Video Game / SubSpace

Meet people from all over the world ... then kill them.

3:57 - 1 - Entered Alpha Zone in a Leviathan.
3:58 - 2 - Was swarmed by internet pilots from all over the world.
4:01 - 3 - Got Greens to improve ship.
4:08 - 4 - Met Tokyo Flyer and Laughing Boy. They seemed nice ...
4:09 - 5 - Killed Laughing Boy. The points were nicer.
4:12 - 6 - Flew to Safety Zone. Nature called . . .

—Player's log, from the box art

SubSpace (also known as SubSpace: The Internet Game) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game in the style of top-down Newtonian Shoot 'Em Ups like Spacewar! and Asteroids. Created by Virgin Interactive Entertainment's Burst Studios—particularly through the efforts of Jeff "JeffP" Petersen, Rod "rodvik" Humble, and Juan Sanchez—the project first took shape as Sniper, intended to test the viability of such an online game in the face of network latency. Initial feedback (especially the outcry when they decided to end alpha testing) convinced Burst and Virgin Interactive Entertainment (VIE) to keep developing the game.

Sniper became SubSpace upon its return as a beta test in February 1996, fully becoming a public beta test later that year. During this time, Burst Studios added more ships and content. Rumors that VIE planned to make SubSpace a subscription-based game like other MMOs never substantiated. Not only did the game remain free to play for that year, it received sponsorship from companies like Pepsi for its competitive Pro League scene. At this time, SubSpace boasted 1,500 peak active players and over 850,000 registered players—not too shabby for The '90s.

VIE implemented a retail model by October 1997, with box copies hitting shelves in December. Clients from the betas now acted as Shareware and only allowed a limited amount of play time. However, VIE also provided the server software to the playerbase free of charge, allowing for players to make their own zones with custom rulesets. This led to a flourishing Game Mod scene, with a plethora of custom zones using their own unique rulesets and (later on down the line) graphics and sounds.

Yet, all was not well at VIE. The company went bankrupt around November 1998, and with its closure the central billing server also shut down. Although alternative hosts stepped in to keep the game going, the loss of VIE's servers exposed the playerbase to a pandemic of hacking and cheating. In spite of all the cheating eroding the playerbase, SubSpace's community wasn't about to let the game fade away.

BaudChaser, a player from the competitive Euro League, formed the SubSpace Council (SSC) to coordinate the community's efforts. The SSC launched a new and better-protected central billing server that mitigated some of the cheating. Then, Priit "PriitK" Kasesalu (who incidentally helped develop Kazaa and Skype) and Mr Ekted reverse-engineered the original SubSpace client without any access to the source code. This allowed the release of a new client, Continuum, which helped immensely in combating cheating and hacking. Ever since, the SSC network only permits Continuum to connect to its shared login servers.

As a result, many in the community now refer to SubSpace as SubSpace Continuum instead—in fact, that's the game's name on Steam when Valve greenlit it in 2015. (Continuum doesn't require Steam, though, and can be downloaded separately if desired. You can even still run it on a Windows 95 or 98 machine for that authentic 90's gaming experience!)

Not to be confused with "The Subspace Emissary" from Super Smash Bros., Stargate: Continuum, the Canadian TV series Continuum, or the webcomic Continuum.

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SubSpace provides examples of:

