Protostar: War On The Frontier

Protostar: War on the Frontier is a 1993 science fiction video game produced by Tsunami Media that blends elements of role-playing, space exploration, space combat, and strategy. The player commands a spaceship from a first-person perspective in real-time capable of traveling to the various planets in the game world and launching an explorer vessel to traverse their surfaces. Several sentient alien races inhabit the region with whom the player interacts through friendly conversation, intense spaceship combat, or barter at their planetary trading posts. One of these races, the Skeetch, is aggressively threatening to conquer the Earth; the player has been recruited to convince the other sentient races in the region to join humanity in an alliance against the Skeetch. A secondary goal of the game is to earn money by performing actions such as selling alien lifeforms and minerals collected on planetary surfaces to obtain the funds needed to upgrade the player's spaceship and improve the odds of survival in confrontations with the Skeetch and other hostile entities. Computer Gaming World criticized the game for failing to break new ground and for its "muddled" blend of science-fiction themes, but did recommend it to players new to this genre.

The game's working title during the first six months of development was Starflight 3 as it was originally intended to be a sequel to Starflight and Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula. The released game no longer retains a relationship to the Starflight game world because Tsunami Media's collaboration with Electronic Arts, the Starflight copyright owner, did not work out. However, the basic framework of exploration, diplomacy, trade, combat, and spaceship upgrades still bears strong resemblances to the Starflight games. A sequel, Protostar 2, was planned but never released.