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This game is dedicated to my childhood friend Franco.

I met Franco in Grade 7, and we bonded immediately. The common ground was video games, and it turned into a fast friendship. We were about one thing, really: games. Baldur's Gate II. Betrayal at Krondor. Dark Sun. Fallout. System Shock. King of Dragon Pass.

Then there were the endless sleepovers — chugging Coke, gathered around the CRT TV and playing GoldenEye, Mario Kart 64, Bomberman, and WCW vs. nWo until the sun came up.

And the tabletop stuff. D&D 2nd Edition. Cyberpunk 2020, where the chrome manuals were the holy grail — if we found something that spoke to us in those books, it had to go into a session.

But we drifted, the way most friends do. We lost touch in high school, then reconnected here and there over the years, always waxing nostalgic about that brief stretch of childhood when games were everything — when you kind of wished you could just play them forever.

I took a different path and ended up not touching games for years. Franco followed his passion: he went to Sheridan College for development and became a developer at HitGrab, where he stayed. He worked on MouseHunt, one of the first Facebook games. I remember reconnecting around then and being in awe of him — the sheer will, mixed with the talent, to break into the industry at a time when that was genuinely hard to do.

Then I lost touch again, for over a decade.

The message came out of nowhere during COVID. I heard from a lot of old friends in that stretch — it was a reflective time for a lot of us. I'd been shut in and was slowly rediscovering games, and we ended up talking for ages about old ones and new ones, laughing about stuff that happened 25 years before.

We connected on Discord, then the phone. We caught up one night for hours, and the next weekend we jumped on Discord to play King of Dragon Pass. We killed ourselves laughing at the ridiculous extremes we'd push things to — that shared gallows humour at some genuinely galling options — and it brought it all back: being in his basement at night, huddled around his desktop, his little brothers coming downstairs to watch Frank make some insane call in Fallout.

He told me about a book he'd written, Rocketship Ride, for his kids. It was a great catch-up.

But I missed something. He asked to reconnect a few more times, and I didn't make the time. I wish I had. I didn't know Franco was sick. Knowing Frank, he wanted to keep it low-key. He always just powered forward.

Frank died after a long illness in November 2024. I was shocked, taken aback, a little devastated. It felt like a fond memory had been ripped away — and even though we rarely talked, something in the world got a little colder. His death reminded me how fragile and short our time on this rock really is, how small and grateful we ought to be, and that we should be lifting each other up and going after what we actually want.

If you sit through the intro, you'll see this game is dedicated to him. The idea had been kicking around for years — inspired by John Ayliff's Seedship — and when I finally sat down to write the design document, the questions in my head were always "Would Frank have liked this?" and "What kind of insane thing would make him laugh if he found it?"

The sad part is knowing he'll never get to play it, because I know he would've loved it. That was Frank. He was just happy to create, and to talk to other people who created. It was the world he lived in — and now he lives on as a crew member in my game.

Franco is the first founder, the one who got me here.

Miss ya, Frank. See you planetside.

You can pick up Franco's book, Rocketship Ride, on Amazon.