• 2-D Space: A natural consequence of a top-down space game with no "Z-axis" movement. All ships have the same orientation in space, naturally—though they do temporarily roll when turning while actively using their thrusters.
• Animal Theme Naming: Most ships have an animal or creature namesake—Warbird, Spider, Leviathan, Terrier, Weasel, Shark. The Nightwasp also fit this pattern. The Javelin and Lancaster are the Odd Names Out.
  • Going further, in the original SubSpace client the Terrier's dual guns are called twin "Hound" ion guns.
• Art Evolution: Many examples of this—
  • Although ships which appeared in the early Sniper builds (Warbird, Javelin, Spider and Leviathan) returned in SubSpace proper, they had drastically different appearances in Sniper. The Warbird looked closer to the F-35, for example, while the Javelin looked like something Flash Gordon would've flown, and the Spider looked more like a fuzzy pear. The Leviathan looked most similar to its SubSpace incarnation, but still visibly very different. Many other graphics, tilesets, and sounds also received overhauls with the release of SubSpace.
  • The icon for the Superpower timer is the same graphic that Sniper used for prizes—and speaking of prizes, what became the "engine shutdown" Poison Mushroom was originally called "sticky glue." (In fact, the server setting that determines the chance of picking up this prize is still called "PrizeWeight:Glue.")
  • Bullets looked very different. They resembled stars from ZZT in their animation cycle, with yellow bullets being Level 1, red being Level 2, and both superimposed on each other for Level 3. Bouncing bullets had a blue pixel in the center.
  • Bombs also had a different look. Level 1 bombs were red, Level 2 bombs green, and Level 3 bombs looked like a prototype of the Thor—albeit neon green and with an exaggerated squashing and stretching animation cycle.
  • SubSpace's client received a graphical overhaul during development, changing from a simple Windows-based user interface to something more immersive. The Continuum client, while less impressive visually, allows for custom user interface skins.
• Asteroid Thicket: Asteroids litter the SVS zones, usually ship-sized or half as big. Like the rest of the scenery, they're impervious and immobile.
• Attack Reflector: The Repel powerup grants ships a one-time use of a powerful shock wave that not only repels weapons, but enemy ships as well. You can imagine the sheer chaos this causes in tight spaces, especially when combined with Burst or bouncing bullets and bombs.
• Battle Royale Game: The basic premise of SubSpace is very close to the modern Battle Royale genre. When you enter a zone (or respawn) your ship is very weak and underpowered, and you must quickly power up your ship by collecting prizes ("greening") lest you get picked off by other players. Zones can have up to 250 players fighting at once. The major difference is that, at least in this default mode, there's no matches—gameplay is continuous and players who die simply respawn. The score accumulated from bounty and kills get added to the player's running total for that zone.
• Bland-Name Product: In supplementary material, most of the ships had manufacturers and model numbers just like real aircraft. In most cases these referenced real life aircraft manufacturers—
  • OConner Domanic HA-46 Warbird (McDonnell Douglas ^note Both manufacturers have patronymic Irish surnames followed by a surname that starts with a D)
  • Crummand FC-12/O Javelin (Grumman)
  • Loakhaed RSC17 Spider (Lockheed)
  • Ivangrad UT-59 Leviathan
  • Blight Aerospace NU-34 Terrier (Possibly Wright Aeronautical)
  • Avro 4F/2 HMS Lancaster (Avro)
  • Yamakazi Sholi Znk/0-1 Weasel (Possibly Kawasaki Aircraft Industries)
  • Lezarwerks SY/9 Shark (Possibly Raytheon ^note Raytheon literally means "light from the gods," and the Shark's manufacturer is literally "laser works.")
• Bottomless Fuel Tanks: You're never going to run out of juice for your thrusters. Hitting the afterburner will drain your ship's energy reserves, but your ship continually recharges energy.
• Capture the Flag: Several different items in the game count as flags. These include stationary flags that change ownership when a ship flies over them, portable flags that must be held for a certain time before they change ownership and automatically drop, and a powerball that acts like a soccer ball. These led to a number of game modes—
  • Basing: A single stationary flag within a fortified base. Teams must take and hold the base. Other games might call this "King of the Hill," but that's a different mode entirely in SubSpace.
  • Flagging: This is where you'd be most likely to find portable flags that must be held onto until they drop. Flagging zones typically have multiple base-like structures teams could fortify to hoard their flags. These modes either have defined matches, or provide point bonuses to the team who manages to collect and hold onto all the flags.
  • Turf: Similar to Basing, except with stationary flags in multiple locations in the zone. Like Flagging, these modes either have defined matches or reward the dominating team with periodic point bonuses.
  • Running: In Running Zones, flags don't have a drop timer, and the only way to acquire flags yourself is to kill enemy flag carriers or find neutral flags that haven't been picked up yet.
