Mila Becker
Some projects just take patience: the Star Wars fan game Fate of the Galaxy was released on October 30, 2026, about 19 years after the team started work in early 2007. And the best part: the game is completely free.
Fate of the Galaxy was not made by a big studio but by a team of volunteer fans. They built it as a total conversion on the open-source FreeSpace Open engine. You do not need the original FreeSpace 2 from 1999. According to the developers, it is not an official Star Wars product and is not associated with Lucasfilm or Disney.
19 years of fan work: how long Fate of the Galaxy took
According to the FreeSpace Wiki, there were several earlier attempts to bring Star Wars to FreeSpace, but none was ever released. In early 2007, a new project lead took over, assembled a new team and named the project Fate of the Galaxy. Shortly afterwards, the team decided to discard all old models and build everything from scratch.
In early 2009 came a hard setback: a hard drive failure destroyed the models of one of the key artists. A beta originally planned for 2008 or 2009 never happened. Instead, the team decided to release a polished version 1.0 directly. That has now taken almost two decades.
The engine has its own history: Volition once released the source code of FreeSpace 2, and fans have kept developing it under the name FreeSpace Open ever since. Other large fan projects have been built on it before. The team also stresses that the whole project is open source and that the community was closely involved via Discord, the forum and the wiki.
What Fate of the Galaxy offers
Fate of the Galaxy is a space combat game set in the era of the Original Trilogy. According to the team’s announcement, here is what you get:
- Fly for the Rebel Alliance, the Galactic Empire or as an independent privateer.
- Interconnected story campaigns, dynamic campaigns, arcade and training scenarios and standalone missions.
- More than 64 ships with working cockpits and customizable weapon loadouts.
- Build your own missions with the FRED mission editor.
- Play LAN multiplayer, in VR and with head tracking.
- According to the team, all assets were made by humans only.
I find the control options especially interesting. You can use up to four input devices at once, such as a joystick, throttle and pedals. If you only have a mouse and keyboard, you can toggle between a mode for wide sweeping turns and an aiming mode for precise shots. Several difficulty and game settings let you play it as a casual arcade shooter or as a serious simulation. You can also give orders to your wingmen in combat.
Download: how to play Fate of the Galaxy for free
Fate of the Galaxy is available for free for Windows, Linux and Mac on ModDB. You can find all the details on the official website as well. The Windows version is about 3.5 GB and comes with the Knossos launcher, which you simply run after extracting. According to the team, a dedicated graphics card is not strictly required if you adjust a few graphics options.
I honestly find it impressive that a group of fans stuck with a project for almost 20 years and then simply gave it away. If you miss classics like X-Wing or TIE Fighter, you should definitely check this one out.
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