Mark starring in Star Citizen

If you are not completely new to this "internet" thing people use nowadays, you must have stumbled upon it at some point during the last three years.

Star Citizen.

The brainchild of a game developer called Chris Roberts, known for his Wing Commander and Freelancer games, which aims at nothing less than creating a full-blown universe sim.
You heard me. Not a starship dogfighting sim, no intergalactic trading sim, no space shooter, it's meant to be an universe simulation.

Back in 2012, when CR started collecting funds to realise his vision of the perfect game, he had been rejected by known publishers when introducing his project, because "nobody wants to play a space game nowadays anyway". Well, he packed his things and moved to a website named Kickstarter, which is the largest platform for crowdfunding today, introduced his concept and begged the community for the funds necessary to start the work on it.
After about three weeks, approximately 6 million dollars had been transferred from fans to Roberts' company, eager to see what he promised them.
That was then. Now, 2016, Cloud Imperium Games, developer of Star Citizen, enlists a number of more than 300 employees in studios all over the world and raised more than 106 million dollars in crowdfunding. Take that, publishers!

So what? How does the project look like today? Maybe you'd like to watch a few youtube videos to make up your mind about the current state, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJJ9TcGxhNY
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBYRIZA44Eg
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbZLbb0_RBI

Note well that these are all captured real-time in-game, there is no pre-rendering here, all you can see is how it will look like when the game will be released, using the Cry Engine for extra visual fidelity.

Lacking a well-known publisher to back him up, Chris Roberts does his best to satisfy his community by regularly giving his backers inside infos about the current state of the game and releasing small modules that will be part of the game later on, for example the dogfighting module, the planetside module, a race module, hangar module and recently of December 2015, the Alpha 2.0 of the persistent universe which will combine all those elements together in a MMO game.

There is Squadron 42, the single player campaign, which features the likes of Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Rhona Mitra and other known actors to support the storyline. What a cast for a video game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FF-ewiwmhs

The current roadmap shows Squadron 42 to be released within 2016 and Star Citizen some time later. But there are plans to decouple the single player from the multi player part of the game which might mean that the packages will be more expensive after January 31st.
There is a referral program which enables you to enlist friends by making them open their Star Citizen account with your code and after purchasing the package of their choice, they will get 5.000 ingame credits while the referrer will get cosmetic bonuses for his hangar and the likes.

So why am I telling you all of this?
I bought my copy of Star Citizen a long time ago, overwhelmed with the vision of a man so fond of playing games like this he wanted to create the ultimate version of a space sim for all of us, regardless the chances.
Do I know when SC will be released? If it will be released at all? And then, will it be what we were promised?
I do not. But I do think what we have been shown alone is worth supporting the bold idea that is behind this. You can only progress if somebody dares to.

So, if I made you want to try out Star Citizen, just having a look at what it can be, you could do me a big favor.
By using my referral code (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-PX36-3P3S) and opening an account on the official webpage, you can claim about 6$ worth of ingame credits for yourselves if you plan to purchase one of the game packages and you can support me by expanding my list of recruits to unlock more decorative bonuses for my game. Even if you don't play to buy something yet, I would be glad if you referred to me.

It is just such a great vision to be realised and I do hope to see many of you soon out in space, living their dreams.

Thank you for reading.
Galandar out.