  • Bounty Rabbit: Similar to Running Zones—except there's only one flag, and whoever has it is the "Rabbit." Killing the "Rabbit" nets the killer a hefty bounty bonus, but doing so makes one the new "Rabbit." This mode has defined matches, and the person with the highest score at the end of a match wins.
  • Soccer: This is the mode where the powerball comes into play, as teams must compete to grab the ball and shoot it into the opponent's goal. The team with the most goals at the end of a match wins.
• Cast from Hit Points: Firing guns, launching bombs, deploying mines, hitting the afterburner or using activating certain special powers granted by prizes all draw from a ship's energy reserves—which also act as the ship's health.
• Collision Damage: Utterly averted, in spite of the genre. Ships pass right over/under each other without incident. You also won't suffer damage hitting the scenery, and instead bounce right off like a pinball no matter how fast you hit an obstacle. The only thing that can damage or destroy ships are weapons.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Bullets and bombs have four strength levels denoted by their color. From weakest to strongest—red, yellow, blue, purple. (The lattermost only being accessible under certain circumstances.) Zones with custom graphics, of course, can and do vary.
• Concussion Frags: Ships can upgrade their bombs with shrapnel, increasing the amount of shrapnel released per bomb with every upgrade. The shrapnel "bullets" have their own levels of strength, color coded just like bullets and bombs, and can be upgraded to bounce off of obstacles.
• Cosmetic Award: During the pre-release beta, if you had the highest score in the zone, no matter what ship you flew it instead appeared as the "Nightwasp." This didn't confer any special advantages. In fact, veterans complained that becoming the Nightwasp encouraged other players to hunt them down exclusively, killing them over and over even if they were still in a weakened "neg" state.
  • The retail launch removed the Nightwasp, but added a small spinning SubSpace logo that appears next to the name of the highest-scoring player to make it a little less obvious.
• Critical Existence Failure: Your ship continually recharges (unless hit by EMP) and functions without issue no matter how much of a pounding you take. In fact, you can turn on every energy-draining ability, fire your guns and bombs, hit the afterburner until you run dry—even though you can make your ship hit zero energy, you'll suffer no ill effect. However, if you take a hit that would put you below zero energy, your ship instantly explodes.
  • Early on it used to be possible to destroy your own ship if your bombs detonated right nearby, but the devs changed it so that you can't make your own energy reserve drop below zero—not even with point-blank detonations.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The original VIE client had a pre-rendered introductory video showcasing most of the ships (except for the Shark) in a vicious free-for-all near Earth orbit. The footage is very unlike actual gameplay—
  • It's a fully three-dimensional battle. Instead of the kind of delta-v maneuvering required in-game, the ships behave more like they're flying in air.
  • Ships don't need to "green" to power up before entering the fray. (Though that might help explain why two of the trio of Warbirds got effortlessly mowed down by incoming fire.) In fact, prizes don't appear at all, not even as a background event.
  • The ships have much faster-firing guns, comparable to how fast Arwings fire in the Star Fox series. The shots also have much more velocity of their own, again, similar to Arwing shots. Who knows—this discrepancy might have even inspired the earliest custom zones. Also, the shots appear as white bursts of energy rather than color-coded according to their strength.
  • The trio of Leviathans pummel a Lancaster with their salvo of Level 3 bombs, sending it spinning out control ... and smashing into a Terrier, destroying both of them. The game doesn't allow for collisions between ships, nor can ships take damage from hitting anything that's not a weapon.
• Deployable Cover: The Brick powerup lets you deploy a small wall of blocks. While it's passable by you and ships on your frequency, and you and your allies can shoot through it, enemy ships can't do the same—unless they use a Thor's Hammer.
• Doppelgänger Spin: Picking up a Decoy powerup lets a ship deploy a fake copy of itself. The decoy inherits the velocity and direction of the ship that released it, doesn't lose inertia when colliding with something, and turns whenever the original ship does—just in the opposite direction. They're harmless and can't be damaged.
• Easter Egg: There's a few, such as the "?sheep" command which displays a message that's customizable for the zone. There's also "bong" sounds which include a number of joke clips that zone sysops can broadcast. Among them: fart noises, an angry redneck ("Listen to me, you pebble-fartin' snot licker!"), a sheep bleating, a soundbyte from a 1960s Justice League record, another soundbyte from a famous early 90's AT&T commercial, and the sound of gamers frantically panicking.
  Gamer #1: I CAN'T LOG IN!
  Gamer #2 (interposing): My machine can't—
  Gamer #3 (interposing): Crashed again!
  Gamer #2: —download the update!
  Gamer #3: Oh the humanity ...
  Gamer #1: IT'S ON FIYAH!
