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Stardock had tried to make a 4th generation engine for Elemental and it was a disaster.

The Oxide team was focused on making a next-generation game engine. A whole bunch of our internal terminology is based on some of his UX innovations (such as the “Shafer button”).

We ended up hiring Jon Shafer, who was the lead designer of Civilization V - he did the original design for Galactic Civilizations III. They had recently finished Civilization V and some of them had interviewed over at Stardock to investigate what came next. The first, Oxide, was made up of the lead Civ devs over at Firaxis. Galactic Civilizations III preludesĪfter Stardock sold its Impulse platform, I decided to focus my energies into co-founding a couple of start-ups. While one can speculate how things might have gone if either of us had acquired the Master of Orion IP, I think most people are glad with how both games turned out. Instead of a Stardock or Paradox Master of Orion game, we ended up with Galactic Civilizations III and Stellaris. However, we were both narrowly outbid by, who later went on to make a new Master of Orion. Both Stardock and Paradox were eager to get this IP. In 2012, the Master of Orion IP went up for auction. The guys at Paradox and Stardock worked like peas in a pod. They were our European distributor for Galactic Civilizations II. In the early 2000s, we became friends with a company called Paradox. Even in GalCiv III, those huge maps consume a lot of RAM. Since GalCiv was on OS/2, we had entire MEGA-bytes of memory to work with. Think how small Civ maps were back in the 90s. Most space games seem to have taken the MOO route of point to point. These games represented two main philosophies on how to do a space strategy game – the free form movement style of Galactic Civilizations, and the phase-lane/star to star method of Master of Orion. While I was programming on my 386SX and talking on Usenet, the guys at Simtex were making a game called “Sar Lords,” which was eventually released as Master of Orion.

For the past 30 years, I’ve been making space strategy games, albeit with more resources than back in 1993 when I was hand drawing space ships with an icon editor. While OS/2 didn’t take off like IBM thought, it gave me the opportunity to make a game that focused on really good AI and a unique style of gameplay. I literally programmed it out of my college dorm room after picking up “Teach Yourself C in 21 days”. I designed and programmed the very first Galactic Civilizations game back in 1993 for OS/2. A little backgroundīefore we start, I should introduce myself. Make sure you check out and in particular the FAQ and Game pages, which will give you a lot of details on what’s coming.