Derek Smart Lusting Rights To Freespace?

WMCoolmon writes "Derek Smart (of Battlecruiser 3000 AD PC space-sim fame) has started a thread on the Adrenaline Vault forums stating that he is looking into buying the Freespace rights from Interplay and building his own Freespace 3. (For those of you who have not heard of Freespace, it is a space shooter developed by Volition Inc. and Interplay in 1998, which has received almost univeral acclaim.) Discussion has turned particularly ugly following Derek Smart's post on the main Freespace 2 fan site. In addition, he has threatened to shut down the Ferrium Project (an open-source project meant to replace the aging engine of Freespace 2) if he gets the license. To quote Derek: 'I have FULL intentions of getting this license. If I DO get it, you and your teenny leetle friends on your Ferrous Oxide project, are effectively, shutdown because I don't piss around when it comes to IP properties'."

Comments

I did not think it was possible.

[DAldredge]

I didn't think it was possible, but he is worse than Theo (OpenBSD).

My goodness, he appears to have a chip on his sholder about 1000 miles wide and IIRC didn't it take years for BC 3000 AD to be patched enough to have the features listed on the back of the box?

Re:My first experience of slashdot bias

[carcosa30]

Just so you know, Derek Smart has been famous (as a dickwad) since maybe 1993 or thereabouts. He has a long and checkered history of attempting to do all manner of things, failing miserably, and then attacking his detractors, in court or elsewhere.

People don't attack a random game developer this way for no reason and for that length of time unless there's a good deal of substance to the rumors. Check out BC3000AD and you'll see what I mean.

Someone making FS3 would be good

[bmnc]

But I'm not convinced Derek Smart is the person to make that happen. I think his games are over ambitious, unfocussed and buggy. I bought BC3000AD and sequel, given that I thought the ideas sounded good, but neither was *actually playable*.

While I love the FS series, and would love to know how it continues, I doubt Derek Smarts ability to do it properly, and I doubt he even has the inclination to make a FS3 game properly. I suspect he'd prefer to take over the IP and then make some sort of massive space sim game where you could command troops on planets, move armadas, trade, mine asteroids for ore, research new technologies, build the great library to steal inventions from the alien species, etc... you get my drift.

Re:My first experience of slashdot bias

[rev_dru]

Wow, I've never heard of this guy before today.

If I treated people the same way he treats people, I'd probably be posting this comment from a hospital bed somewhere.

I'm seriously surprised he hasn't been killed in some kind of real-life drunken fight.

I fear Derek Smart

[ThePyro]

In a forum thread, Derek Smart mentioned plans for *mouse control* in flights, and *planet side missions* (As in, get out of your space fighter and run around on foot).

If those are his "revolutionary" ideas for the Freespace universe, then I fear that he doesn't understand what makes a space combat sim truly enjoyable. At the very least, someone should force him to play all the way through the previous game, and maybe Descent 3, using a really good joystick...

Rolling, banking, afterburning all over the place, laser fire screaming past you, dodging homing missiles left and right, huge beam weapons slicing capital ships apart in the background... THAT's a space combat sim. Not running around on a planet somewhere collecting goo. Not constantly picking your mouse up because you ran out of mouse pad.

Re:So He (DS) Threatened us With Legal Action

[Anonymous Coward]

"Furthermore any game content we distribute is protected by the laws protecting fan fiction."

What? You mean like no laws, right?

Re:From his forum - He is supreme Cmdr.

[Luigi30]

He sued a site that gave BC3000 a bad review, and threatened to sue SomethingAwful for saying he was arrested for bank fraud.