Star Control II just completely - completely changed everything for me. Like, I felt isolated and lonely in - in, like, the - the crappy Adirondack Mountains, and I didn't know - I couldn’t, like, do much. There was - my world felt so small. And then, I had an entire galaxy in front of me. And then, the game was structured as such that it would have all these little hints at mysteries, things that you would want to go investigate. And a lot of games have that, but when you actually try to find it, you - it’s just flavor, right? There’s nothing actually there. But, in Star Control, it - it was there. You would find mysteries that led to other mysteries, and they thought of everything. And I was, like, making maps of this on my wall and co- and correlating, like, some sort of slang term an alien used to, like, what that might mean in terms of a star system. And it was - it was just like go - and it was like an - it was an open world game. You just get plopped down in the beginning, with no idea what’s going on, and all it is, is just exploring this enormous galaxy and never feeling like if you try and - uh, like, like, the background is some cardboard prop you can just knock over. It all feels developed. It all feels weighty. And that was just, uh, that was amazing. I - I still play that game. It’s, uh, it - I still feel like it’s one of the best-designed games ever.
