Backed Kickstarter Project: Space 1889

The first Kickstarter project I ever backed was Space: 1889.

That fact alone probably says something about the appeal of this particular game. Long before steampunk became a familiar genre, Space: 1889 imagined an alternative Victorian age in which humanity had mastered travel through the Ether and begun exploring the other worlds of the Solar System.

It is a wonderfully old-fashioned piece of science fiction, deliberately evoking the spirit of the great adventure writers of the nineteenth century while turning their imagined futures into a role-playing setting.

A More Civilized Time

The premise is wonderfully simple. Humanity has conquered the inner planets and now travels between worlds aboard ether-flyers. Mars is inhabited by ancient Martian cultures, Venus is a steaming wilderness, Mercury contains regions of extraordinary heat and cold, and the Moon and Asteroid Belt remain open to exploration.

Earth itself is still recognisably the Victorian world of 1889. The great powers compete for influence and territory while explorers, soldiers, scientists, adventurers and entrepreneurs carry the ambitions of empire beyond the Earth.

The result is a setting in which an adventure can take place almost anywhere: beneath the Martian sun, in the jungles of Venus, in the frozen regions of Mercury or along the banks of the Amazon.

Everything Jules Verne Could Have Written

The original game described itself in terms that perfectly captured its ambition:

• Everything Jules Verne could have written.
• Everything H. G. Wells should have written.
• Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of but never published because it was too fantastic.

That description remains one of the best ways of understanding Space: 1889. This is not science fiction in the modern technological sense. It is an imagined future built from the science, assumptions and imperial adventure fiction of the nineteenth century.

That combination gives the game a character that is difficult to reproduce. The planets are exotic, but the people exploring them still carry Victorian prejudices, technology and politics with them.

Frank Chadwick's Victorian Solar System

Space: 1889 was created by Frank Chadwick and originally published by Game Designers' Workshop in 1989. The game became one of the early examples of what would later be called steampunk role-playing, although the word itself was not yet part of the mainstream gaming vocabulary.

Chadwick's setting deliberately combined adventure fiction with an alternative history of science. Steam technology, airships and Victorian engineering were pushed beyond their historical limits, while the planets of the Solar System became places of exploration, colonial rivalry and adventure.

The result was not simply a game about travelling into space. It was a game about asking what the nineteenth century might have looked like if its wildest scientific dreams had actually come true.

My First Encounter: The Amiga Game

My own first experience of Space: 1889 was not the tabletop game at all, but the computer adventure game released for the Amiga.

As with a surprising number of adventure games from that period, I never quite managed to complete it. Years later, with the assistance of the internet, I finally discovered how the adventure was supposed to end: the story eventually leads to the Asteroid Belt and a climactic final confrontation with your enemy.

It is a particularly appropriate setting for the conclusion. After travelling through a Victorian Solar System, the adventure ultimately leaves Earth far behind and carries the player into one of the most remote and dangerous regions of the setting.

The German Renaissance

Although the original game was created in America, one of the most interesting chapters in its later history took place in Germany.

The original GDW game had disappeared from the market, but interest in Space: 1889 never completely vanished. A German revival eventually led to a completely new edition rather than simply a reprint of the old rules.

Uhrwerk Verlag published the new German edition in 2012. It retained the setting and atmosphere of the original while using the Ubiquity rules system and introducing new material and artwork. Frank Chadwick described it as a new interpretation rather than simply a translation of the original game.

That created an amusing reversal: an American game about British imperial adventure, originally written in English, was revived in Germany before an English edition of the new version was produced.

The Kickstarter

That was the reason I eventually backed the Kickstarter. The project was intended to bring the new German edition back into English, allowing English-speaking players to experience the modern revival of a game whose original English edition had long since disappeared from regular publication.

I only paid for one lot of postage for my pledge, which meant waiting a little longer for the rewards, but it also helped unlock an additional stretch goal. For a game that had already travelled such an improbable route—from an American publisher in the late 1980s, through a German revival and finally towards an English-language Kickstarter—that seemed entirely appropriate.

Why Space: 1889 Still Matters

Space: 1889 occupies an unusual place in gaming history. It was created before steampunk became a familiar commercial genre, yet its central idea now seems almost like a definition of steampunk: Victorian technology, imperial adventure, fantastical science and journeys to other worlds.

It also demonstrates something that makes old role-playing games so interesting. A game does not have to be the biggest commercial success of its era to leave a lasting mark. Sometimes a distinctive idea simply survives because people continue to find it compelling.

For me, Space: 1889 is particularly memorable because it connects several generations of gaming: the nineteenth-century adventure stories that inspired it, the tabletop role-playing game created by Frank Chadwick, the Amiga computer game through which I first encountered the setting, and the later Kickstarter that brought the revived game back into English.

It is a relic from a time when the future still looked Victorian—and when the Solar System was waiting to be explored by steam-powered adventurers.