The creators of Star Control dispute Stardock's rights to the franchise
The authors of the Star Control series, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III, unexpectedly attacked the Stardock company. Game designers claim that Stardock has no rights to the Star Control franchise, and she cannot sell games in the series.
Stardock officially bought the rights to Star Control from Atari at an auction in 2013, but this is not an argument for Ford and Reiche.
“In our opinion, the publishing rights to our games ceased 10 years before Atari put them up for auction. Therefore, we claim that Stardock has no rights to our games, including their code and other intellectual property. We did not give Stardock permission to sell three parts of Star Control,” the game designers said in a statement.
Ford and Reiche also reported that Stardock is hindering their work on the game Ghosts of the Precursors, which does not use the name Star Control, but is an ideological continuation of the titles of the series. The developers claim that Stardock filed a lawsuit for intellectual property infringement due to the fact that the names of alien races in Ghosts of the Precursors echo the names of aliens from Star Control.
After these statements, the GOG game store withdrew 1-2 parts of Star Control from sale, but they can still be purchased on the Stardock website.
Responding to the accusations, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell noted that the Star Control series games were sold under this license long before it was sold to Stardock, so it’s strange that Ford and Reiche only took care of it now.
Wardell acknowledged that the rights to the Star Control franchise were indeed transferred with a lot of ambiguities.
Commenting on the situation with Ghosts of the Precursors, the head of Stardock explained that the company does not interfere with the development of the title. At the same time, Stardock does not want the new creation of Ford and Reiche to be somehow associated with further products of the company, which is now working on restarting the Star Control franchise from scratch.
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