Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.

By pure coincidence, after playing Star Control 2 when I was about 8, my family moved to Novato, CA - home to Toys for Bob - when I was a bit older. I ended up getting a temp contract job there on the Madagascar game when I was 19. Paul and Fred were great to work with and as far as I know TfB is still a great place to work.

I doubt that Paul and Fred would have actually disappeared to write the game, but the story is 100% Paul's sense of humor.

It makes me happy to hear that, thank you for your reply.

You don't need to create everything with modern AAA standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula. Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow nonexistent.

If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing really interesting and unusual things.

Off the top of my head:

- Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop)

- Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)

- Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and builds)

- Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the player to use different strategies with every playthrough)

- Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)

- Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)

- Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game where your cards represent different types of conversation)

- Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?... and trying to figure out what happened)

- Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also objects in the game that can be moved and changed)

- Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality 90's internet)

- The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions, or not following them and irritating the narrator)

- The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games of another developer, possibly without their approval)

Of this list, I've seen ads of most on Steam and checked the reviews. That's not what I'm talking about. Most of your list is still one genre, maybe with some new mechanics (not so new in Hades, for example, I've seen shades of this in 1992's Ragnarok).

What I was talking about are games like Star Control 2 and Dune 1, where they boldly mixed completely different genres and, in SC2 case, added a very deep lore and managed to feed it to you at the right pace, not overwhelming you with information, and giving it in entertaining way.

For example, I would love some nice space RPG with FTL-like space combat. But they just don't mix genres that way these days.

StarSector - ~Star Control

RimWorld - "sims"

AFAIK RimWorld is more like Dwarf Fortress