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Stardock and the non-sequel to Master of Magic

[caption id="attachment_54" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="Early screenshot from Elemental"]Early screenshot from Elemental [/caption]

Hot diggity damn.

Stardock, after teasing us for more than a year, has officially announced that they are producing a spiritual successor to the classic Master of Magic . The new title, Elemental: War of Magic , does not actually build off of the MoM license. However, MoM was a Magic: the Gathering / Civilization double rip-off with just enough differences to avoid the infringement police, so turn-about is fair play. :p More on the game in a moment.

Stardock, you may or may not recall, was the software development company that mostly did applications, with gaming as a kind of sideline hobby. Then, they released Galactic Civilizations II without any DRM. A Russian company that makes DRM then pointed to torrents of Stardock’s game as proof that piracy was a problem in their own forums . Widely seen as a blatant extortion attempt along the lines of "you sure got a lot of nice stuff here, be a shame if somebody started a fire or sumthin’," the story went huge in the geekosphere (slashdot, digg, etc…) which had the secondary effect of giving far more publicity to GalCiv than Stardock ever would have paid for. Since the game was awesome, this led to massive sales and, almost overnight, Stardock was a major game company. Their latest game, Sins of a Solar Empire , has also been rapturously received (it’s a hybrid 4x/RTS, and I don’t have the twitch reflexes for RTSes, so I’ve sadly passed).

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4Nov2008 | John | Comments Off | Continued