THE MAKING OF FREESPACE 2

The backstory behind the development of FreeSpace 2 sounds like a recipe for disaster. The first FreeSpace game – a spin-off from the Descent series – was released in 1998. “Once we saw FreeSpace selling well, both Interplay and Volition were interested in turning it into a series,” designer Adam Pletcher recalls. So far so good. The only problem was that development on the game didn’t begin until the end of 1998 and the developers were tasked with completing it for October 1999, giving them less than a year. You wouldn’t be surprised if what came out at the end of this rushed development cycle was a complete mess. But, somehow, the team at Volition created a classic of the space sim genre. Not only that: it was finished a month early.

To achieve this impressive turnaround, the team had to curb some of its early ambitions. “Two ideas I remember discussing were ship interiors and planets, but neither of those features would have been feasible in our short timeframe,” writer Jason Scott tells us. “We were planning a DLC pack set in the Sol system