One day last spring, Brad Wardell found himself in suburban Baltimore for some meetings when he joked about videoconferencing being bad for his step count.
Wardell, founder, president, and CEO of Stardock Systems Inc. in Plymouth Township, was visiting Oxide Games, a Stardock subsidiary in Timonium, Md. Along with representatives of Microsoft, he was there to help finalize Oxide’s “new, big title” that Microsoft would publish in the fall. But it didn’t necessarily mean he would circulate within Oxide’s expansive headquarters.
“Unfortunately for my waistline, it’s actually easier to do a lot of these meetings as if remote, even when we’re in the same building,” Wardell says. At 53, he has an avuncular manner and likes to dress in layered monochromatic outfits. “Even when we’re trying to interact, instead of getting up with our legs and moving there, we just do it right from Teams.”
Stardock observed 30 years of incorporation last fall. The company develops Windows-based desktop productivity software and has a catalog of its own video games.
The relationship with then-new Oxide started in 2013, when the Stardock Strategic Investment Fund put in seed capital. Besides the talent in Oxide’s studio, the cherry atop the cake in that deal was the startup’s proprietary Nitrous engine, a robust game-specific software platform. Wardell issued a statement calling Nitrous “an amazing piece of technology that will push the strategy (game) genre forward” by delivering sharp, detailed scenes for gamers.
Oxide and another subsidiary, Mohawk Games — the producer of strategy games “Old World” and “Offworld Trading Company” — helped to propel Stardock across new thresholds. Wardell also co-founded Mothership Entertainment and EdgeRunner for role-playing games.
Nowadays, there’s less need to start new production studios, as broader technological advances are reshaping how work gets done and what’s possible in video game production. First among them, virtual communication and collaboration tools are transforming the company and the industry.
That leaves about 50 of Stardock’s 100 employees checking in daily at the 25,000-square-foot headquarters near Beck Road and M-14 in Plymouth Township. Stardock acquired the structure in 2006. The other staffers work remotely from various corners of the globe.
“The building is really important to the culture,” says Chris Kowal, 52, vice president for corporate and business development at Stardock, who started his career in finance in New York. “There’s a number of events going on. We celebrate birthdays here, have chili cookoffs. Fundamentally, it’s about creating an environment where people are comfortable and can be themselves.”
At the company headquarters, teams work on software and entertainment development, general administrative services, and human resources operations.
The other 50 employees are mainly creative talent, such as the lead user-interface artist, who lives in Brazil. Wardell lists others from Canada, Australia, and “quite a few” in England.
Credit for Stardock’s organizational elasticity goes not only to the improvements in communication tools — videoconferencing applications such as Microsoft Teams — but also the AI-assisted collaborative tools “that let us quickly get stuff back and forth to each other,” Wardell says. “We can now keep hiring in Michigan and also bring on people who are working from (afar).”
Besides the reverse-brain-drain effect fostered by these communication and collaboration tools, Wardell refers to the increased processing power of computers and game consoles that make Stardock’s products appealing. In technical terms, Oxide’s Nitrous engine uses the “fully concurrent processing” of multicore hardware and 64-bit architecture to support the sharpness and complexity of, for example, Stardock’s “Sins of a Solar Empire II.”
“That allowed us to create a new type of simulation-level engine,” he explains. “AI needs to be able to ‘think’ about a lot of things at the same time, and then come back and make a decision.”
Another good example comes about through what he calls “new types of games” — “Galactic Civilizations IV,” for example.
“A player can enter a description for the alien civilization they want to create, and then the game would generate this alien civilization for them to play on the fly, in real time, including all the backstory, all their strengths and weaknesses,” he explains. “You can pick what your alien looks like and everything.”
Wardell keeps bees at his 15-acre Canton Township residence in what may be a case of nature inspiring art. The evidence is seen in how Stardock has grown around principles of flexibility and decentralization.
“The old model isn’t viable,” he says, suggesting that other game developers and publishers are looking backward to the days when a customer went to Best Buy or Walmart to buy a game on a DVD. “They (competitors) have not yet fully transitioned to this new way, where everything is digital.”
