What you need to know
- It’s Monday and nobody has logged on yet, so I can post whatever I feel like.
- Clippy is Microsoft’s notorious Office assistant from the 90s, who remains a cherished icon of a bygone age.
- To celebrate Clippy’s legacy, Starfield player /u/lililiilillil from Reddit recreated the fun and cheeky Office tool as an interstellar space ship.
- Using Starfield’s space ship crafter, you can create ships of all shapes and sizes, and go even further using mods on PC.
- Starfield gets its first major story DLC drop today, dubbed Shattered Space.
Happy Monday gamers and Microsoft 365 users everywhere. None of the other editors have logged in yet, so I’m abusing the lack of oversight to post something fun and fanciful to get your week started.
If you’re of a certain age (potentially with back pain), you may remember Clippy, Microsoft’s fun and friendly Office assistant of yore. Clippy would pop up over the top of Word and other application documents, offering tips and tricks, sometimes unwantedly so, while you were working. These days we have Microsoft Copilot and the promise of AI tools like Windows Recall popping up unwantedly on our Microsoft documents, and they’re certainly far less fun than Clippy was. Alas, Clippy is gone, consigned to the ancient past of Microsoft’s vast and expanding graveyard of products no longer with us.
Clippy may have gone to software heaven, but what if Clippy had the capability to literally travel the heavens? One Starfield player over on reddit named /u/lililiilillil dared to imagine.
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Starfield is the latest game from Bethesda Softworks, now owned by Microsoft under the firm’s Xbox gaming division. Bethesda is known for megahits like Fallout 3, 4, and The Elder Scrolls franchise, and its latest outing took players to one of the most expansive playgrounds the industry has seen, comprised of dozens of planets in a wide open galaxy.
RELATED: Starfield review
To travel around, players build their own ships (or use the basic one provided in the story). The ships are essentially comprised of blocks that connect together intuitively almost like Lego, but have limitations. A bigger ship needs more power to escape planetary gravity, inter-system flight requires bigger fuel storage capacity, and so on. Using Starfield mods, however, you can circumvent some of the restrictions on PC, and create monstrosities awesome ships like reddit’s friendly Clippy ship up there.
On September 30, 2024 (today, in fact), Bethesda is launching Shattered Space, its first story DLC expansion for Starfield. The game proved controversial at launch, with some users criticizing the game’s over-reliance on procedurally-generated planets. Shattered Space conversely is an entirely hand-crafted experience, with heavy horror vibes, where players help (or hinder) a space cult in crisis.
I long for Clippy, but this will do
Clippy is essentially a meme these days, at least among users of a certain age (you and me, probably), but I can’t help but reminisce about its impact. It represents a more “fun” and less “corporate” time for Microsoft in some ways. Microsoft Copilot might be infinitely more useful thanks to its ChatGPT back end, but Clippy or even Cortana were more fun. Ultimately, I know people don’t really want work tools to be fun, right? Maybe they do, which would explain why Microsoft put games in Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn.
Clippy lives on in tributes like the above, but also in Microsoft’s own Windows 11 emoji (📎), at least on the latest versions. I can’t help but feel like Microsoft Copilot or even Bing itself would be far better received if it had a dash of Clippy in it, though. Maybe I’m just overly nostalgic. What do you think?
Either way, have an awesome week, Windows Central friends.
