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FiringSquad: Hi Brad. Would you care to give a short bio of yourself and your company?

Brad Wardell: Sure thing. As you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall I spent a lot of time trying to make money selling pieces of the wall. Or at least, pieces of stone that I claimed were part of the wall or at least part of a wall in Europe. After serving time in prison for attempted fraud (what is “attempted” fraud anyway? I mean really!) I decided it was time to get into computers. My dad said, “son, I think computers are the future.” And so I decided to buy one of those computers. After trying out the Coleco computer, I upgraded to an IBM.

Now I specialize in writing GW Basic games that run not just on IBM based computers but the Coleco Adam and the Atari 800. Galactic Civilization is of course, a text based game based on a fairly recent version of GW Basic. In it, you must work with a robot named Floyd to uncover the mystery of an abandoned space civilization (hence the name).

Took a long time to build this baby

I think I have enough of an advantage

0 of my casualties, 21 billion of his

Okay, maybe not.

Okay seriously:

I founded Stardock back in 1993 as a way to pay for college. During that time I wrote a game for OS/2 called Galactic Civilizations. It and its sequels ended up doing surprisingly well in sales and so I ended up making Stardock my career.

As time went on, we began focusing more on desktop software as well as games. PC Games, as you know, are a pretty hard business to be in. Ironically, most people know us through our desktop software such as WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectBar, IconPackager and the suite they come in, Object Desktop.

These guys are my pawns

Because I OWN them

Stats

We’ve previously made a couple of fairly popular but niche strategy games such as Entrepreneur and The Corporate Machine. But Object Desktop’s success allowed me to go back and recreate Galactic Civilizations from scratch with a big budget.

And so, 18 months later, here we are.