Q. Mr. Roberts, one more question if I may...with the world in the state that it is and with your personal wealth that you have acquired over the years...have you considered expanding your businesses beyond Earth? Could we see Roberts Industries on the Moon or Mars someday?
A. Hahahahaha, no. Not really, that would be really expensive to do actually. But it's interesting that you ask - it's just that as a master of illusion, I really have better ways to do this.
Q. And those would be...?
A. I wanted to make use of what the original Star Citizen project left behind and create a true space simulator. The player will feel like a real astronaut, with the same duties - several hours of advanced research and workout everyday - and a realistic display of relativistic time dilation and travel time. The journey to the moon will take only 3 days, and the one to Mars is estimated to take only 5 months for one way - it's a bit shorter than I thought but I think it still counts as realistic. That way the player can feel almost exactly like a real astronaut landing on the Red Planet! I can very well imagine that many players would be willing to pilot a regular shuttle after a couple rounds to distract themselves from reality.
Q. Wow. Something releasable coming out of Star Citizen...! Does that... does that mean you want to resurrect Star Citizen!?
A. I'm playing with the idea to do so. It's nagging me that I left it unfinished. Sure, I could say "It made me rich, the rest didn't work out" but that's not me. Also, as much as I hate Mr Smart, some of the ideas he had for the project were simply too good to be wasted; in particular that he added these alien species he named... ehm... something like Zods and Shivs, not sure anymore. And he wanted to have a supernova! In-game!
Q. Oh my God! But with the experience from the initial take on it, wouldn't it be more likely that you rather finish the world than Star Citizen?! The costs-
A. I understand your fears. But the economy will be alright soon. During the initial project, we started to implement an economic simulation model into SC that was able to predict the consequences of every buisness action better than any other before. But since we ran into a tough bug that caused the game to crash at the worst possible point - right after the morning coffee - we were never had the time to finish it; hence the bankrupt of our company... While I'm a huge fan of realism, maybe in retrospective our failure was that we tried to put the reality into a game, instead of simply adapting reality to the game. One way or another, remember my words - once the economy has recovered, there'll be a second take on Star Citizen!