Site music
Welcom to Beacon Mag
Artist beaconmagasine
Album Welcom to Beacon Mag
Five hours of gameplay, three days at Cloud Imperium Games, a surprise visit from Mark Hamill and a lot of rain. Commander Fran, former president of Beacon Events, was one of the handful of creators invited to play Squadron 42 ahead of everyone else. He tells us everything he’s allowed to tell (and he’s allowed to tell quite a lot).
Read the article
On 9 October 2026, Cloud Imperium Games let 120 guests play Squadron 42 for five hours at its Manchester studio. It is the first time the game has been in outside hands. We weren't there, and we are not jealous in the slightest. So here are the questions you ask when you know nothing, and what those who were there have to say. The answers are a synthesis of first impressions published right after the event: Commander Fran's write-up, the reviews by Camak and Hugo Lisoir, and observations from Citizen Spooner. They are reworded. Only the passages in quotation marks use their own words, translated from French where needed.
Read the article
In October 2012, Chris Roberts asked for 2 million dollars to bring the space sim back to life on PC. Fourteen years later, Star Citizen has passed one billion dollars in funding, its studio employs more than a thousand people, and the game is still in alpha. This is the story of how an outsized project came to be, and of the company built to make it: Cloud Imperium Games. No video game has ever raised this much money from its own players. None has taken this long not to come out, either. To understand how a crowdfunding campaign turned into a global studio, you have to go back well before 2012, to a teenager in Manchester writing code on a BBC Micro.
Read the articleNo articles in this section yet.
Beacon assistant
Navigation help
Automatic answers drawn from the site's pages. Please don't share any personal information. Learn more
