Inherit the Galaxy, For a Price

THE LORE OF M.A.X.

Table of Contents

Preface

M.A.X. is rarely remembered for its surprisingly dark science fiction setting which is sad as there is a complete grand space opera to be explored with a well established creation myth, treachery, slavery, conspiracy and the unmissable freedom fighting.

The article collects all the bits and pieces of canon M.A.X. Universe lore and explores the alternative time & story lines that were eventually cancelled during game development by the original authors. In case the source materials contradict each other the contradiction is shown rather than smoothed over. Where the author of this article draws a conclusion of his own, it is marked as such.

For the history of the game development itself — Mindcraft, Mechamander, the release chronology — see the separate Evolution article.



Two Voices, One History

The backstory under the title INHERIT THE GALAXY, FOR A PRICE [2] tells the same story twice, in alternating blocks, in two completely different registers.

One voice is scriptural. It speaks of the Starmaker, of Lightning and Flare, of largess and beneficence, and it is attributed to the Concord Revelations. The other voice is flat, direct and cynical; it is attributed to the Secret Revelations. The two run in strict alternation, each block of scripture immediately followed by its plain-language gloss.

The grand, mythic passages are the Concord’s official Revelations, and the blunt ones are the secret truth known to the initiated. The final Secret Revelations block, the one-line hand-off to the player, is the only one left without its label.

The effect is that the reader is inducted twice: once as a believer and once as an insider. The last two blocks make the device explicit. The Concord Revelations close with a blessing —

And now, with all the secrets of the Star Lords revealed to you, we welcome the new M.A.X. Commander to the ranks of his compatriots and await your acquisition of the glory that is no doubt rightfully yours.

— From the Concord Revelations [2]

— and the Secret Revelations answer with a single, deflating sentence:

To this situation you come, one of the latest of the M.A.X. Commanders. [2]

The Discordant Concord

The Starmaker and the Star Lords

Space was vast and empty, and the Starmaker filled it with stars and planets, but could bless only some of them with life. On a few of those, intelligence arose, and those species that survived the crossing to the stars built empires and became known as the Star Lords. In the beginning there were planets enough for everyone, and the Star Lords met “with amiability and tolerance” [2].

The gloss is less romantic: half the stars in the galaxy have only lifeless planets or none at all, life itself is common, intelligence is rare, and early contact between star-faring species was friendly purely because nobody was short of resources yet [2].

Running out of everything

Over millennia the interstellar powers stripped their own worlds bare. Some had husbanded their planets and “many cared little for doing so”, but the end state was the same: exhausted homeworlds, and a shrinking supply of exploitable planets, most of which somebody else also had a claim on [2].

So they fought. The scripture says the Star Lords “called upon the Lightning and the Flare and smote one another”; the gloss says space-borne weapons are simply too indiscriminate. Star Lords themselves died in these wars. Three races were utterly destroyed before the survivors drew back in horror and the most powerful of them formed the Concord [2].

The two principles, and the two provisos

The Concord exists to enforce two rules [2]:

  1. No race may attempt to take a planet that is fully occupied by another Concord member.
  2. Disputed worlds may only be fought over on the surface of that world, using appropriate forces. Space-borne weaponry cannot be used on planets. Nuclear and biological weapons cannot be used on planets.

Rule 2 is the entire design document of M.A.X. Everything the player is allowed to do — surface units only, no strategic weapons, an opponent who is bound by the same restriction — is a treaty obligation rather than a game balance decision.

Holdout Star Lords were brought in by two provisos that the Revelations describe as “hidden” [2]:

  1. Members of the Concord could do anything they wanted to non-member worlds without anyone raising a complaint.
  2. The Concord had no power to interfere with any of the policies of a neighbour as long as it did not lead to all-out war.

The Concord, in other words, is not a peace. It is a cartel with an agreed rulebook for its wars and no protection whatsoever for anybody outside it.

Nobody left with will to fight

Having outlawed the only weapons they were good at using, the Star Lords discovered that their own populations would not fight at all. The scripture blames an inability to raise a hand against fellow citizens; the gloss simply calls them decadent. Either way the Concord had to buy mercenaries [2].

Machines alone were not enough — “even these creations needed a guiding hand”. The Concord already had the technology, because it was using it for its Master Pilots, who navigate faster-than-light ships, and its Master Controllers, who build orbital factories and run shipyards. The same procedure produced a third profession: the M.A.X. Commander, built to lead mechanised forces instead of live troops [2].

Colonists were an even scarcer commodity than soldiers. What the Concord needed, in the gloss’s own words, was “a more primitive race that would be willing to fight for the privilege of living on a new world and then continue to pay for it” [2].

Then they started picking up radio transmissions from Earth.

