The History of Mars Frontier
Mars Frontier began in a Stanford dorm room as a “GSB 390 Individual Research Project” to create a fact-based educational game about interplanetary colonization. A video trailer and concept images were created to evaluate the commercial potential for the project.
ABOVE: Original trailer used to concept test Mars Frontier as an educational game, created for $50 using video actors from fiverr.com.
The market for science-based title suggested low adoption, so the title was changed into a science fiction war game. The original 3D models commissioned for the educational game were weaponized for the new title, and a story about how the new settlers of Mars used the “ancient” NASA designs for machines created to harvest resources on Mars.
The Mars Rovers
As the notoriety of Mars rose in 2012 with the arrival of NASA’s Curiosity rover on the red planet, a storyline arose in Mars Frontier about the replication of Curiosity design into a deadly war machine three hundred years in the future.
Buildings and Game Engine
In parallel with the development of story and art, a new game engine was built from scratch built on experimental new “HTML5” technology (whose standards would not be finalized for another two years).
After several generations of building refinements the structures began to define the game world, and set the context for the storylines and characters to be developed.
Transports
To align with the retrofitted NASA rovers, a new class of weaponized “Transport” vehicles was created to parallel the storyline around rovers being militarized versions of civilian vehicles. In the first release of the game neither rovers nor transports could resurrect after being destroyed, and the feature was added later after extensive testing and game balancing.
Characters
Our first character in Mars Frontier was the in-game narrator Valentina, named after Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman in space in 1969. Originally a sarcastic, dry-witted side-kick, the character evolved over time into a more edgy, unemotional space companion, bordering on robotic.
Since the release of Mars Frontier in 2012, two expansion packs have been released:
WAR STAR EMPIRE is set in the distant future where the sentient robots created by humans evolved exponentially into a series of all-powerful “Machine Lords” who dominate the galaxy and hunt human kind to the brink of extinction. In a cataclysmic battle, the humans destroy the Machine Lords motherships disabling their forces, but at the cost of losing nearly the entirety of the human forces. Survivors escape to the nearby world of Minoa, the birthplace of the Machine Lords, and the center of their incredible power. They fight for survival on the historic planet, which in ancient times had another name: “Mars”.
BATTLEFRONT MARS begins immediately after the original Mars Frontier story line, and before WAR STAR EMPIRE. It is set during a period of hyper colonization of Mars, where discovery of vast water reserves and terraforming technology brings a massive inflow of migrants from the dying world of Earth.
Mars Frontier – The Story
After 300 years of robotic exploration, humans arrive on Mars for the first time. It’s a one-way ticket and a race to rule the planet. Mars, originally cultivated by robots and a genetically engineered clone workforce, has become a chaotic mass of war-torn regions.
It started with a small band of renegade clones who began to deviate from their genetic programming. Created to be docile problem solvers, these clones were the opposite – conflict-seeking aggressors who broke off from their roles as manufacturing engineers and began to weaponize the rovers and transports used to harvest iron and water from the surface of Mars.
With a small robotic army at their command, the renegades began attacking mining outposts across the planet, and retro-fitting the laboratories and factories to build ever more powerful vehicles and weapons to grow their power.
Terrified of extinction, the workforce clones manufactured defenses, however their docile genetics made them poor soldiers and the renegades slaughtered them in battle after battle.
Desperate and scattered, the workforce clones went to their top engineers to create new weapons. In the east regions of Mars, they took genetic material from the corpses of dead renegades to begin manufacturing combat-ready clone soldiers. In the north, they began retrofitting their most powerful computers with artificial intelligence programs imbued with a thousand years of earth’s best military knowledge and training. In the west, they built new weapons and flying vehicles, known as “gunships” to attack and destroy the renegade ground units from high above.
However, the spies of the renegades knew these efforts far in advance. Outnumbered and out-gunned, the renegades launched a campaign of cunning and deception, tricking the workforce clones into fighting friendly forces.
Thousands died.
The workforce clones, now known as “the ancients”, are extinct, as are the renegades (the maximum life of a clone is only ten years). The weapons they created — the great Clone Armada of the east, the sentient artificial intelligence robots of the north — now rule Mars as a scattered collection of warlords and tyrants.
As bad as it is on Mars, Earth is worse off, and a series of global wars and nuclear detonations wiped out almost all life on our home planet.
Settlers like you land daily on the red planet, fleeing the chaos of the earth in an attempt to create a new life for themselves on Mars. They work around the clock to harvest iron and water from the planet’s surface and developing the facilities, armies, and alliances needed to allow their outpost to survive in the harshest environment known to humankind.
The stakes are high, the challenge enormous, but with cunning and courage your armies shall grow, as shall your empire, and your legend.
Good luck, Commander.