As a big fan of the games, I went to see the Wing Commander movie on opening night. (A quick aside about just how different things were back then: the last game in the Wing Commander series, Prophecy, sold so well that EA decided to release the expansion pack for free. EA released an expansion pack for free (well, to be fair, Electronic Arts did; they may have started calling themselves EA (I don't recall when that began), but the transformation was far from complete). No hidden fees, no gimmicks, no catches- well, one sort-of catch; it was released only online, and downloading a file that big (somewhere around 175 megs, if I recall correctly) on a 56k line was absolute murder, especially since this was before widespread download resuming programs.) Now, some people will tell you that the movie was okay; I am not one of them. The movie had the first preview for the Phantom Menace, and I maintain that that was the best part of the movie, and I say that having seen The Phantom Menace. I don't know how you screw up so many things, including (and I didn't see a single critic pick up on this) spelling the names of your own characters wrong. The core problem, as I later gathered, was that Roberts had no experience as a filmmaker, and rapidly got in way over his head.
So: making movies is a lot harder than it looks from the outside. Fair enough. Lesson learned? Well, twelve years later, Roberts comes roaring back, announcing that technology has finally caught up to his vision, and he wants to make a new game, bigger and more ambitious than anything he'd ever done before- possibly bigger and more ambitious than anything anyone had ever done before! So, no. Lesson not learned. Your last game had some major problems, mister Roberts, and I have to imagine that game-making has changed since 2000; game-playing certainly has. So do you want to slide in with a simpler project, maybe get back into the groove and see how the landscape has changed before you promise the moon and stars? I guess not.
MMO's bore the snot out of me. That's fine; I'm not the target market. Even so, I'd love to see Star Citizen come out of the gate a roaring success, silencing its detractors and proving that it was worth the wait- but I don't that's going to happen. I suspect it's going to tank, and take Squadron 42 with it. I suspect it's also going to do serious damage to the perceived legitimacy of crowdfunding, at least for video games, and that frightens me more. With all this proposed feature creep and project bogging down, it's almost like... Oh. Oh no. Does anyone know if Chris Roberts has ever been seen at the same time as Peter Molyneux?