The Alien Enigma

Earth, early 21st century

The backstory’s Earth is not destroyed and not post-apocalyptic. It is merely squalid. Nuclear arms have proliferated past any hope of control, the world is split into opposing camps, everyone expects a madman to push the button eventually, and nobody is spending money on making the planet worth inheriting. “Pollution and toxicity were the rules of the day.” The scriptural version puts it more elegantly: the peoples of Earth “breathed poison and drank venom, all of their own making” [2].

The Dealer in Worlds

First contact is detected by the Meteor Watch. A gigantic ship, obviously carved out of an asteroid, appears near the orbit of Mars and proceeds slowly under power towards Earth. The warlords of Earth try to destroy it and fail; the ship stops well outside the range of anything Earth or its orbitals can throw [2].

Its occupant — the Concord’s chosen negotiator, deliberately picked because he resembled the figures in the video broadcasts they had intercepted — introduces himself as the Dealer in Worlds. His offer is exactly one sentence long:

He offered humanity the stars, for a price. [2]

The price is warriors. Any political organisation that supplied warriors to the Concord could put colonists out among the stars. Given the Concord’s edge in technology and numbers, the gloss notes drily, “it would probably be a very good deal” — for the Concord [2].

Who signed up

The industrial powers sat back and evaluated. None of them were interested in sending their soldiers to fight alien wars in exchange for farmland [2].

Everyone else queued up. A thousand smaller powers, fringe organisations and special interests took the offer, and were “delighted (and usually somewhat surprised)” to find that the alien was willing to treat each of them as a political organisation in its own right. Persecuted religious minorities, tribes with powerful traditional enemies, anybody for whom the promise of their own land was worth fighting for. The major powers then realised they could defuse a hundred domestic crises at once, supported the claimants, and in several cases coerced factions that did not want to leave into leaving anyway [2].

The fleet itself was built in orbit by Concord robots under Star Lord Master Controllers, out of raw material taken from the Asteroid Belt and the Moon: “scores of gigantic colony ships”, one per faction, each sent out with its own band of dissidents and seekers [2].

The Bargain

The real contract was disclosed only after the ships had left Earth [2].

The factions had understood that they would receive planets to colonise in exchange for supplying mercenary warriors. The truth was that to gain a planet, all the colonists had to fight for it — not just the soldiers. When two Concord members dispute a world, each sponsor picks a human faction, and those two factions fight it out on the surface. The winner earns the right to populate the world in the name of the alien race that sponsored them; the sponsor takes title to the planet, and takes rent from the colonists in resources and manufactured goods, forever [2].

There was exactly one objection.

One colony ship’s passengers refused to be “sharecroppers” for the Concord. That ship blew up quite spectacularly in full view of the others and the Dealer asked if anyone else had objections to the arrangement. [2]

The scriptural version of this passage is worth reading side by side with the gloss, because it is the clearest demonstration of what the Concord Revelations are for:

One dissenter asked, “Why should we fight and die for a planet for which use we must pay a burdensome tax?” But when the full glory of the Star Lords was revealed to him, he acquiesced and was silent forevermore. No others had objections.

— From the Concord Revelations [2]

The brain in the jar

Only then did the Dealer reveal the last clause. Certain colonists would be selected as M.A.X. Commanders: they would pilot a colonisation ship at faster-than-light speed to the target world, raise a robotic force there, and establish a beachhead the colonists could grow on [2].

The catch is medical. A waking mind of any species cannot survive the rigours of faster-than-light travel, and the colonists’ cold sleep is not an option for the pilot, because somebody has to be awake to fly. Centuries of experience across the galaxy produced one solution:

The prospective M.A.X. Commander must have his brain removed from his body and put into a life support system. […] only by isolating that mind in the life support system and putting a layer of interfaces (conveniently human-shaped for human M.A.X. Commanders to allow for maximum ease of control) between the brain and the universe can piloting a faster-than-light ship be accomplished without driving the pilots mad. [2]

The scripture presents the same operation as a promotion: the Chosen from among the Chosen, “ensconced in receptacles that would protect them and make them virtually immortal, as onto the Star Lords themselves” [2].

Ali Atabek’s welcome note for M.A.X. I describes the procedure in the second person:

To command your own M.A.X. force, you too must become a brain in a jar, just like the rest of us. Fortunately, a good brain is all you need to succeed as a M.A.X. Commander — no other body parts are required! [4]

Come the Revolution

Centuries of it

And so it went for centuries. Humans fought and died on worlds so that alien masters could enjoy the resources. The Great Ships kept sailing, supplying each new generation of colonists and the occasional Commander. But the Colony Ships travel far slower than light and are now many light years from any habitable star; only the Dealer’s supply ships keep them alive [2].

That single logistical fact is the leash. It is also the reason the campaign happens.

Eight Clans

Shared experience wore down the creeds that had originally separated the factions, but the old animosities and the memories of what had been done on the disputed worlds never quite went away. The thousand-odd factions consolidated into eight Clans, all mutually hostile, each with its own specialities in warfare, production and colonisation, and each with its own flight of Colony Ships. Smaller factions remain independent in name but are in practice dependent on one of the eight [2][3].

