Hagionaut

Star Citizen has drawn the ire of DEREK SMART, a PC gaming celebrity from the dim mists of the past, who might have faded quietly into obscurity were it not for his campaign to “expose” Chris Roberts as a scammer ripping off the public to the tune of US$1

Smart has singled-out Star Citizen as some kind of elaborate, multimillion-dollar scam

Separating Battlecruiser 3000AD the game from Battlecruiser 3000AD the late-90s / early-00s cultural phenomenon is difficult, and made more difficult by the way its creator Derek Smart continues to evangelise it, in more or less proportion with the increasing success of Star Citizen.

As most vaguely-aware PC gamers know, Smart has singled-out Star Citizen as some kind of elaborate, multi-million-dollar scam. He claims the game, as described by Chris Roberts, is simply impossible to build. How does he know this? Because he is the only one who has ever successfully built a game with scope approaching Star Citizen. And that game is Battlecruiser 3000AD.

Or is it Universal Combat? It’s hard to tell - Smart’s titles blend into each other, adding on and casting off features and technology a bit like those lacewing nymphs that wear the dried-out husks of ants as camouflage.

Battlecruiser was certainly born in the 1990s, in the middle of the space combat sim’s golden age. All sorts of games were in the mix, not just Wing Commander, but Descent Freespace, Infinity War, Mantis, and half a dozen others. The space sim was one of the first “default PC” genres. PC evolutionary history goes: Graphical Adventure, Space Sim, RTS, FPS, in more or less that order.

Smart felt that many of the space sims were too basic, too arcadey. After all, PC was also the home of the flight sim, and by the late 90s, Falcon 3.0 had become a giant of the genre and Falcon 4.0 would blow minds in 1998.

Work started on Battlecruiser in the 1980s, according to Smart. He claims he has design documents from as early as 1987, no doubt written while he was holding down one of his various IT jobs that included - again, according to Smart - developing a missile early-warning system.

Part of the vast ambition of BC3K (as it was eventually known) was its AI. Smart says he rejected all the available APIs and IDEs and wrote his own “AI language” called AILOG. Somehow, word got out that the game would feature a “neural net”, though Smart now denies this rumour came from anyone on the small development team.

Indeed, many of the claims made prior to BC3K’s release were fairly remarkable. It was to be the first game that fully modelled an entire military starship - not just multiple ship systems but also four fighters, four “shuttlecrafts”, and four all-terrain vehicles for exploring planets.

Thirteen alien races were further split into 25 castes (which seems to be 3000AD’s word for “classes”), and the player would have to manage 150 crewmembers aboard the ship.

The game modelled our solar system, plus 75 additional planets in 25 star systems. There were also 145 moons, and each of these celestial bodies was a true 3D object (a big deal in the 1990s).

Do you love minutiae? Then you’ll love accessing multiple computer systems including personnel control, engineering repairs, tactical command, cargo manipulation, communications, navigation, power allocation and the all-important etc (I’m getting all this from Smart’s own blog at www.dereksmart.org). The player must also “observe” the crew and manage their AI, fatigue, health, and “a variety of other attributes.” Crew move between decks, get stuck, hurt themselves in damaged parts of the ship and more... and more...

And more! Enemies board the ship, radiation leaks kill the crew, away teams return from planets with infectious diseases. Naturally the only solution is to gas ‘em all and clone your best officers anew! Crewmembers have various skills and can be assigned to individual ships or stations... and more... and more...

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the way all this obsessive (oppressive?) detail was implemented tended more toward the Dwarf Fortress end of the visual spectrum. Tiny 3D figures, brought to life in detailed isometric cutaway renderings of the ship? Not so much. Clicking on menus to open nested menus to further access submenus? That’s the BC3K way!

Like so many developers before and since, Smart vastly overpromised on BC3K, but unlike almost all his contemporaries,

he has never backed down from his central assertion that the game was, and is to this day, “the most advanced space combat game ever built.”

Followers of Smart’s fortune know that his publisher, Take Two, lost patience with what at the time must have seemed like a pretty bad case of feature-creep, and released the game. Smart says that release was “a Beta”. Most of the gamers who tried it agreed that it certainly didn’t work, at all.

To detail Smart’s subsequent legal battles with Take Two would distract from the game, but the point is after a settlement, Smart continued to develop and fix BC3K, and released numerous patches to bring in at least some of the promised functionality.

In 1999, the game was published again, this time by Interplay, as Battlecruiser 3000AD v2.0. Then, in 2001, it was republished by Dreamcatcher as Battlecruiser Millennium. Finally, in 2003, Smart published the game himself under his 3000AD brand, as Battlecruiser Millennium Gold.

Wait, did we say finally? Because as early as 2000, Smart licensed, of all things, Croteam’s Serious Sam engine to build a “tactical engagement add-on” for Battlecruiser (think, FPS ground battles). Battlecruiser Generations was due in 2001, but didn’t appear until 2004... and now it was called Universal Combat. You may be surprised to learn that THIS was where things started to get complicated - between 2004 and 2009, Smart would release a further NINE iterations of Universal Combat, under a range of names.

The fate and future of Derek Smart and his sci-fi universe have not become any clearer since then. He’s currently working on an epically-ambitious MMO called Line of Defense (sic). There are many videos of Line of Defense (sic) on YouTube and few of them are especially kind.

Yet Derek Smart remains determined to bring the world his true and lasting vision of the most detailed and sophisticated space combat game possible. It seems unlikely that he will ever give up. As a veteran of the flame wars of the 1990s, the current state of Twitter doesn’t seem to faze him.

Some might call his game objectively bad. Some might say that Battlecruiser 3000AD never did the things Smart claimed it would, and what you CAN do in it, isn’t fun to do anyway. But that’s a limited perspective. Battlecruiser 3000AD remains one of PC gaming’s most enduring cultural phenomena, and our hobby and passion would be poorer without it.