Stargate’s Biggest Mistake Still Has Fans Reeling

Stargate has always been a distant third behind Star Wars and Star Trek. What the franchise lacks in mainstream name recognition it makes up for with a dedicated ride-or-die fanbase going strong today over a decade after the cancelation of Stargate Universe.

Stargate Worlds, an ambitious massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG), was the franchise’s best opportunity to go beyond the shows and capture a new audience. Hot on the heels of World of Warcraft, the game was announced in 2006, and left for dead in 2010, leaving long-suffering fans to wonder how cool it could have been to explore the galaxy as a member of SG-1.

A World Put Together With Stargate Fans In Mind

No one could have imagined that the 1994 sci-fi action film Stargate would end up launching a franchise that has lasted for nearly 30 years. Stargate SG-1 brought the film to television with smart recasting (Col. O’Neil played by Richard Dean Anderson instead of Kurt Russell and Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson instead of James Spader), multi-faceted characters, and world-building that created an entire universe of aliens, mysteries, and intergalactic politics. It’s the perfect series to base a long-running MMORPG on, and it’s clear that the video game was being put together with fans in mind.

Instead of the usual fantasy classes, Stargate Worlds had archetypes based on the major characters: Archaeologist (Jackson), Scientist (Sam Carter), Soldier (O’Neil), Commando (Stargate Atlantis team leader, Sheppard), and even the possibility of playing as an Asgardian, Goa’uld, or Jaffa (Teal’c). That sounds amazing, and the basic gameplay loop of going through a Stargate to a different world, completing missions, and battling against the Goa’uld would give plenty of opportunity to expand the world of the show in new directions. All that and for a late 2000s computer game, it didn’t look half bad either.

Giving Fans What They Want

Stargate Worlds was being developed by Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, a new studio that had never released a game before, but to fans, the studio was saying and doing all the right things, including making the Asgard skills utilize drones and clones, while the Goa’uld would have Jaffa minions under their control. A Friends and Family closed beta went live, and the game was getting high praise from testers, particularly citing the feel of the combat, something the series has always done surprisingly well, given its perennially low budgets.

Faced with mounting development costs, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment put together a different game using the assets of Stargate Worlds: Stargate Resistance, a team-based competitive shooter pitting Stargate Command against the Gao’uld System Lords. Behind the scenes, it was a last-ditch attempt to bring in money to keep the lights on at the studio until the MMORPG was finished. Released in 2009, Stargate Resistance was shut down in 2010, and with it, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment filed for bankruptcy. Stargate Worlds would never go on to see the light of day.

Stargate Worlds Found Its Way Into Official Canon

Though fans never got a chance to play it, Stargate Worlds became an official part of the franchise thanks to the pilot episode of Stargate Universe. Genius Eli Wallace is an avid video game player who solves a real Stargate puzzle hidden inside one of his games by Stargate Command. That game in the universe is Prometheus, but in reality, it was footage of Stargate Worlds.

The franchise did have other video game tie-ins, from the SNES movie tie-in to more recently, the real-time tactics game Stargate: Timekeepers available on Steam. None of them caught on with either gamers or fans of the shows, and that’s where Stargate Worlds would have helped act as a gateway to bring in new fans who had never given the series a chance.

Stargate Worlds will remain one of the franchise’s biggest “What if” opportunities, right up there with Stargate Universe Season 3. Stargate is a dormant franchise today, which is disappointing for fans, but then again, they can look at the current state of both Star Trek and Star Wars and wonder if maybe it’s better to hold on to the great memories of three shows and a movie. Then again, Battlestar Galactica came back after over 20 years, so maybe, just maybe, by 2032, we’ll get that new series.