Star Saga
| Star Saga | |
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Cover of Star Saga: One - Beyond The Boundary
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| Genres | Adventure/Role-playing |
| Developers | Masterplay Publishing |
| Publishers | Masterplay Publishing |
| Creators | Andrew C. Greenberg, Rick Dutton, Walter Freitag, and Michael Massimilla |
| Platform of origin | MS-DOS, Apple IIGS |
| Original release | 1988 (Star Saga: One) 1989 (Star Saga: Two) |
Star Saga is a series of floppy-based video games which combine a computerized game arbiter with hefty sections of printed text. Released in an era before the availability of the CD-ROM format, the titles make up for the limited storage available at the time by using print to attempt to tell a rich story. In essence, the designers endeavored to blend aspects of paper gamebooks with the complexity of a role-playing video game.
Versions of the games were released for MS-DOS and for the Apple II series of computers.
Star Saga: One - Beyond The Boundary, released in 1988, was the first in a short-lived series of science fiction adventure/role-playing games by Masterplay Publishing. Loosely based on the Rekon pen & paper role-playing system, the game series was designed by Andrew C. Greenberg (co-creator of Wizardry), Rick Dutton, Walter Freitag, and Michael Massimilla. In this first title, players leave their homeworlds setting out to explore the vast unknowns of space. Per the official game text:
The second title, Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace was the sequel, released in 1989. In this title, a gigantic armada of alien ships scours the galaxy, seeking to eliminate any and all sentient life. Players must quickly explore the accessible reaches of space, hoping to uncover technology with which to oppose this threat. The game background text describes this as:
Although Star Saga was to be released as a trilogy, Masterplay went out of business before the third game was released, leaving only Star Saga: One - Beyond the Boundary and Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace.
As well as the computer software (which acts as a "game master" or moderator for the game), Star Saga ships with a large color fold-out map, six colored tokens that players use to move around the map, and thirteen booklets containing a total of 888 numbered passages of text. Due to the high volume of text, the oversized game box weighs in at over 3 pounds. The second title expands the number of booklets to fourteen, with over 50,000 individual paragraphs.
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Wikipedia