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Every ship has one, but they won't detect ships actively using the Stealth powerup. However, if a ship has the X-Radar powerup active, it'll detect stealthed ships. On top of this, in SVS zones the Weasel can detect mines on the radar, while the Shark can detect bombs.
• EMP: The Weasel's bread and butter—its bombs and mines cause less damage than other ships, but temporarily disables energy regeneration.
• Energy Weapon: How the ships' guns, bombs, and mines work—which helps explain why they have no ammunition of their own, but instead draw from the ships' energy reserve. Supplemental material referred to bombs as "plasma bombs" and, in the case of the Terrier, guns as "ion guns."
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Better said, every projectile is a tracer. Whether it's a ship's guns or bombs, Burst shrapnel, or the Thor's Hammer superweapon, they're all very bright and visible, and often have glittering trails so players can better judge their direction and velocity.
• Expy: If the Javelin's appearance◊ reminds you of the F-14 Tomcat◊ that's not by accident. After all, Grumman was the Tomcat's manufacturer, and the Javelin's manufacturer is Crummand.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: A ship's guns and bombs fire directly forward—although if you pick up the Multifire powerup, your shots fire in a spread.
• Fragile Speedster: There's two different takes on this trope among the ships when playing in SVS zones—
  • The Warbird's game is agility. It has the best turning rate and best thrust. Of the two, this is the ship better suited to fighting once decently upgraded.
  • The Javelin has the best top speed—though it also has the worst thrust. This ship is better for hit-and-run, interception, or rushing to capture flags or grab the ball in certain modes.
• Friendly Fireproof: Ships on the same frequency can't damage each other.
• Fusion Dance: Ships can attach to other ships on the same frequency, transforming into turrets visible in the center of the "receiving" ship. In this way, they act as Power Boosters. (This same mechanic also allows ships to quickly travel across the zone by warping to and then detaching from another ship.) Multiple ships can attach to a single ship, creating truly heinous concentrations of firepower—however, the combined ships don't get more resilient. Attaching to another ship requires full energy, and becoming a turret almost completely consumes your reserves—so trying to attach in the middle of a firefight will certainly end you. And, while it's possible for turrets to survive destruction of their recipient, in practice anything which would destroy the "driver" will take out the whole group.
• Game Mod: Players developed many, many custom zones that have their own rulesets over the years. Some even have their own completely different graphics and sounds. The longest-running custom zones include Trench Wars, Extreme Games, Hockey Zone and Death Star Battle—the former three an example of zones that mostly customize the ruleset, while the latter-most gradually turned into a Star Wars-themed total conversion. Other zones come and go—for a time there was 17th Parallel, a custom ruleset zone inspired by The Vietnam War. Many "total conversion" zones also existed over the years, dedicated to Dragon Ball, Metal Gear, and Wing Commander—just to name a few.
• Glass Cannon: At first glance, the Leviathan appears like it should be a Mighty Glacier, slower and better protected than the other ships—but it has the same speed, agility, and hardiness as the average for SVS zones. (Though in some zones it was more sluggish and had the slowest recharge rates.) Its perk is that it's the only ship that can get Level 3 bombs, meaning it can hit really hard—but Level 3 bombs take a lot of energy to fire, meaning that once it's fired a bomb or two, it's incredibly vulnerable.
• Griefer: Originally in SVS zones, ships that just respawned had a negative bounty score until they collected enough prizes. This (in theory) discouraged players from bullying others by repeatedly killing them while still (relatively) defenseless. Regardless, some players still did deliberately prey on "negs," an act known in the community as "negging."
  • The phenomenon of "negging" led to Chaos Zone SVS including a tongue-in-cheek vocal quickchat. "Neg spotted, attach to destroy!"
• Instant Death Bullet: Any custom zone can theoretically give ships these. Trench Wars might be the most famous and enduring example, where most of the ships have the ability to kill other ships in a single shot.
• Invincibility Power-Up: Downplayed with the Shields powerup. In SVS zones, the shields last for a hundred seconds, and the amount of time remaining is directly proportional to the amount of damage they'll prevent. If you have ninety-five seconds left on the timer, it'll block 95% of the damage. Fifty seconds left, and you take half damage. With good coordination and communication from teammates, a ship with Shields can bust through killzones and carry their team. In more free-for-all situations, you have a short window of opportunity to fearlessly take on the ships with the highest bounty.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Spider's specialty in SVS zones—and, originally in some zones, also the Shark's. The X-Radar powerup, when active, reveals cloaked ships.
• Joke Name Tag: One advertisement for the game◊ is a simple nametag with the name "dead meat" on it.