In 2003, on the verge of digital distribution via the internet, Wardell created Stardock Central as an arm that would encompass the distribution platform Impulse. But Impulse was sold to GameStop Corp. in 2011, and today Stardock’s titles are available through Steam, which serves independent developers.
Stardock was launched in 1991 from Wardell’s dorm room at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo as Stardock Systems, a fictitious DBA entity. Ordering from a wholesale catalog of computer parts over the phone, he answered the question about his company’s name by glancing at a chapter heading, “Stardock,” in a science-fiction novel by Raymond E. Feist. The corporate charter came about in 1993 after the Gibraltar native earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering.
“My mom, Becky, said I had to incorporate because what happened if I got sued?” In fact, there has been litigation such as an intellectual property case, Stardock Systems Inc. v. Paul Reiche III and Robert Frederick Ford, in 2017-2019. The game industry blog Rock Paper Shotgun reported an amicable settlement to the case.
The two parties reached an agreement over disputed rights to a game, “Star Control: Origins,” which Stardock acquired from the Atari bankruptcy in 2013. The settlement involved Wardell supplying “honey from his hives … while Reiche gives Wardell some of his mead.”
Stardock Systems was the holding company for Stardock Software, with early products
based on the Microsoft and IBM OS/2 joint-venture operating system. Wardell claimed an industry first in 1995 with the Object Desktop productivity program. Stardock Entertainment made games starting with “Galactic Civilizations,” which was written out of “zealotry” to prove OS/2 “could be a good game platform,” as he explained in a post.
Remaining a true believer, Wardell insists OS/2 was “a great operating system,” but it didn’t last.
As he explained in the post, “Stardock’s history could really be divided into two parts — the OS/2 Stardock and the Windows Stardock.” Reorienting the company to Windows after the 1997 collapse of the OS/2 market took some time, and in addition to the new coding, there was also a process of organizational restructuring.
“Over time, what I’ve done as I got older and a little bit smarter, I stopped naming new ventures ‘Stardock something’ because that made it confusing,” he says. People were increasingly aware of the Windows utilities, video games, or other products. Stardock even produced early and “horrendously insecure” software for credit card purchases. “You would never do it like that now. It was a much more innocent time.”
Wardell increased the emphasis on helping people modify or extend their graphical user interfaces with the Windows desktop. To that end, there are now nine programs available. Among them, Start11 ($9.99 to $39.99) allows for customization of startup screens. PCWorld reported, “Start11 solves Windows 11’s worst Start menu and taskbar sins.”
WindowBlinds 11 ($29.99 to $39.99) is a program that lets the user apply a variety of customizable design themes on a PC, adding colors and textures for the Start menu, and even window “frames.” One reviewer wrote: “There’s so much choice with some truly cool designs (and many not-so-great ones) from the community, so you can explore to your heart’s content and make Windows as hideous or beautiful as you want.”
Object Desktop ($29.99 to $39.99) soldiers on as a productivity tool with a dozen applications, including DesktopGPT. Introduced in April, this AI app contributes efficiencies to tasks such as writing email subject lines or translating text in multiple languages. “DesktopGPT is the evolution of a tool that we were using internally at Stardock to help us be more effective with our AI interactions,” Stardock Software general manager Brad Sams said in a statement.
“Within our ecosystem, we’ve been working really hard and raised our stature on a global basis,” Kowal says. “Some of the work we’ve done engineering-wise created strong relationships with the biggest names in the tech industry: Microsoft, Intel, ANV, Nvidia — all the large players — (as well as) Sony and others.”
Yet the primary motivation, Kowal says, isn’t about profits or stature; instead, it’s “wanting to do interesting work by solving technological problems.” The result is that millions of people follow the company online and hundreds of thousands play the games.
Besides creating a new civilization in “Galactic Civilizations IV” ($49.99) or battling for dominance amid the stars in “Sins of a Solar Empire Ultimate Edition” ($69.99), Stardock’s big catalog of games includes version 6 of “The Political Machine” ($19.99).
The game fields real or imagined presidential candidates against one another in primaries
and a general election. The player can compete solo against the computer, or partake in multiplayer campaigning.
