STAR WARS: THE PATH NOT TAKEN
for X-Wing vs TIE Fighter
Every now and then I see someone looking for this old mod, so I put it back up online here. Yes, I am the original author. Yes, that is my horrible, Texas-accent-drawling voice in all the sound clips.
DOWNLOAD LINKS
Path Not Taken - main mod file download
Shipset98 mod installer required to install the mod
The original website, circa 1999. No apologies made for the horrible design.
Decades ago, when the Star Wars prequel movies were still years away from being announced, I was attending college for an advertising arts degree that wouldn't wind up being useful to my future at all. My go-to PC game at the time was X-Wing vs TIE Fighter (its better known successor X-Wing Alliance wouldn't be released for several years yet). Datamaster's Website, long since offline now, was the place where all the original work was done to crack the game's various file formats and figure out how to mod the game, and while I was nowhere near capable of contributing to that work, I was a part of that community.
I gave back to the community by spending two years working with their tools and info, building a huge new campaign for the game that included new ships, new missions (60 of them), a handful of (embarrassingly-ameturish) anime-style background images, and as much polish as I could humanly add to the thing while not quite failing my classes. It was my thank-you to the community that opened this game up to modding, and it was released in all its 30-megabyte glory in late 1998. The original hosting website's tracking tools showed over 10 thousand downloads of the thing in its first two months. It's a ridiculously simple thing now, but for the time it was truly revolutionary in its scope if I do say so myself.
And naturally, my thanks was to be completely snubbed for the first "Annual Best Shipset Award" six months later. Not even a nomination. Incidentally the winner of the award was the "Atmospheric Shipset Project," an intesively hype-focused project with two screenshots to its name and no actual gameplay that would never release a playable mod before quietly imploding into oblivion. But that was deemed a more worthwhile experience than what I tried to give everybody. I learned a hard lesson about the community that year and quietly left with my oversized ego for greener pastures.
Still very proud of what I accomplished, though! At one point years later, the New Jedi Order group recovered the original site I made for the mod on Freeservers and put it up on their server as an act of preservation, which was an honor to me that I found genuinely touching.
Also, if my friend and collaborator from that time Dave Saint John runs across this, I'm sorry for disappearing; I still feel bad about it to this day. I was fighting a crippling level of depression after college and I didn't handle it well. Hit me up, draegos1 [at] gmail.com.
Site Credits:
Domain and website hosted by BlueHost.
Front page code by The Personal Page on GitHub.