All week I have talking about Sci-Fi games and sci-fi themes. All of this has sent me back to the late 70s / early 80s when I was hard core into scifi and playing Traveller.
I had so many ideas back then for games. Most I'd never use or even admit to today. But back then they were awesome. You just have to take my word on that!
Again. This time was ripe for ideas in gaming. Anything seemed possible. I was already associating D&D and Star Wars together so when the 80s dawned, I threw MTV into the mix.
No one (except one other artist on my list tonight) looked more like a futuristic alien than Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls. "Space Age Love Song" was a lesser know, or at least lesser charting, song from their self titled album. But I always thought it was a great ode for the classic space age hero like Flash Gordon or John Carter.
Who was my idea of a Space Hero? It varied, but I knew his name. Major Tom.
Here is the other Alien artist on my list, David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust best, singing about our hero Major Tom in his "Space Oddity". This song appeared on his 1969 album of the same name. It was written as an homage to both Apollo 11 and 2001 A Space Oddity.
German born artist Peter Schilling heard "tell my wife I love her very much" and took his own stab at the story of Major Tom in "Major Tom (Coming Home)".
Major Tom finally made it into my games, but not till much, much later and as a riff on the movie "Lifeforce". Major Tom comes home but he is carrying a virus that starts a zombie plague in All Flesh Must Be Eaten.
You can also here/watch the original German version, Völlig Losgelöst and the really-cool-even-though-it-is-a-commercial version by Shiny Toy Guns.
Back to Bowie for bit. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars just BEGS to have a game made from it.
Ziggy played guitar...
Call me crazy. But I always wanted to write a game called "Space Truckers". It would be the unholy fusion of late 70s sci-fi and late 70s "trucker chic". It has not been an easy sell. Regardless of how the game comes out in needs to play like Deep Purple sounds.
Few rock acts can speak credibly on matters of scifi, let alone science. Few acts are Queen.
Brian May, the lead guitarist, writer and sometimes singer of Queen is also Dr. Brian May. He has a Ph.D. is astrophysics. "'39" from 1975's A Night at the Opera is song that grabbed me from the first time I ever heard it. The story of the song is that a man and 19 other astronauts leave on a spaceship to discover a new world. They return with good news of a new world. For them it's only been one year, for the Earth and his family it has been much longer. His wife is dead, his daughter is an old woman and his own grand children are there to meet him.
"Ne'er look back, never fear and never cry."
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