How did we get here behind the scenes? When did this process start for you guys? How did we create our candidates? How did the primary process work?

Well, weirdly enough, it actually started probably in 2013, at least the initial conversations of this idea of having some kind of election thing where we allow the community to take part in it. Because the community interaction is such a big part of this and sort of woven so much into the fabric of this game. But it was that sort of thing of, how do we do this in such a way where we don't accidentally elect a bowling ball because people think it'd be funny, which it would be.

I mean, everyone supports Boaty McBoatface as Imperator.

Yeah, totally. But it didn't really kind of get rolling until, actually, it was last CitizenCon when at our panel we sort of unveiled... we'd been sort of talking about it and we're like, hey, we're starting to... I don't know if we'd actually established the exact date where the Imperator was supposed to turn over, that we were sort of coming up to that wall.

Yeah, we had the 10-year term limit established. And then just from the way the lore had been working out, I think it was actually a backer who kindly reminded us on the forums that we were rapidly approaching our term limit. And so we were like, oh, that's a really good point. And that little seed started putting into motion this idea of how we could move forward.

Yeah. And sort of as far as the structure goes, again, we were trying to figure out a way, like Adam was saying, with this sort of super wide swath in the beginning that eventually narrows down, how would this government approach electing this type of official. Because they're coming off of the Messers and stuff like that, they would want a way to make it seem like politics is accessible to the people. And plus, it gives opportunities to have more eccentric type candidates pop up and play around with sort of the Lord Buckethead thing.

Oh, yeah. Vermin Supreme.

And we have previously established that new citizens take their oath and everything and become citizens on Citizen Day. That's on October 10th: CitizenCon in real life, Citizen Day in lore. And so the idea that new citizens would get the right to vote in this once a decade election was really cool to us. And so we decided to anchor the timing of it around that day, of starting the Imperial election at that point. So that was pretty fun.

So with a lot of other things in Star Citizen, we started with this broad structure that they worked through for CitizenCon last year. And then we started to have meetings after that to slowly start to specify and draw in the details about how the voting timeline would work, what candidates would be interesting and highlight certain themes or aspects of the game that we thought would be interesting or play into storylines that were already there. Mira Noh is a senator from Terra that we've mentioned in lore going back years. So we knew the Terra as capital theme is something we want to lean into. And she just seemed like a wonderful way to pull this person who had represented that idea previously in the lore and elevate her to the candidate that's really going to bring that message forward in the election. So it was about getting more specific and then looking back at previous specifics and seeing how we could tie some things together to bring some consistency to the universe.

And if you saw our CitizenCon presentation last year where we talked about the pertinent issues facing the Empire, that helped us provide a framework. So we came up with: what would voters in the universe really care about? What would they be talking about at the time? And laying that on a grid and making sure that we had candidates with opposing views to make an interesting election, and genuine proposals that we could believe in and see as being viable options. We wanted to make it hard to pick.

Yeah. And also the thing, too, is, referring to the Boaty McBoatface thing, because we were opening up this idea of letting the backers elect the Imperator and honoring that, basically we wanted to get down to five candidates who would potentially challenge us, could throw us curveballs as a creative team as far as the political direction of the empire. It was finding candidates who had enough personality to make them pop and feel like they were real people who had ideologies and viewpoints that they could stand on that, again, could potentially throw us curveballs, à la Addison with her stance on AI, which terrifies me at night. But again, it's one of those things, we'll work with that. We have to figure out a way to work with that, which just sounded very interesting and also a fun way for the community to keep us on our toes.