Most real-time strategy games of the late 1990s were played on a flat map seen from above. Homeworld has no ground. Its battles happen in open space, with fighters, frigates and capital ships manoeuvring above, below and around each other, and a camera that, in PC Zone’s words, “can be positioned at any angle and zoomed to any distance”. It was the first game from Relic Entertainment, a Vancouver start-up, and Computer Gaming World had named it Game of the Show at E3 in 1998, more than a year before it came out.
What players remembered just as much was the mood. Homeworld is one long journey. A people find a map in a ruin beneath the desert showing that their planet is not where their species began. They build a colossal mothership to go and find it, and while the ship is away on its hyperspace trials, an enemy destroys everything they left behind. “You have no choice left but to seek out this fabled ‘homeworld’,” PC Zone explained, “while pursued by the mysterious hostile force.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Relic Entertainment, Vancouver.
- Publisher: Sierra, 1999, for Windows PCs.
- Price: £34.99 in Britain (PC Zone); Edge listed it at £40.
- Music: Paul Ruskay, with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and a closing song by the rock band Yes.
- Awards: Computer Gaming World’s strategy game of the year.
- Source code: released by Relic in 2003.
A fleet that carries over
In most strategy games of the time, each mission started afresh. In Homeworld the fleet the player ends a mission with is the fleet they start the next one with, after a hyperspace jump. Computer Gaming World called the campaign “persistent and unconventional”. Everything depends on the mothership, which builds the ships, refits them and carries the survivors. “If your mothership goes, that’s it,” PC Zone warned. “Game over.”
That makes every loss matter. Ships gain experience as they survive battles, PC Zone noted, and “the trick is keeping them alive long enough in the early stages to do so”. Resource collectors, which mine asteroids and dust clouds for the materials that pay for everything else, are “among the most precious of your units”. The magazine’s reviewer was struck by an enemy that retreated to repair, refuel and rearm: “I honestly think it’s the first time I’ve seen a computer AI actually work to preserve its forces in a strategy game.”
The ships run from fighters and corvettes up to frigates and heavy cruisers, and the player can order them into formations such as “the Claw”. PC Zone’s favourites included the multi-gun corvette, with six turrets, and the ion cannon frigate, “useless against fast-moving fighters” but built to “slice through an enemy capital ship’s armour”. Its one real complaint was the research system, “little more than a way to ration out the introduction of each new unit type”.
Battlestar, and a piece of music
Relic’s founder, Alex Garden, was a fan of Battlestar Galactica, the American television series about the last survivors of humanity fleeing across space in search of Earth. PC Zone listed the parallels and noted that Garden “would dearly have loved to make the officially licensed Galactica game”. The licence did not come, and the game became “a thinly-disguised tribute” with its own people and its own lost planet.
The music came from a single moment. PC Zone told the “well documented” story of Garden’s flash of inspiration on hearing Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings one morning, and found the piece “as stirring and hauntingly beautiful as ever” alongside the opening scenes, though the rest of the soundtrack, by Paul Ruskay, did not quite match it. The game also brought in Yes: the band’s singer, Jon Anderson, wrote a song based on it for the album The Ladder. “We’re all trying to find our way home,” he said.
Reception
PC Zone called Homeworld “the most rewarding game you’ll play this year” and said it felt “like being in command of any giant space battle you’ve ever seen in a film or sci-fi television show”. Edge was more measured, giving it eight out of ten: “enormously enjoyable”, it “prods realtime strategy in a new direction”, though big battles could slow the engine down. Computer Gaming World made it its strategy game of the year, praising “the incredible 3D spatial design, coupled with an easy-to-use camera system”, and compared it with Half-Life: both were debuts from new developers, both published by Sierra, and both set a mood and kept it to the end.
The series
Homeworld: Cataclysm (2000) was a stand-alone expansion made not by Relic but by Barking Dog Studios, another Vancouver developer, and set fifteen years after the first game. Relic made Homeworld 2 (2003). In September 2003 it released the original game’s source code for non-commercial use through its developer network; the game’s art and video were not included, so players still needed the CD.
When THQ, which had bought Relic in 2004, went bankrupt, Gearbox Software bought the Homeworld rights at auction in April 2013. It released the Homeworld Remastered Collection, with both games rebuilt in high definition, in 2015. Blackbird Interactive, a studio founded by former Homeworld developers, made a ground-based prequel, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak (2016), and Homeworld 3, which Gearbox published in May 2024.
Released source code
- Homeworld (1999): released by Relic Entertainment on 26 September 2003 through the Relic Developers Network, for non-commercial use; the game’s data and videos were not included.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 170, September 1998, p. 66: E3 Game of the Show; the campaign “persistent and unconventional” (see Relic Entertainment).
- PC Zone issue 73, February 1999, pp. 42–43: Alex Garden and Battlestar Galactica (see Relic Entertainment).
- PC Zone issue 82, November 1999, pp. 72–77: review (£34.99; the story; the mothership; experience; resource collectors; the enemy’s retreat; the unit guide; Adagio for Strings, Paul Ruskay’s score and Jon Anderson; the Battlestar Galactica parallels; the research system).
- Edge issue 77, Autumn 1999, p. 75: review, eight out of ten.
- Computer Gaming World issue 188, March 2000, p. 78: Premier Awards, Strategy Game of the Year (Adagio for Strings; the comparison with Half-Life).
- Computer Gaming World issue 189, April 2000, pp. 61–66: Homeworld: Cataclysm (stand-alone; fifteen years after Homeworld; “Vancouver-based Barking Dog Studios”).
- Edge issue 251, March 2013, p. 93: Paul Ruskay as Homeworld’s composer.
- Edge issue 254, June 2013, p. 72: Blackbird Interactive, “made by former Homeworld developers”.
- LinuxFr.org, “Relic Entertainment ouvre le code source de Homeworld”, 2003 (web, secondary): the source release of 26 September 2003 and its conditions. https://linuxfr.org/news/relic-entertainment-ouvre-le-code-source-de-homeworld
- “Gearbox acquires Homeworld from THQ”, Game Informer, 22 April 2013, and Engadget, 22 April 2013 (web, secondary). https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/22/gearbox-acquires-homeworld-from-thq.aspx
- “‘Homeworld: Remastered’ is beautiful, but it’s not the sequel you want”, Engadget, 24 February 2015 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2015-02-24-homeworld-remastered-review.html
- Wikipedia, “Homeworld (video game)” and “Homeworld 3” (web, secondary): release dates; Deserts of Kharak; Homeworld 3 (Blackbird Interactive, Gearbox Publishing, 13 May 2024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeworld_(video_game)