The Circuit

The Commanders drifted in the opposite direction. Because they were selected for competence in particular environments rather than for loyalty, a Commander would be assigned to whichever Clan suited the mission — and a Commander could easily find himself leading the forces of his own people’s hereditary enemies against his own people. Being virtually immortal and increasingly detached from any memory of human life, they stopped objecting [2].

They then formalised it. The M.A.X. Commanders formed their own association and established the Circuit: new Commanders are deliberately rotated through several different Clans in their early missions so they can learn the strengths and weaknesses of each [2].

The Circuit is not just flavour text. It is the in-fiction justification for the campaign’s structure, and, as shown further below, the campaign follows it to the letter.

The cinder

The Circuit had an unintended effect. Commanders who had served every Clan started to notice that all of them were human, and that there was no obvious reason why humans should keep killing each other on behalf of alien landlords when they could simply share a planet.

The Concord’s answer is the coldest passage in the revelations:

The Concord met the first such attempt with massive overkill. When they were done the planet was a cinder. All M.A.X. Commanders and Clans were informed that they should learn a lesson from this and continue to maintain the status quo. [2]

The Revelations dispose of the same event in five words: “Their folly was demonstrated to them.” [2]

Most took the lesson. Some drew the opposite conclusion — that no human would ever be safe until humanity controlled its own fate. But the obstacles are enormous, and the revelations list them with unusual precision [2]:

  • only M.A.X. Commanders have access to faster-than-light travel, and only when assigned to a mission;
  • the Colony Ships and the individual human worlds are extremely vulnerable;
  • the weapons available to M.A.X. Commanders “were little better than those their ancestors had known on Earth”, while the Concord space fleet has far more potent ones.

How could anyone break the endless cycle of brokered battles? [2]

Clan Origins

Every Clan is a twenty-first century grievance that survived four hundred years of interstellar serfdom, and the clan introductions are entirely unsentimental about most of them.

Clan Origin story [3]
The Chosen Religious refugees, each certain his vision of the True Way was the correct one. They have since built a central credo everyone can live with — an outstanding achievement, since Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists all number among their ancestors.
Crimson Path The last of the Communist insurgencies. Part of the name is thought to derive from Peru’s Shining Path. Dedicated to liberation of the people and collectivisation of all community effort, and among the first Clans to form — a triumph of ideology over ethnicity. Most members today would struggle to explain what their ancestors actually believed.
Von Griffin An assemblage of the world’s street-level fascists and Nazis, who “lived in the shadows and specialized in atrocities”. United by hatred of foreigners, despite most of them being foreign to one another — in several cases one group had persecuted another back on Earth.
Ayer’s Hand The prosperous who felt dispossessed by the arrival of foreigners in their countries. The name appears to come from an organisation of Australian landholders who felt dispossessed by the government-sponsored resurgence of aborigines in the early 21st century.
Musashi The samurai — the “independent, arrogantly noble dispossessed” of a dozen countries whose governments had moved on to democratic or socialist solutions. Despite the Japanese name it drew from every nation with a chivalric tradition, real or aspirational. They are fixated on bigger and better armour.
Sacred Eights Also religious refugees, but persecuted for being different from their neighbours — often neighbours who are now the Chosen — rather than for asserting superiority. Many ethnicities and countries, united by a wish for religious freedom rather than dominance.
Seven Knights Much in common with Musashi, but placed the maintenance of station and power above any code of honour. “These were the nobility of place, not attitude.” Their philosophy is to establish and maintain rather than to seek out danger.
Axis Inc. Businesses and establishments that wanted to preserve a status quo the World Order had moved past. Mostly fascistic and autocratic, but pragmatic enough to know that dominance comes through assimilation rather than conquest. Founded as a counterweight to the rising Crimson Path and their bitter rivals ever since. Four centuries on, the only Clan still trading under a corporate name.

Two details in this table are very important. Musashi’s armour obsession and Seven Knights’ defensive doctrine are stated as cultural facts [2], and they show up unchanged in the mission briefings four hundred years later: the briefings repeatedly speak of “Vicious Musashi tanks”, “The Musashi Tank Horde”, and of Seven Knights defending “in their usual formidable fashion” behind “the typical, and legendary, fixed defenses that Seven Knights is best known for” [9]. The Clan bonuses in the Clan selection screen are the same statement expressed as numbers.

Where each Clan stands

Four centuries of shared serfdom did not produce solidarity. The campaign foreword, shown once before the first landing, splits the eight Clans down the middle and names them [21]:

Unfortunately, only four Clans have thrown their support to our efforts: Crimson Path, Musashi, Sacred Eight and Von Griffin. The other four Clans prefer to continue to submit themselves to the whims of our Concord masters. [21]

Aligned with the Secret Council of Freedom Content with the Concord arrangement
Crimson Path, Musashi, Sacred Eights, Von Griffin The Chosen, Ayer’s Hand, Seven Knights, Axis

The division follows the origin stories almost mechanically. The loyalist four are exactly the Clans whose founding grievance was about keeping something: Seven Knights are “the nobility of place”, Axis exist to preserve a status quo, Ayer’s Hand formed around the fear of dispossession, and the Chosen are the one religious Clan defined by the certainty of being right rather than by having been persecuted. The rebel four are the insurgents, the revolutionaries, the outcasts and the persecuted — the Clans whose ancestors had already lost everything once.

