games do carry a flavor of their time, and picking up a box from thirty years ago can either dissuade you with the musty smell of outdated implementation, or entice you with the allure of imagination. There is a lot of imagination in games about spaceships. One particular one — The Wreck of the BSM Pandora by Jim Dunnigan and Redmond Simonsen — has about equal parts imagination and frustration. For the time, that was probably a big win. If only they’d had Sackson’s notebooks.
The ship casts an unimpressive visage with its cobbled together skin of garbage cans, road signs, and miscellaneous debris, but that’s part of its charm. Thunder Road from The Explorers was more than just a vessel with which to sail the skies. It was a symbol of childlike wonder and adventure. Much like my real life attempts to create a spaceship from stuff laying around my house, the ending of the movie was a letdown, but the tone it hits never left me. The idea that a couple of kids around my age could put together a starship and break through the atmosphere was the fuel for many of my adventures in the woods surrounding my family home. Proof positive that looks can be deceiving.
“The catch is, a boat this big doesn’t exactly stop on a dime.”
The Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has three things going for it that made me immediately fall in love with it the first time I saw 2010 in a theater in 1984. First, it is massive. I love a massive ship in space, just as I gravitate to the largest ships in water. There is something comforting about an aircraft carrier, or even a cruise ship. A couple years ago I was on a cruise ship out in the Atlantic and that sense of being out in the middle of the ocean was awe-inspiring. I would sit for hours out on the tiny little stateroom balcony and just stare out at the ocean and the horizon and the unfathomable expanse of what was before me and feel this amazing sense of relaxation slowly move in over me like a tide. Having been on a small boat out of sight of land, I have to say that bigger is better. It just feels like so much can go wrong out there on a small boat, and if it does…well, let’s just say my imagination was fertile as a young boy, and this was decades before I would see the movie Open Water. I had already seen Jaws.
Hello, my name is Brian Rubin, and I’m a space gameaholic (Hi Brian!). I’ve had a love affair with space gaming ever since playing Lunar Lander using a freaking cassette tape on a Radio Shack TRS-80. For the top ten videogame spaceships, I’ve first of all chosen more than ten, because there’s no way there are only ten. To pick the most historic and memorable ships, you need at least 11 slots. And since I’ve mostly played computer games, Star Fox isn’t on here.
After the jump, the top ten (or so) that aren’t Star FoxContinue reading →
This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone … Mayday, Mayday … we are under attack … main drive is gone … turret number one not responding … Mayday … losing cabin pressure fast … calling anyone … please help … this is Free Trader Beowulf … Mayday …
–cover of the original Traveller game box
One of my favorite books as a child was this oversize picture book called Space Wars Worlds and Weapons. It’s basically just a big book of paintings of science fiction stuff: aliens, planets, and lots of spaceships. There is some desultory text trying to tie these themes together, but it’s really all about the pictures.
The book starts out with a section on “space vehicles,” and the text quickly bogs down.
However you call it — star ship, rocket ship, space machine — the space ship is the foremost, some would say ultimate, sf symbol. If science fiction is all about other worlds, then the space ship is a part of that other-worldliness, connecting solar systems and universes … the public transportation factor.
The USCSS Nostromo was a starfreighter, not a starfighter or even a cruiser. It was nothing but a space tugboat, used to push loads of cargo between the stars. It just goes to show you that you can’t judge a ship by its looks, because the Nostromo may not have been much to look at, but it served one of the most important roles in Alien, acting as a floating Amityville Horror, Camp Crystal Lake, and 45 Lampkin Lane all in one. Alien was basically a slasher film in space. While it’s true that in space, no one can hear you scream, no one can run away either. The Nostromo’s oppressive blend of cramped quarters, hissing steam valves, dripping pipes, and cat hidey-holes made it as much of a character and as much of a scare generator as the xenomorph that roamed its halls.
Having played a good bit of XCom when it was released, I had moved on to whatever else came out that month and set it aside with a promise to return. Since that time, though, the game has changed a bit for the better. You can now change basic options like having your units automatically pick a class type instead of you having complete control or making the weapons do a dice roll for damage instead of static damage every time.
There’s one last element to the scenario — a huge Titan bearing down on a space colony — I didn’t mention yesterday, and that is that the space lords have sent us a relief force!
Roll one die at the beginning of the End/Repair Phase and record a running total. When the total is equal to or greater than 12, the TDF player receives reinforcements (BCH, BC, CA x4) within 2 hexes of (E). This happens once per game.
The Gunstar from The Last Starfighter is an amazing craft, fitted with several lasers, a proton beam, and several banks of photon bolts. It has been known to win desperate battles against incredible odds. Its tandem control system allows a navigator to pilot and maintain the craft while the starfighter focuses on delivering the formidable weaponry. One Gunstar in particular was fitted with a prototype weapon known as Death Blossom. In the battle for Rylos against the Ko-Dan Armada, it eliminated what was left of the Armada’s fighter compliment. The ship is still used as a front line fighter in protecting the frontier to this day.
Sci-fi? Sure, I like it, but only the trashy stuff. Not so much trashy as phony. The kind I can dip into between shifts, read a few pages at a time, and then drop. Oh, I read good books, too, but only Earthside. Why that is, I don’t really know. Never stopped to analyze it. Good books tell the truth, even when they’re about things that never have been and never will be. They’re truthful in a different way. When they talk about outer space, they make you feel the silence, so unlike the Earthly kind — and the lifelessness. Whatever the adventures, the message is always the same: humans will never feel at home out there. Earth has something random, fickle about it — here a tree, there a wall or garden, over the horizon another horizon, beyond the mountain a valley … but not out there.
–Stanisław Lem, “Tales of Pirx the Pilot”
I have always thought that science fiction, despite being forever linked with fantasy in the “fantasy/sci fi” section of bookstores and libraries, was actually best appreciated by adults. Unlike traditional* fantasy, which is wrapped up in quests and knowledge acquisition which are essentially coming-of-age concerns that resonate best with adolescents and young adults, science fiction at its best challenges our notions of what is possible by stripping away all the things we find familiar, and thus letting us examine fundamental beliefs and assumptions we have spent a lifetime constructing. It also taps our fascination with the unknown, specifically, that of distance.
It’s Starship Week! Which means we’re going to take a long adoring look at our favorite ways to travel the stars, from games, movies, and maybe even TV shows (books not eligible because nobody reads books anymore no matter how many clever spaceship names Iain Banks thought up). This week we’ll bring you a movie spaceship of the day every day, a series of articles from Dr. Bruce Geryk based on his experience crewing spaceships, videogame spaceship expert Brian Rubin’s list of top ten videogame ships, and more from some special contributors whose names you might recognize. Punch it, Chewie.
(Note that spaceships are too big to be contained in a single week. So according the laws of physics as proved by Einstein and other leading scientists, Starship Week actually lasts for two weeks.)