• Lead the Target: Bullets and bombs don't have too much speed of their own in SVS zones, largely inheriting the speed and direction of the ship firing them. Learning how to catch a target with leading shots is a vitally important skill—even in many non-SVS zones, where custom rulesets allow for way faster-moving shots.
• Meaningful Name: Applies to many of the ships—
  • The Javelin's rather, ah, straightforward. The ship with the highest top speed and weakest thrust (and originally, a slower turning rate) makes it behave rather like an actual throwing javelin.
  • The Spider's ability to cloak brings to mind how many real spiders hide until unsuspecting prey comes along. This is also likely how the Shark got its name, at least when it had the ability to cloak in some SVS zones—to us surface dwellers, sharks are much the same as spiders.
  • The Weasel's name, original description ("experimental electronic countermeasures craft") and EMP abilities bring to mind the Wild Weasel type of air mission—suppression of enemy air defenses. Many real examples of planes that do this kind of work have an Electronic Warfare Officer along for the ride, and SubSpace's Weasel effectively suppresses enemy defenses by preventing energy regeneration.
  • The Lancaster's full make and model designation is Avro 4F/2 HMS Lancaster. Which makes it an Avro Lancaster. The Lancasters of World War II were famous for their role in Operation Chastise, in which they destroyed the dams of the Ruhr Valley with bouncing bombs. (Sound familiar?)
• More Dakka: A few fitting examples in SVS zones—
  • The Terrier has double the guns of other ships. If it picks up and activates the Multifire powerup, it shoots four bullets instead of three. Its firing rate is subtly slower, though.
  • In Chaos Zone SVS, the Shark has the fastest firing rate of all the ships—two-thirds faster than the average ship—and also has the second-best rotation speed.
• Multi-Directional Barrage: The Burst powerup gives your ship a one-time use ability to fire bullets in every direction at once. They're as strong as Level 4 bullets, too. The catch is, they have to ricochet off a surface before they become active and therefore capable of damaging an enemy ship. Naturally, this means they're ideal for unleashing in a cramped environment where the enemy has nowhere to run.
• Nitro Boost: The Rocket powerup, when activated, sets off a continuous burst of thrust that's more powerful than your ship's own afterburners. Problem is—you can't turn it off or reverse thrusters while it's active.
• No Plot? No Problem!: SubSpace unabashedly marketed itself without any setting or plot—just an Internet game to play against other real life folks—and yet, the game had hints here and there of a coherent setting. Perhaps Rod and Jeff planned to expand on this for SubSpace 2, but we may never know.
• Pinball Projectile: In SVS zones, the Lancaster is the only ship type with bouncing bombs. In addition, all ships can pick up a "Bounce" powerup which causes their bullets to bounce off of obstacles until they naturally dissipate.
• Place of Protection: Zones typically have one or more Safety Zones where players can park their ships, as explicitly referenced in the game's box art. When inside a Safety Zone, your ship cannot take damage, nor can you damage others. Whether or not you spawn in a Safety Zone depends on the zone design and settings. For example, in Chaos Zone SVS you'll spawn into the zone at a random location. In a custom zone like Death Star Battle, you spawn in your team's Safety Zone, far from the actual battlefield.
• Player Versus Player: The entire point of the game, even in custom zones. The nature of the competition may change (for example, more sports-like gameplay compared to straight up destroying opponents) but there's no built-in "PvE" mode. That said, over the years the community's worked to develop bots which can fill that role.
• Poison Mushroom: Prizes randomly, but rarely, inflict your ship with a complete engine shutdown, leaving you a helpless pinball for a precious few seconds.
• Power-Up: A major part of the gameplay. Any ship that's just entered the zone or respawned has very weak stats. Ships have to collect prizes (often called "greens" because they look like glowing green cubes) to improve their stats and firepower, as well as collect special weapons and abilities.
• Pre-Rendered Graphics: Pre-rendered 3D models comprise most of the graphics, particularly all the ships and most of the tileset. Naturally, the introductory video is also pre-rendered.
• Price on Their Head: As you collect prizes ("greens") and kill opponents, your Bounty increases ... and the higher the bounty, the more other players will come gunning for you.
  • Over time, player etiquette in SVS zones evolved to frown upon players who target ships below a certain bounty, depending on one's skill level. The game allows players to set a "target bounty" number so that ships below or above that target appear as different colors on their radar—and thus, letting them avoid picking on the weak.
• Promoted to Playable: When VIE converted SubSpace to retail, they also made the Shark part of the playable roster. Before then, players nicknamed the Shark the "UFO" as it was a special ship available only to sysops and VIE staff. (This is also probably why the Shark doesn't appear in the pre-rendered intro movie, unlike the other seven ships.) Since it wasn't playable until the end of VIE's ownership of the game, the Shark doesn't have established SVS settings—in some zones it could cloak like the Spider and had the most energy of any ship, but in Chaos Zone SVS it just has the fastest firing rate.
