My name is Martin Lettvin. I am such a Star Control zealot that I've had it in my news feeds for years even though the property stagnated for two decades. I feel I must have been one of the first few to learn the news of Stardock's acquisition of the property from Atari back in July 2013 (less than a week after my birthday) through Anthony Suarez's Star Controller blog.
Even before then, I knew of Brad Wardell's interest in the property, and his determination to be the high bidder for the property at Atari's bankruptcy auctions. I even asked Paul Reiche what he thought of Stardock acquiring the franchise before the bankruptcy sale; don't know if he was just playing dumb, but he claimed to know less than I did about it! So excited that the series is in capable hands that understand what Star Control was then, and what it can be in the future.
We have all patiently painfully waited for a worthy followup since playing SC2 back in 1993, and I'm sure most of us are flabbergasted to remind ourselves it's been nearly a quarter century since then. I was barely 11 years old when SC1 came out, maybe 13 when SC2 hit shelves. They came on these things called floppy disks that had to be individually loaded into the computer one at a time, taking several minutes to transfer a single measly megabyte of data to a hard drive. There was no internet as we know it today. I grew up on dialup BBS communities before a short stint on AOL, years before web browsers were commonplace, and I'm rather stupidly nostalgic for those days.
Even though SC3 failed to capture the spirit of the game that had an impression on all of us, I enjoyed the characterizations and dialog a lot. While part of me is disappointed that the old canon isn't involved in this new story direction, the other part of me is even more delighted to know there are completely new stories to be told.
The UQM timeline has been played out ad nauseum in fan fiction, and in our own imaginations. Having no preconceived notions of what to expect is very exciting; the same feeling as when we first piloted our Precursor vessel back home into our solar system not knowing what we were about to discover.