Homeworld

Homeworld (1999) saw Canadian studio Relic Entertainment attempt something bold – a real-time strategy game set in genuinely three-dimensional space. Instead of commanding units across a flat map, players led the fleet of the Kushan people, whose home planet Kharak is annihilated in the opening moments, sending the survivors to search for the mythical homeworld of Hiigara aboard the mothership. The economy relied on harvester ships gathering resources from asteroids and gas clouds, a ship lost was lost for good, and veteran crews carried visible scars from earlier battles. A mournful score paired with the silent vastness of space gave the game an atmosphere no real-time strategy title had approached before.

Homeworld: Cataclysm (2000), developed not by Relic but by Barking Dog Studios, was officially a standalone expansion set fifteen years later. It introduced modular ship-building and the parasitic Beast faction, whose virus could infect and hijack both enemy and the player's own vessels, forcing players to quarantine or sacrifice infected ships in time. Three years later came Homeworld 2 (2003), which streamlined fleet-building, sped up combat, and pushed the story toward a final confrontation between the Kushan and the expansionist Vaygr empire led by Makaan.

After Homeworld 2 the series went quiet for over a decade. Publisher THQ collapsed, and Gearbox Software acquired the rights in 2013, releasing the Homeworld Remastered Collection two years later – a rework of both original games that preserved their original gameplay while adding online multiplayer. 2016 brought Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak from Blackbird Interactive, a ground-based spin-off set before the first game, when the Kushan were only just discovering their spacefaring past and fighting over a desert planet with vehicles instead of ships.

A full return to space combat arrived only with Homeworld 3 (2024), again from Blackbird Interactive working with Gearbox, which continued and closed out the story begun in the first two games, this time staging battles amid the wreckage of ancient megastructures used as cover. Over twenty-five years, the series earned a reputation as one of the few to turn the emptiness of space into both a battlefield and an emotional backdrop, leaving most later attempts at 3D space strategy far behind.