After the budgeting, strategizing, speechmaking, and debates are finished, and breaking scandals or natural disasters intervene, demographic data underlies the simulation results. “The Political Machine” comes with charming caricatures of the established candidates and grandiose, election-night orchestral music by composer Sean Beeson.
Early testers of the 2024 version posted observations on the chat site Discord.com as the primary season started. For example, “Divinity” wrote: “Love the new graphics and overall presentation. The characters feel much more like their IRL (in-real-life) counterparts.” To which “Vielle” responded: “Yeah, unless you’re talking about Nikki Haley’s dress or (third-party candidate) Andrew Yang’s face, then I think it’s pretty good.”
The appreciation for the graphics and presentation is an endorsement for art director Laika Laursen, who’s in the second year of a four-year contract.
“For Stardock, it has been more focused on engineering,” Laursen says in a videoconference from her home studio on Denmark’s Helgenaes Peninsula, a resort area with a seacoast, national parklands, and summer houses. “I come with some different eyes. It can help in any production to have somebody come in who doesn’t really have the same view of things and the same background, (who) just sees things a little bit differently.”
Just how different is her vision? A graduate of The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, Laursen has never been to Michigan — it’s all virtual. In accepting the job with Stardock, she committed her availability to correspond across a six-hour divide and match the Eastern Time Zone workday. She calls the difference her “Goldilocks hours.”
As art director, Laursen wants to go beyond staff supervision. She adds illustrations in two dimensions, but will also “go in and craft parts of the game in 3-D on the computer.” It’s a bit different from the same role at most indie producers, but why not be a triple-threat? “I like to keep sharp on the tools I use,” she relays.
Increasing the quality of game art and design makes sense for Stardock, especially with mighty multicore computers being supplemented by the AI boost that allows gamers to set their own parameters.
“I would describe Stardock, first and foremost, as a software-engineering company. That’s what they do,” says Stephen Mallory, assistant professor of game design at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield. “If you look through the history of their titles, the strongest aspect is the engineering, the stability, and the depth of play around it.”
Within the video game industry, Stardock “is a bit of a unicorn,” Mallory says. The company’s diversification and sound financial underpinnings lead to resistance against the “shocks and pressures” other studios succumb to.
“You know when you see the Stardock label, the fact they’re publishing it, they developed it, that it’s going to be a pretty complete, well-made, compelling video game experience,” he says.
Thinking in terms of the widespread continuous-improvement principles of the 1990s, Mallory sees Stardock weighing its strengths and weaknesses and deciding, “OK, we know we need to elevate this now. We have a strong engineering base; let’s start bringing the art up with it.”
As Stardock pursues industry leadership, Wardell has another point to make — namely, gamers are decent people and the media should stop vilifying them. He isn’t thinking of reviews that are critical of products on merit, such as the 2016 take on “Ashes of the Singularity,” which GameSpot said “feels like little more than a tech demo of Stardock’s new Oxide engine.”
The more objectionable criticism arrives via what he calls “excessively politicized” game journalism. As a 2023 headline in The Federalist put it, “The Gaming Press is a Sorry Tool for Wokescolds.”
A decade ago, a scandal known as Gamergate arose through collusion between a game developer and a reviewer, which opened the door to a toxic atmosphere. The Federalist’s article by Douglas Blair says, “What really matters here is what happened after Gamergate; the massive uptick in politics posing as game journalism.”
Well before the scandal, Wardell had already written his 10-point “Gamers Bill of Rights,” stating basic tenets of customer service such as the right to a refund and the right to sell or transfer ownership of physical copies of games. With the more recent campaign against elitist cultural journalism, he thrusts into a new arena with his moral imperative.
That’s why he spent the past New Year’s Eve chatting with, and affirming, Stardock fans on Discord. It may have been another sedentary moment and more trouble for his waistline, but the session personalized Stardock’s storylines and bolstered its bottom line.
“I like our customers — it’s really what it boils down to,” Wardell says. “I like to make things for our customers. I don’t like it when our customers are made to feel bad about what they enjoy. My games aren’t violent, but ‘Galactic Civilizations’ has space battles. Is that bad?”
