It was first released against Smart's wishes in 1996 by publisher Take-Two Interactive for MS-DOS and Windows and negatively received for its incomplete nature.

It was released in 2021 on Steam as a compilation pack titled "Battlecruiser Generations", which included both versions of 3000AD and its sequel Millennium.

The game takes place in the year 3000 AD, centuries after mankind has developed advanced spacecraft, and discovered new worlds and intelligent life-forms within and beyond the Solar system.

The events of the game begin with GALCOM diplomatic craft developing a navigational malfunction and straying into Gammulan territory.

Intracorp bid for the rights to publish the game; with a disagreement over source code release, the deal never progressed beyond a letter of intent.

[6] In Take-Two Interactive's SEC filings on February 10, 1997, the company stated that Battlecruiser 3000AD accounted for 14.2% of revenue for the fiscal year ending October 31, 1996.

[14] After publisher Take-Two Interactive released Battlecruiser 3000AD in September 1996, it generated one of the longest and largest flame wars in the history of Usenet.

[20] This flame war lasted for several years, garnered over 70,000 posts, and yielded a series of sites that documented and parodied its history.

Smart and Take-Two Interactive advertised that Battlecruiser 3000AD used a neural network to perform artificial intelligence tasks in the game.

"[21] Upon its initial release of Battlecruiser 3000AD, the game[22] contained many bugs that made it unstable,[6][23][24] according to a GameSpy.com reviewer, who asserted that "Smart consistently overrates his own products and his own abilities.

In February 1998, after obtaining publishing rights from Take-Two Interactive, Smart released the game on the Internet for download free of charge.

[25] Derek Smart filed a lawsuit against Take-Two Interactive (who also released the game in the UK through a sub-license deal with GameTek), alleging breach of contract.

GameSpot gave it a score of 2.6/10, writing that "it will go down in legend as the most bug-ridden, unstable, unplayable pieces of software ever released.

[31][32] According to some reviews[33] of the game, it was as encompassing and strategically pleasing as the developer had set out to make, but lacked in user interface design friendliness and atmosphere.

In 2003 Gamespy named it the 19th most overrated game of all time due to the hype Smart produced with his extremely ambitious gameplay promises that he would ultimately be unable to fulfill.