Star Control II

Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, a 1992 adventure shoot 'em up for MS-DOS, was created by Toys for Bob (Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III) and published by Accolade. This direct sequel to Star Control drops the first game's strategy layer to focus on story and dialogue, letting players explore an open universe with over 500 stars and 3800 planets. Players navigate hyperspace, gather resources, build a fleet, and engage in real-time one-on-one spaceship battles where each of the 25 alien races has unique weapons and abilities. The combat mode, Super Melee, can be played separately and includes ships from both Star Control games, while the story mode limits players to vessels earned from sympathetic aliens and upgrades their capital ship. The game was ported to 3DO by Crystal Dynamics in 1994 with enhanced multimedia, and its source code was released under GPL-2.0-or-later in 2002 (game content under CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5), forming the basis for the open-source project The Ur-Quan Masters. A sequel, Star Control 3, followed in 1996.

The plot picks up after the Alliance of Free Stars is defeated by the Hierarchy of Battle Thralls. An Earthling ship discovered a Precursor installation in the Vela system, but a Hierarchy offensive stranded the science expedition. Decades later, a genius child born on the planet activated the Precursor machinery, which built an advanced starship only that child could pilot. The expedition commander died protecting the ship from an unknown probe, leaving the young man in command. The player starts as that captain, returning to find Earth enslaved by the Ur-Quan. They rally a skeleton crew from Earth's starbase and seek allies among the galaxy's races, learning that former allies have been eradicated, enslaved, or turned into battle thralls. The Ur-Quan are locked in a civil war with the genocidal Kohr-Ah, and the winner gains the Sa-Matra, a powerful Precursor battle platform. The captain must recruit races, gather resources, and destroy the Sa-Matra before the Ur-Quan become unstoppable. Along the way, they encounter the Chenjesu and Mmrnmhrm merging into a composite species, and capture a Dnyarri—the psychic race that once enslaved the galaxy and sparked the Ur-Quan's rampage.