• Regenerating Health: All ships gradually replenish energy reserves provided they're not draining them somehow, getting hit by something, or had their regeneration disabled by EMP. You can increase the regeneration rate by picking up prizes.
• Sitting Duck: A possible consequence of picking up an engine shutdown prize. In general, player etiquette looks down upon those who deliberately take advantage of Sitting Ducks—whether it be because they're underpowered ("negging") or in the middle of typing ("Mavis Beacon," after the software that teaches touch typing) or suffering from an engine shutdown.
• Space Is Noisy: Self-evident both in-game and in the pre-rendered intro movie—but hey, Rule of Cool is in effect here. (Custom zones can and do play this other ways, or avert it by virtue of not being set in space.)
• Space Mines: The Secondary Fire function of bombs, deploying them as completely stationary mines behind the player's ship. (And of course, the Weasel's mines are EMP mines.)
• Status Infliction Attack: This is how the Weasel's special works in SVS zones. It's the only ship that has EMP bombs in such zones, which temporarily disables energy regeneration in enemies hit by them.
• Stealth in Space: While the Cloak powerup renders a ship invisible, it'll still appear on radar. The Stealth powerup, on the other hand, hides a ship on radar even though it'll still be visible to other ships. A ship that gets both the Stealth and Cloak powerups can become truly invisible ships ... unless, of course, someone has the X-Radar powerup active, which can detect both stealthed and cloaked ships.
• Super Mode: Granted by the appropriately-named Superpower powerup, any ship lucky enough to get this has a limited amount of time during which weapons cause no energy drain. For a ship like the Leviathan, this is a huge benefit, because they have a short window of time during which they can spam devastating Level 3 bombs and/or mines with impunity. Super's countdown timer, unlike Shields, is a random number between one and sixty seconds.
• Superweapon: The Thor's Hammer special weapon qualifies. Looking like an oversized atom, it's the nastiest projectile in the game. It completely ignores walls and obstacles and has a higher proximity detonation radius compared to regular proximity bombs. As one common guide notes, a group of ships synchronizing their Thor shots can completely clear out a team holed up within a base.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The Lancaster appeared in the game after the Nightwasp was removed. Both ships have a dark grey-with-gold color scheme. The game files outfight confirm the Lancaster is a direct replacement of the Nightwasp, as the sprite sheet for the Lancaster's turning animations is called "nwroll" ... as in, Nightwasp. (Similarly, the sprite sheet for debris from a destroyed Lancaster is called "junknw.") All the other ships, even the Shark, have file names that match the name of the ships: "wb" for Warbird, "jv" for Javelin, "sp" for Spider, "lv" for Leviathan, "tr" for Terrier, "we" for Weasel, "sh" for Shark.
• Tech-Demo Game: Sniper was this, in the sense the whole point of it was to feel out the effects of lag in online gaming as well as gauge interest in a full-blown game on the top-down Spacewar! premise.
• Teleport Interdiction: When activated, the Anti-Warp powerup prevents any nearby enemy ships from warping or attaching to other ships.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: Ships have two general means of teleportation—
  • The Portal powerup lets you drop a warp point you can instantly warp to, but it's a one-use powerup. Still, it lets you get out of trouble quickly ... or, get the drop on a pursuer.
  • Attaching to another ship as a turret and then detaching also doubles as a means to warp across the zone, but doing so requires a full tank of energy and leaves you extremely vulnerable. Obviously, this is not recommended if there's a firefight at your intended destination.
• Timed Power-Up: The Shields and Superpower pickups have a timed duration.
• Vanilla Edition: Technically, this is what the surviving SVS (Standard VIE Settings) zones are with respect to custom zones. SVS zones approximate SubSpace as it was in 1997, though the devs did make changes here and there. Chaos Zone (which lists its settings on its site) is largely the last major zone remaining from those days, but when VIE still ran the show there were zones like Warzone (for squad-versus-squad combat), Alpha Zone (intended for new players), Turf Zone, Running Zone, and Philosophy Zone (a private zone for special events).
• Video Game Long-Runners: SubSpace managed to outlast its creator company for decades and continues to receive support from its community.
• Visual Pun: In the pre-rendered introductory movie, the one ship seen explicitly chasing the tail of another ship is the one named after a dog—the Terrier.
• Wall Jump: Owing to the fact that ships don't take damage from colliding with obstacles and even retain a significant chunk of their inertia after bouncing off of something, SubSpace makes this a viable and important tactic. If you need to reverse course, you are much better off doing so by directly flying at a wall and bouncing off of it than you are using your thrusters to decelerate and then accelerate in the desired direction.