Trivia / Starsiege

• Acclaimed Flop: The first games critical praise was very high; It was one of Computer Gaming Worlds highest rated games of the year, and was nominated for a couple awards as well. However, the game sold horribly in its first year (By the end of 1999 it didn't even sell half of its needed minimum to make a profit) and the commercial results ended up in massive layoffs at Dynamix, and its eventual closing two years later. Thankfully, time has been kind to it.
• Acting for Two: Mark Hamill is the voice of both Harabec and Caanon Weathers, though Caanon's vocal register is lower.
• Dueling Works: Starsiege and the Metaltech series as a whole were this for the MechWarrior series, as one of the other prominent Walking Tank Real Robot combat sims.
• Dummied Out: There's a lot of artifacts of development in Starsiege which, rather than being removed from the game upon release, had simply been "commented out" of the game files. Some examples:
  • There were originally plans to make the airskimmers (the Banshee, Draco, Advocate and Consul) pilotable, and the flyers' scripts that allow for this remain in the game—however, as fans discovered, only the Banshee and Advocate flew in any capacity, and were only barely pilotable as they behaved more like they were balancing on a column of air. However, with some modding, fans corrected some of these issues and even implemented landing/takeoff functions.
  • Many other vehicles, particularly some mentioned in the Compendium, can also be made playable in this fashion. Want to drive the self-propelled artillery the Rebels and Cybrids use? How about the Rebels' Hammertank? Or the Imperial Suppressor and Nike Siege Gun? Go for it!
  • In addition to vehicles which were simply left unplayable but still visible in-game, there's two vehicles which have no presence at all in-game or in-story. One of them is a Lethal Joke Character, the Starsiege Universe Assault Vehicle, AKA the Magic Bus—an in-game representation of the tour bus Dynamix used for marketing. The other, however, is the Pouncer Assault Bike, seemingly meant to be a small one-hardpoint raiding vehicle used by the Rebels.
  • Weapons and internal components, as revealed in the game files, had also been dummied out in this way. Command-detonated demolition charges and a Kill Sat weapon called the Finger of God.
• Life Imitates Art: The Scannex feature of the O-Web predates the rise of microblogging social media by at least six or seven years. Sites like Twitter, particularly by the mid-2010s, turned out to be scarily similar to the Scannex as seen in Starsiege, right down to individuals using it for politically-charged flame wars or to contest what's reported on mainstream media.
  • In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter and announced his intention to use it as the foundation for X, an "everything app" he'd sought to create for decades (PayPal is actually a byproduct of early attempts at that in The '90s). The following year, he rebranded Twitter entirely into X. Six more letters, and we'd have a literal incarnation of Starsiege's Scannex!
• What Could Have Been: Much like with Dummied Out, evidence of changed or curtailed plans during development abound.
  • The game was originally going to have a third campaign, starring the Imperials. Although it was scrapped, one with a good eye will find its leftovers in the game and manual, where it is sometimes even directly referenced.
  • Game files make reference to additional locations, such as Europa. Given that the Human campaign seems oddly abridged after the Yoke Offensive, with many of the battles mentioned in the Timeline and Scannex happening unseen, it's possible there were many missions and locations that had to be cut due to time constraints.
  • Harabec and Caanon Weathers originally had different voice actors—and some of their lines remained in the game, usable for multiplayer Quickchats.
  • The Dreadlock looked significantly different at first, as seen in the Compendium. It appeared to be a much larger bulldozer on four treads, and mounting only one hardpoint. The Compendium's listing of in-game vehicles shows the Dreadlock as it is seen in-game with only one weapon mounted, as if in a nod to this original design.
  • Concept art included in the Compendium shows that the Rebels had an additional tank and a flyer that do not appear in the released game. The tank looks like a repurposed tunneling machine with two weapon hardpoints, and in the concept art is shown to be ramming a Knight's Gorgon◊ and throwing it off-balance. The flyers, in fact, appear in the introductory movie as well, suggesting that they had been cut from the game later in development.
  • Many pieces of artwork in the Compendium show the Emancipator mounting a long-barreled weapon on its top hardpoint. There's no weapon like this in the released game. It doesn't appear to be a weapon from the Tharsis cache.
  • In a double-dose of "what could have been," the Compendium also includes concept art of unused Imperial HERC designs. The aborted Fan Sequel Starsiege: 2845 would have resurrected one of them as a Colonial purpose-built war machine equal to the Basilisk, dubbed the Medusa.
  • The EarthSiege 3: Future Wars teaser trailers (namely this first one and this later one) reveal a game that is both very similar to, and very different from, the final product.
    • The Cybrids already had much of their look finalized—in the initial trailer we can see the Goad, Executioner, and Adjudicator warforms look very close to how they appear in the released game, as well as other units like the Nexus. There are differences, though, most notably in the Seeker. In the released game, Seekers are the fastest HERCs in the setting, mounting two weapons on their "hips." However, one trailer shows them as taller and much slower beasties, and sporting actual arms resembling that of a Tyrannosaurus.
    • Human forces, by contrast, were much different. The only faction on display appeared to be called "VECI" at this time, and their vehicles all seemed to have an aesthetic somewhere between Art Deco and classical marble statues. The seemingly only vehicle at this stage that made it to release is, ironically, the Apocalypse—the only other human vehicles seen at this point were some kind of tank and flyer.
    • Speaking of those flyers, in the second trailer we see the essentially complete version of the Cyrbid Shepherd HERC and the Advocate flyer. The first trailer, though, featured a strange sled-like Cybrid flyer in addition to the human one, which was similarly bulky with a tiny engine. Notably, this early trailer showed an in-cockpit view of these flyers, suggesting that pilotable flying vehicles had been a planned feature practically from the beginning of development.