Now, I have my own role in this intricate space opera; it is my ship and my abilities that dictate who wins what, whether planets are Rebels or Confederates or simply blasted to rubble, whether people live or die. I can exercise my agency on this world, leaving my mark on that which had, long ago, felt so incomprehensibly massive, so innumerable. I start to recognize certain people bouncing around the universe, and they - for better or for worse - have begun to recognize me. I have ascended the ranks; I'm rocking the hottest gear appropriate for my political affiliations; maybe I've got my own planet or seven. My Rebellion has won, with me at its head, and all the alien invasions have been successfully repelled. But you know, once you're at the top, the only place to go is down.
So, maybe I'll take a break for a while. Go outside, read a book, eat some ice cream. But the beauty of Escape Velocity is that I can always come back, start over in my shuttlecraft in some backwater nowhere in the Milky Way, and work my way back up from a small fry to a big fish. And maybe this time I want to be the good guy. Or the guy with the particle beam instead of the cloaking device. Or the one with the alien technology. This is open-ended gaming done right, and it's up to me to decide what I want to be this time around. Perhaps I'll decide that I don't want to come back to this galaxy, and I'll find another one instead - one inspired by Star Wars, or Gundam, or maybe just strictly the product of someone else's imagination. And if I'm feeling particularly inventive, I can - thanks to an easily expandable game design, plethora of fairly easy-to-use, code-free tools and a fairly strong modding community - tell my own story to others if I feel so inclined.
Escape Velocity is more than just set in space; it is in love with space. It's not obsessing about cool ships and new weapons, or flying missions, or anything so gauche. It is the frontier vision we wish we had in our real lives, where we could leave everything behind and set out anew into a world far more expansive then we could ever hope to understand, and slowly we come to control it and make it ours, make it more our own space than our previous homes ever were, all by virtue of having shaped it however we see fit. And no matter how many times we conquer our new worlds, we will always search for more new frontiers to explore, and each time we will look at our expanding star maps and think, "Wow."
Space is big.
Pat Miller has been doing this for way too long.
