Origin Stories Part 01
Well here we are, at the launch of our brand-new-shiny website! It still kind of blows our mind to think that the original concept for Starfighter fell out of Nick’s brain roughly 25 years ago. There’s been a few casual charges at the windmill and a whole lot of life/family/day jobs undertaken since that time - but officially we started in earnest on this current plan for product release around the middle of 2015 . We have made a huge amount of progress in the last four years. We live in exciting times and we are very close to being in a position to start sharing our development process with you. In the interim though, here’s a little bit of the backstory of how it all began…
There was no internet in 1993. No smartphones. No youtube or Netflix and only 3 TV channels. The last decade of the last century was lame. If you were a teenager growing up at the time there would be times where you’d just have to face the fact you were going to be bored out of your mind. But sometimes that can be a good thing.
After school we’d ride our bikes down to the local computer store and check out the latest Amiga games. Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight, Speedball 2 and Frontier: Elite 2 being the stand out faves amongst our group of friends. At the front of the store, under a glass counter we’d stare enviously at MTG blister packs and of course the incredible WH40k metal miniatures that were for sale - always slightly more expensive than we could ever afford on just our pocket money. We’d settle for a copy of White Dwarf that we’d pore over and wish that we had enough $$ one day to field an army of Space Marines - perhaps stave off some of the pre-internet boredom!
Now adding further insult to Nick’s plight, he lived around 20km out of town further reducing the prospects of catching up with friends on a weekend. And so it was -sufficiently bored on a rainy afternoon in Invergowrie - that Nick clambered up into his parent’s attic and re-discovered a lost bag of Torro….
…Torro was New Zealand’s answer to L###™, and looking at that long lost bag Nick thought: “Heyyyy I remember this stuff. I used to build spaceships out of it when I was a kid!” Grateful to have something to pass the time, he hauled it down and pieced together a few rudimentary ships. The storm rolled in thicker. Nick stared intently at his fleet. Suddenly there was a thunderclap of lightening and nearby wildebeest scattered in all directions. [“Ok waaay too much dramatic license being used here thanks - Ed.”] And behold! In that moment, the original concept for Starfighter was seared across Nick’s mind: a strategy war game based around space battles where the players first build their own ships and then try their hardest to blow chunks off their opponent’s ships.
A feverish few months of self-testing, basic rule writing and development later, Nick had a working version of the game ready to play-test on his friends….
TO BE CONTINUED…