We’re pretty nostolgic around here, aren’t you? Who doesn’t remember CD GAMES, DIR *.EXE commands from a misspent youth in Dos Gaming Landing? (Which is totally possible again, Thanks DosBox!)

We thought we would take some time in this space today to acknowledge and point out some of the older games that helped inspire Silent Space Rebellion!

The Classic Submarine Simulator

First up, we have Silent Service! (Which is totally on Steam? Who knew!) Silent Service is a classic, a World War II Submarine simulator that lets you sail the South Pacific hunting for enemy ships to destroy. This game provides you with all sorts of (now cheesy) graphics about your ship. Silent Service is a lot of fun to play, but the sequel Silent Service II is even better! It lets you patrol the ocean at will, choosing which fleets you want to engage with and how you want to attack.

While this is passingly similar to the play style of the older SSR, the newer Silent Space Rebellion has much more in common with…

ASCII DOS Games – Under The Gulf

This game is so old, this was the only screenshot we could find! Our developers remember it for being playable on old Monochrome PCs. One of them used to keep charts up on his walls while he played the simulator. This game is notable for having only a single control screen. Everything that needed to be managed on your sub was done through text menu options. The graphics themselves were nothing more then a top down view of your ship. This has much more in common with the modern Silent Space Rebellion interface, which attempts to hold true to a single screen for managing everything.

Story Inspirations

Of course, Silent Space Rebellion is about much more then just the game play. It’s about the much larger universe that we created for the game. The obvious influnces of Modern Science Fiction cannot ignore the vast contributions by Star Wars and Star Trek, but Star Trek attempts to explain everything away with Science and Star Wars has filled in the gaps with the many many storied adventures of it’s expanded universe. We decided much more vieled references were more fun – they made the universe seem larger, even if they never got followed up and used again, kind of like…

This game series did a wonderful job of dropping references to things that only appeared once, but added so much depth to the universe. Things like local band names, and ship names, down to who won the Bombers Cup are attended to in detailed manuals and fiction. Though you may hear of some of those things again, for the most part there are just there to give flavor to the world, something we are hoping to accomplish with Silent Space Rebellion!

We hope you enjoyed our (second) trip down memory lane…more then one hour was wasted playing one (or more) of these games before we wrote about them, our next blog post will be back to the future!