Considering that his first effort, Star Commander, was being prototyped before even Wing Commander was released - and the fact that he's barely stopped iterating since - he's more than your typical unsung hero. Seamless flight from space to surface has been a mainstay feature of Bower's games since 2002's Star Wraith 3Īs the founder and sole developer of Star Wraith 3D Games, Shawn Bower has been quietly turning out space combat titles for almost as long as the genre has existed. Meanwhile, gliding almost unnoticed beneath the toxic roar of the Battlecruiser series' indomitable Smart-drive™, a succession of solid if unspectacular titles flying under the banner of Star Wraith 3D Games completed the procession - and would, in time, constitute the bulk of it. Behind it jostled a rag-tag fleet of Russian-made hulks and semi-complete mods powered by ageing 3D engines. Being the only one to achieve mainstream success, X series creator Egosoft led the way. With none of its trailblazing commanders to lead it through the interminable darkness, the fate of the space genre was left in the hands of a few under-resourced developers.
With only a couple of anomalous mouse-controlled space brawlers to distract them, players at the dawn of the millennium were increasingly in thrall to world wars and pantomime jihadists, leaving the space game genre to float unceremoniously towards oblivion. Having birthed the now ubiquitous open-world sandbox by way of Elite, and later, thanks to Wing Commander, establishing the PC as a mainstream gaming machine, the genre's leading architects had seemingly abandoned ship. It was against a dark background of first-person shooter dominance that the once mighty space sim teetered on the brink of irrelevance.
It's somewhat fitting that the collective history of said games has followed precisely the same trajectory. It's hard to say what the most overused plot in gaming might be, but when it comes to a certain genre it's fair to say that the launching of a fleet of hastily built space arks in an effort to evade extinction is about as derivative as it gets.
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