Angelfish wrote:Death 999 wrote:Who holds the rights to the aliens?
It can be Star-Control-like without them. It can be a great game! But it won't actually be Star Control.
Like, if you made a Star Wars story without any of the particular characters, Jedi, the Sith, or anything else to do with the Force, the aliens, the places, the political structures, the ship designs, or the particular technologies.
You can have a Star-Wars-like story then, too. It just won't be Star Wars.
Not true.
Star trek Enterprise didn't include any characters from Star trek the next generation, yet it WAS Star trek.
Characters, yes. But that was an 'or' list. Characters OR Force OR aliens OR particular places OR political structures OR ship designs OR particular technologies.
Star Control barely has a consistent sense of political structure if you exclude mention of the aliens, and even less consistent sense of technologies (each of the three installments used a completely different method of travel, for instance, unlike Star Wars or Star Trek), and there are exactly two ship designs (two slightly different versions of the cruiser) that would be available without invoking aliens. Using particular places other than the Earth would be very limiting if not allowed to use particular Aliens - before alien contact, we had nowhere to go, and after, we would expect them to be present.
So the only threads we would really have left to call it Star Control in particular are History and Aliens. And without the Aliens, the History can't be the same.
So you're left with just a general mood. That's easily enough to make it Star Control-like.