The Machinery of War

A handful of unit descriptions quietly extend the setting [6].

The Xenti. They are the only named alien group other than the Concord itself:

Players can gain upgrades either by doing research or by purchasing them from the Concord’s master technicians known as the Xenti, who supply software upgrades to your factories and thereby render them capable of building the enhanced units. [5]

This reframes the whole economy. Refined gold is not an abstract research budget — it is hard currency paid to an alien technical caste for licensed firmware: “Each factory builds units based on the software specifications for each unit. Upgrades to individual units are accomplished by means of software upgrades purchased by refining gold reserves” [6]. A M.A.X. Commander does not invent a better tank. He or she buys a better tank as a software patch.

The Eco-sphere is described as a “domed building containing an Earth-like environment”, so roviding as many of them as possible for the colonists is “your ultimate goal” [6]. This is why the victory condition of nearly every mission in the game is an eco-sphere rating rather than a body count: the score is the colony. Destroying an enemy eco-sphere retroactively deducts every point it ever earned [1] — the colony is not merely set back, it is unmade.

Habitats house the colonists and each one produces three work teams; eco-spheres, research centres and training halls each consume one [6]. The colonists the whole war is fought over are, mechanically, a labour pool.

Infiltrators and Infantry are the only humans who ever set foot on the battlefield. The Infiltrator is a “commando trained in the arts of stealth and electronic warfare”, invisible to every mechanical unit and detectable only by other humans; Infantry are “human soldiers equipped with light anti-tank shoulder weapons” who can spot them [6]. Both are trained in Training Halls, and the Barracks that houses them contains “a machine shop for repairing and improving powered suits” — the only reference in the game to what these people are actually wearing [6].

The Physics of the M.A.X. Universe

Steve Perrin, the game’s head writer, also wrote the strategy sheet Interplay distributed as Strategy to the M.A.X. [13]. It is nominally a hint sheet, but Perrin cannot help writing it partly in-universe, and in doing so he documents the physics of the setting better than other sources do.

The design premise comes first:

The first thing to keep firmly in mind with M.A.X. is that it was purposely designed to emulate a chess game with a lot more variety of units and terrain. [13]

From that follows the most distinctive property of the M.A.X. universe: there is no chance in combat. If a unit is in range and fires, it hits, and it does exactly the same damage every time. Only an upgrade can change that number. Perrin then justifies it as a fact about the world rather than a rule of the game:

In the worlds of M.A.X., targeting is an exact science and munitions are manufactured to rigorous tolerances. The sights will put the shell into the best possible spot and the shell will always do its exact amount of damage. [13]

And, therefore:

Obviously, Electronic Counter Measures are useless in M.A.X.. Sighting devices cannot be fooled. It’s a hard fact that a M.A.X. Commander has to learn to live with. [13]

There is exactly one exception in the entire game, and it is a human being. An Infiltrator’s attempt to disable or steal an enemy unit is, in Perrin’s words, “the game’s sole concession to probabilities. There is always the chance of failure, and the chance that failure will bring discovery and disaster” [13].

A universe in which machines never miss and only the humans are unreliable is a fairly pointed piece of setting design, whether or not it started life as a game balance decision.

The Campaign is a War of Emancipation

The nine campaign missions [8] are a continuous story, and that story is the human rebellion the backstory sets up and then walks away from.

Read in order, the briefings describe a conspiracy that starts by stealing alien research, escalates to stealing alien industry, and ends by disarming the Concord’s deadman switch.

The Secret Council of Freedom

The foreword is the only place where the rebellion introduces itself [21]:

We are the Secret Council of Freedom, an organization of M.A.X. Commanders who are devoted to making a place for mankind as an equal member of the Concord. [21]

Note what is not being demanded. The Council’s stated goal is membership, not secession — a seat at the table rather than escape from the room. This is a war of emancipation fought by people who intend to keep living in the same galaxy afterwards, and it reframes every briefing that follows: the artifact raids and the industrial thefts are not preparations for a breakout, they are preparations for a negotiation.

The Council also explains why the moment has arrived at all:

As the members of the Concord have grown more decadent, they have left more analytical and decision-making positions in human hands. At last we are in a position to act. [21]

The decadence that the Concord Revelations keep mentioning as a moral failing turns out to be an operational one. The Concord has spent centuries outsourcing its own competence to the mercenaries it bought, and the mercenaries have noticed.

