Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 13, 2013

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star: Official News page 3 Fed2 Star next page

THE ORIGIN OF ARMSTRONG CUTHBERT

by Hazed

Armstrong Cuthbert is the mega corporation that has a lock on cargo deliveries in Fed DataSpace, as well as dealing with more specialist packages via the akaturi system.

If you read the Encyclopedia Galactica entry on Armstrong Cuthbert you will discover that the company was formed in the 18th century on Earth and spread across the globe rapidly. They were then perfectly placed to expand when humankind left the confines of their home planet.

But there’s actually an interesting real-life story behind the invention of Armstrong Cuthbert.

Players of classic Fed may remember that the cargo jobs that appeared on the workboard just kind of showed up. There was no mention of there being a specific company behind the delivery service.

Armstrong Cuthbert was not actually an invention for Fed, but for another game: Age of Adventure. This was an exploration game set in the 19th century, the Victorian era, full of puzzles and quests, but it did have a basic job system to give players something to do in between all that exploring. To make the game world more interesting we needed to personalize the company dishing out the contracts, and thus AC was born, with offices in all major cities, and the mysterious anonymous founders who were actually women but kept their identities hidden to protect against prejudice.

Sadly, Age of Adventure never made it past the beta-testing stage, but when we were designing the rewrite for Fed that became Fed2, incorporating Armstrong Cuthbert into the new galaxy seemed to work.

The final thing you need to know is where the name came from. Well, that was a fortuitous discovery akin to the use of the name Hotblack Desiato for a character in Douglas Adams’ book ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, the second in the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy: Douglas used the name of an estate agents in the north London borough of Islington where he lived at the time.

For our job delivery company, we took the name of a hairdresser in Chiswick, the west London borough where Alan lives: Armstrong Cuthbert.

Fed2 Star last page   Fed2 Star next page