Alongside first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, the ’90s was also the golden era of space combat simulators. From Star Wars: X-Wing to Freespace 2, whipping out your joystick to blow up spaceships in nausea-inducing 3D spaceflight was a formative experience for every first-generation PC gamer.Among those space sims jostling for supremacy was Star Quest 1 in the 27th Century. Developed by Virtual Adventures Inc and released in November 1995, its defining feature was how it allowed seamless transition between open space and planetary atmospheres, which technically put it decades ahead of games like No Man’s Sky. Sadly, this wasn’t enough to make Star Quest a big success, and the game’s been largely forgotten in the interceding years.Until now, that is. Three decades since Star Quest first appeared, its designer Paul Lauzon has updated the space combat sim so that it works on modern machines, and re-released it over on itch. Best of all, you can download it for completely free.Lauzon announced the game’s rerelease over on Reddit. “I’m the original developer of Star Quest 1 in the 27th Century, first released in 1995,” he wrote in the post. “I spent the last few weeks updating it for a 30th Anniversary Edition so it runs on Windows without the need to install and configure a DOS emulator yourself. I also modified the code to support game controllers and joystick with HOTAS setup and revised the keyboard and mouse control too.”While Star Quest is primarily a game about dogfighting in space,…