Then the hostage problem, stated more precisely here than anywhere else:

As long as the Concord has the ability to destroy the Great Ships that contain the majority of our population and all of our main manufacturing facilities, they have hostages that we cannot endanger. For centuries we have sought some way to safeguard the Great Ships. [21]

That single sentence resolves an oddity in mission 5, which complains that “our own industrial facilities are not adequate” while the rebellion is evidently well supplied. Human heavy industry is not scarce — it is aboard the hostages, and therefore unusable.

And finally the plot engine of the first eight missions:

The Council has received secret survey reports that there is knowledge of ancient artifacts unknown to the Concord on various planets that are up for dispute. Taking over this knowledge will give us an edge that will allow us to protect the Great Ships and negotiate with the Concord from a position of strength. [21]

Ancient artifacts unknown to the Concord. The setting quietly acquires a third party here — something older than the Concord, scattered across disputed worlds, and forgotten by the species that has been strip-mining the galaxy for millennia. It is never named, never described, and never mentioned again. It is also why so many campaign objectives are worded as capture intact rather than destroy: the Council is not after the hardware, it is after the knowledge.

# Planet Player’s Clan Objective Limit
1 Islandia Von Griffin Destroy the eco-spheres, capture the research station intact 30 turns
2 Valentine’s Planet Musashi Hold a captured research lab 30 turns
3 Three Rings Sacred Eights Capture two loaded material trucks intact 40 turns
4 Cooler Crimson Path Take the planet 50 turns
5 Splatterscape Crimson Path Gain control of the entire planet 150 turns
6 New Luzon Von Griffin Destroy the invaders 100 turns
7 New Luzon Crimson Path Hold the planet, highest eco-sphere rating 100 turns
8 Valentine’s Musashi Capture 4 alien units alive, keep every R&D lab standing —
9 Frigia Von Griffin Destroy the eco-spheres of the central base 100 turns

Mission 1 — Islandia. The Seven Knights have found alien artifacts and are studying them at a facility on Islandia. The player is to take the planet “so that the information can be obtained by the council” [8] — the Secret Council of Freedom named in the foreword [21]. This is the first of the “ancient artifacts unknown to the Concord” the Council’s survey reports pointed it at, and the reason the research station has to survive the battle.

Mission 2 — Valentine’s Planet. An Axis research facility has “discovered some interesting aspects of the meteor that created the gigantic Lake Corazon”. Advance elements have already seized the base; the player has to hold it against the two Clans actually fighting over the planet — Axis and Ayer’s Hand — until the researchers have everything [8].

Mission 3 — Three Rings. An Ayer’s Hand mining complex is extracting “rare mineral ores we need for our weapons Research”. Five loaded trucks have been spotted; two must be captured [8].

Mission 4 — Cooler. The Chosen hold the central continent. Cooler turns out to be an excellent source of the minerals “we need to implement the master plan” — and here the conspiracy’s reach becomes clear:

We have found an uncurious Concord sponsor to allow you to take over the planet as if it was a normal takeover. [8]

The rebellion is already able to arrange fraudulent planetary disputes through a compliant alien patron.

Mission 5 — Splatterscape. Raw materials are no longer the problem; capacity is. “While we have the raw materials for the new weapons, our own industrial facilities are not adequate to use them. We must capture some concord facilities.” Splatterscape is directly controlled by a Concord member and holds Concord industry among its human population; the Seven Knights run its defences. The player lands on an out-of-the-way island and is told to build up before being spotted [8].

Missions 6 and 7 — New Luzon. Two consecutive missions on one world, from two different Clans. First, as Von Griffin, the player repels an Ayer’s Hand landing — and the briefing gives away that New Luzon matters for reasons the enemy knows nothing about: “Our information is that this is just a regular colonization operation. They don’t seem to realize that we are here for any other purpose.” Then, as Crimson Path, the player takes over from the mauled Von Griffin garrison to face an incoming Chosen force, with a warning that changes the stakes: “Be very careful, we think they have been given Concord level weapons to use” [8].

Mission 8 — Valentine’s. The cover is blown. “The Concord definitely knows there is something wrong on this planet, but we can not move the Labs without losing all of our work.” An invasion force made up predominantly of alien fighting units closes in from all sides, badly outnumbering and outgunning the defenders, who have only a large refined gold credit and their training halls to fall back on. The objective is not merely to survive: four alien units must be captured alive for the scientists [8].

Mission 9 — Frigia. The last briefing is the payoff for the entire backstory:

We have discovered that the drives of our Great Ships have been booby-trapped to explode in response to a subspace pulse that can be sent from a Concord facility on the frozen planet we call Frigia. Apparently the Concord had this set up as a fail safe in case we ever rebelled. The current Concord is so decadent that we are not sure they even realize this possibility exists. But we are so close to freedom that we cannot take the chance. [8]

The Concord’s grip on the Great Ships — which the lore established as humanity’s fatal vulnerability — turns out to be literal explosive charges installed centuries ago and possibly forgotten. The defenders are Seven Knights fixed emplacements plus Concord vehicles. The player is given a handful of alien vehicles and told there will be no more of them unless he or she captures some. The briefing ends, uniquely among the nine, with “Good luck” [8].

The epilogue

Completing the ninth mission earns the campaign’s conclusion, and it is the only text in M.A.X. that says what the war actually achieved [22]:

The last threat to the Great Ships has been defeated. The Concord members are faced with a hard choice; they must either bring the humans into the Concord or use their still superior space-going capacities to isolate the humans in the systems they now occupy. [22]

The obvious third option is raised and dismissed, and the grounds on which it is dismissed are entirely in character for the organisation the Revelations described:

The only possible third alternative, extermination of the human populations on the planets, is now impossible because of the human weapons on the planets. Even bombardment with asteroids would probably fail or render the planets uninhabitable and unexploitable. [22]

Genocide is ruled out partly because it would not work and partly because it would spoil the real estate. The Concord never stops being a cartel.

And then the settlement:

But isolating the human populations will just delay the inevitable. Humans will build their own starships and come out to meet and perhaps conquer their former masters. Induction of the humans into the Concord is the only sane alternative. [22]

So the closing question of the backstory — “How could anyone break the endless cycle of brokered battles?” [2] — does get an answer [22], and almost nobody ever saw it. Humanity does not break the Concord and does not escape it. It makes itself too expensive to kill and too dangerous to ignore, and is let in. The Secret Council of Freedom gets precisely what it asked for in the foreword [21], no more and no less — and the warning that humans will eventually build their own starships and “perhaps conquer their former masters” is left hanging as the Concord’s reason for saying yes.

The Circuit, enacted

The campaign hands the player to a different Clan almost every mission: Von Griffin, Musashi, Sacred Eights, Crimson Path, Crimson Path, Von Griffin, Crimson Path, Musashi, Von Griffin [8]. That is exactly the Circuit’s established approach — new Commanders rotated through several Clans so they learn each one’s strengths and weaknesses [2].

It is also, mission for mission, the roll call from the foreword [21]. The player never fights for the Chosen, Ayer’s Hand, Seven Knights or Axis, and never fights against Von Griffin, Musashi, Sacred Eights or Crimson Path. Across all nine missions there is not one exception: the campaign only ever puts the player in the uniform of a Clan that has joined the Secret Council, and only ever points a gun at a Clan that has not.

The Circuit therefore does double duty. In the fiction it is the alien association’s training rotation. In the campaign it is how a conspiracy that spans four Clans moves the same trusted Commander between all four of them without anybody in the Concord noticing anything unusual.

The Aliens on the Ground

The Concord is not just a lore element. Alien hardware appears in missions, and its behaviour is documented [12]:

Alien Units are sometimes found in the Campaign and Stand Alone Missions, and can optionally be added to Custom Games if desired. When first found, Alien units do not belong to any team, and must be captured by an Infiltrator before they can be used. [12]

Unowned, superior, and acquirable only by sending an infiltrator to steal one. That is the rebellion’s entire technology strategy compressed into a game rule, and it is why campaign missions 8 and 9 are built around capture rather than destruction [8].

Alien Derelicts

The in-game options panel gives these machines a proper name — Alien Derelicts [23] — and that single word carries a lot of setting. They are not a garrison, not a patrol and not a deployment. They are wrecks, abandoned on disputed worlds and still running, waiting for somebody to walk up and claim them.

The same panel records what the other side does about them:

Note that computer opponents will also attempt to use any Alien Units they find if the Computer Opponent difficulty level is set to Expert or higher. If set below Expert, the computer will attempt to destroy any alien vehicles it encounters. [23]

Below Expert, a rival M.A.X. Commander blows the derelicts up on sight. Only an expert tries to take one. Whether that was written as difficulty tuning or as characterisation, it reads as the latter: capturing alien hardware is the sort of thing only a Commander who has understood what the Secret Council is really doing would attempt [21].

Machines that learn

The four alien vehicles the game ships — a gunboat, a tank, an assault gun and an attack plane — carry descriptions of their own [24], and every one of them ends with the same sentence:

All alien units repair themselves, and improve their abilities with experience. [24]

This is the exact inverse of everything human forces do. A human unit is repaired by a repair vehicle or hauled back to a depot, and it improves only when its owner buys a software upgrade from the Xenti or grinds one out of a research centre [5][6]. Human machinery is inert; it gets better because somebody paid an alien for a patch. Alien machinery heals itself and gets better because it has been in a fight.

The Alien Assault Gun mounts a “powerful plasma weapon” [24] — only the Concord possess energy weapon, against an entirely ballistic and rocket-armed human arsenal.

Put beside the closing line of the backstory — that the weapons available to M.A.X. Commanders “were little better than those their ancestors had known on Earth” [2] — the gap stops being a game balance decision and becomes the whole reason there is a plot. Four hundred years of rent, and the tenants are still firing shells at landlords who field self-repairing plasma armour.

Two of the stand-alone missions extend the picture further [9].

Sanctuary is the only briefing that shows the Concord’s own internal politics. The player has colonised the world entirely by the book, and it is his sponsor who breaks the contract:

your sponsor has decided that he can exploit it better robotically rather than by collecting rents from you. He has hired one of the few remaining M.A.X. Commanders of Concord origin to use Concord equipment to take it away from you. If you can defeat this outlaw attack, the Concord will reprimand their member and ensure that this will not happen again. [9]

Three separate pieces of lore fall out of one paragraph: the rent arrangement of the Bargain [2] is still running exactly as described; M.A.X. Commanders of non-human origin still exist but are nearly extinct, which confirms the Revelations’ claim that human Commanders “soon proved their superiority to those of all other races of the Concord” [2]; and the Concord will actually enforce its rules against its own members — but only after the fact, and only if you win.

Peak-a-Boo points at yet another faction: “a renegade association connected with the Concord is operating a highly advanced reseach facility in this island complex. They have engaged elements of the Seven Knights Clan to defend it. Destroy it utterly.” [9]

Two of the stand-alone briefings also quietly acknowledge the rule laid down in the Bargain [2] — that each disputant picks a different faction. The first opens with “It is not supposed to happen, but both you and the other MAX Commander are commanding Sacred Eights units”, and another with “Though normally not allowed, this time both M.A.X. Commanders are commanding units of the same Clan” [9]. Somebody was keeping track.

The Worlds

“M.A.X. features twenty-four different worlds” [15]. The twenty-four worlds are not a flat list. They are grouped into four families of six, each family sharing one planetary type: snow, crater, green and desert [20]. The selection screen shows one globe per family and the six survey maps belonging to it, which is what the in-game help means when it says the arrows “cycle through the available classes of planets” and that the picture is “a representative world in this class of planets” [23].

Family The six worlds
Snow Snowcrab, Frigia, Ice Berg, The Cooler, Ultima Thule, Long Floes
Crater Iron Cross, Splatterscape, Peak-a-boo, Valentine’s Planet, Three Rings, Great divide
Green New Luzon, Middle Sea, High Impact, Sanctuary, Islandia, Hammerhead
Desert Freckles, Sandspit, Great Circle, Long Passage, Flash Point, Bottleneck

Six frozen worlds out of twenty-four, and not one that is described as pleasant. The Concord’s disputed planets are the marginal ones — the leftovers nobody would fight over if there were anything better on offer, which is precisely the situation the backstory describes [2].

Lake Corazon

Survey notes of Valentine’s Planet says the world is “named for the heart-shaped great lake in the center of the land mass” [20]. The second campaign briefing calls that lake Lake Corazon and sends the player to hold a research facility that has “discovered some interesting aspects of the meteor that created” it [8]. And corazón is Spanish for heart.

So Valentine’s Planet is a world named after a heart-shaped impact crater — a colony world with a romantic name and a violent one, depending on which language you read it in, and the only world in the game whose geography is also a plot point. It is the site of two campaign missions, the second of which ends with an alien invasion force closing in on the labs studying it [8].

Whatever the researchers found in that crater is never stated. Given that the campaign foreword sends the player after “ancient artifacts unknown to the Concord” [21], a meteor worth a dedicated research facility and an alien counter-invasion is a fairly strong hint.

High Impact — “generally resourceless except for the region around the impact crater from a major asteroid strike” [20] — is the second impact world, and the only one whose resources are explicitly a consequence of what hit it.

Which worlds see action

Twenty-three of the twenty-four are used by the shipped missions [8][9][11]. The campaign takes the player to Islandia, Valentine’s Planet (twice), Three Rings, The Cooler, Splatterscape, New Luzon (twice) and Frigia. Hammerhead and Bottleneck are the most heavily used of all, with three stand-alone missions and a multiplayer scenario between them; Great Divide, Long Passage, Freckles, Three Rings and Sanctuary get exactly one mission each. Snowcrab is used by nothing.

Only one further piece of world geography appears anywhere: Frigia, the site of the last campaign mission, is described as “the frozen planet we call Frigia” [8] — the phrasing quietly concedes that the name is humanity’s own, and that whatever the Concord calls the place, nobody has told the colonists.

Two Incompatible Backstories

The archived M.A.X. pages from June 1997 carry a completely different origin story [15]:

War, famine and pestilence have combined with ecological collapse, genetic manipulation and tectonic disaster to bring about the demise of the world we now know. The aftermath of this destruction has caused mankind to splinter into eight opposing clans and necessitated the construction of huge spaceships to search the galaxy for habitable planets. Once a planet has been deemed habitable, a mechanized commander, a brain in an android body, must be sent down to the planet to survey, colonize and defend the planet for the arrival of the clan. [15]

There are no aliens in this version. No Concord, no Star Lords, no Dealer, no Xenti, no bargain and no rent. Earth is destroyed rather than merely filthy; the Clans are a product of that destruction rather than of a recruitment drive; humanity builds its own ships rather than receiving them; and the Commanders work for their own Clan rather than being rotated between all of them by an alien association.

The same text, almost word for word, opens Interplay’s in-house interview with Ali Atabek in the December 1996 Interplay RAG [17], where it is already picked apart in the Evolution article. Seeing it turn up again as the official product description six months later suggests it was not a one-off blunder by a single interviewer but the marketing department’s standing summary of a game whose manual nobody in that department had read. The leaked internal beta version of the game from 21st of August, 1996 has no missions at all, nor any of the alien storylines and units. The stolen internal build from 29th of October, 1996 already had the alien storyline in. The game was ready for mass production on 8th of December, 1996 with an official press release communicated the game’s arrival in stores on 30th of December, 1996.

The front page of the same site introduces the player as the “Mission Commander” rather than the M.A.X. Commander, and frames the game as straightforward colonial expansion: “YOUR MISSION: colonize new worlds on distant planets. As the Mission Commander, you and the Mechanized Assault & Exploration (M.A.X.) Force you lead are the first ones in. […] The entire new colony? You create it. The resources you find there? Control them. Enemies? Crush ‘em!” [14] The three words at the top of the About the Game page are “Create. Control. Crush.” [15]

It is a fair summary of the gameplay loop and a complete inversion of the fiction, in which the player creates a colony he does not own, controls resources he must pay rent on, and crushes other human beings on behalf of the species that keeps his brain in a jar.

Who Wrote It

The manual credits Steve Perrin as Head Writer, with Paul Kellner, Amy Mitchell and Laura Mitchell as writers and Kelly Newcomb as editor. Tony Postma is credited for Visual Concepts and Storyboards, Cheryl Austin for Original World Design, and the acknowledgements thank “James Thomas for Story Elements and assorted inspirations” [7].

Steve Perrin (1946–2021) was the creator of RuneQuest, published by Chaosium in 1978, and a designer on Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu, Thieves’ World and Elfquest before moving into computer games at Interplay, Maxis and Spectrum Holobyte [18][19]. The double-voiced Revelations, the canon-lawyer’s treaty at the centre of the setting, and eight factions each defined by a specific historical grievance are recognisably the work of a tabletop roleplaying designer rather than a marketing writer — which is very probably why the manual and the web site describe two different universes.

Perrin also wrote the hint sheet quoted above, which is how the setting acquired its one page of in-universe physics [13].

Loose Ends

A handful of things the sources raise and never answer:

  • The ancient artifacts. The foreword describes them as “ancient artifacts unknown to the Concord”, scattered across disputed worlds [21]. Whoever left them there is never named, and the knowledge recovered from them is never described — only its effect, which is that the Great Ships end up safe [22].
  • The master plan. Named once, in the fourth campaign briefing, and never spelled out [8]. Read against the foreword it can only be the plan to safeguard the Great Ships and force a negotiation, but the briefing never says so [21].
  • The Xenti. Named exactly once, and given no description at all [5].
  • The Dealer in Worlds. Still operating centuries later — the supply ships that keep the Great Ships alive are “the Dealer’s” [2] — but whether that is the same individual or an office is never clarified.

References

[1] M.A.X. user manual — North American release, product code MN-ICD-082-0, Interplay Productions, 1996
[2] M.A.X. user manual, Inherit the Galaxy, For a Price
[3] M.A.X. user manual, Clan Origins
[4] M.A.X. user manual, Welcome (Ali Atabek)
[5] M.A.X. user manual, Upgrades
[6] M.A.X. user manual, Game Elements / Support Structures / Colonist Structures / Human Units
[7] M.A.X. user manual, Credits
[8] Campaign mission briefings DESCR1.CAM – DESCR9.CAM, from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[9] Stand-alone mission briefings DESCR1.SCE – DESCR24.SCE, from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[10] Training mission briefings DESCR1.TRA – DESCR15.TRA, from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[11] Multiplayer scenario briefings DESCR1.MPS – DESCR12.MPS, from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[12] README.TXT (M.A.X. v1.04), section (3b) Additional Features
[13] Steve Perrin — Strategy to the M.A.X., Interplay Productions hint sheet
[14] Interplay M.A.X. home page — archived 9 June 1997
[15] Interplay M.A.X. — About The Game — archived 9 June 1997
[16] Interplay M.A.X. — Hints & Tips — archived 9 June 1997
[17] Interplay RAG 1st Edition — December 1996
[18] Wikipedia — Steve Perrin
[19] Steve Perrin at MobyGames
[20] M.A.X. game text resources from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[21] Campaign foreword INTRO1.CAM from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[22] Campaign epilogue WIN9.CAM from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[23] M.A.X. in-game context help text from the M.A.X. CD-ROM
[24] M.A.X. unit definitions and in-game unit descriptions from the M.A.X. CD-ROM