Wait, When Did Star Trek Games Get So Interesting?

Wait, When Did Star Trek Games Get So Interesting?

Someone out there decided to start boldly going.

The single most surprising announcement to come out of the recent flurry of news and teasers from events like Summer Games Fest has to have been Star Trek: Shadow Frontier. Now, the existence of a Star Trek game is not in and of itself a particularly weird or shocking turn of events. Star Trek games have been around very nearly as long as video games have! But Shadow Frontier looks nothing like any Star Trek game we’ve ever seen before: a third-person horror game by genre specialists Bloober Team, featuring fan-favorite character Ro Laren, with acclaimed actress Michelle Forbes returning to the role she made so beloved in the first place. That is, in fact, legitimately wild news.

Again, Star Trek games date back more or less to the beginnings of the medium. The kind of people who invented computers and games in the 1960s and 1970s were precisely the kind of people who were really, really into Star Trek during its original television run and kept fandom alive after it was canceled... which is to say, geeks. And one of those geeks, Mike Mayfield, wrote a simulation game about the U.S.S. Enterprise patrolling the galaxy for Klingon cruisers way back in 1971. At the time, there was no games industry, and the entire concept of selling a video game (let alone officially licensing a property) didn’t even exist, since literally no one on the planet owned their own computer at home, and Ralph Baer was still building his early prototypes for the world’s first console. So it was little more than a fan game.

However, that unofficial and unauthorized Trek fan game ended up circulating the tiny community of coders who pioneered early computers. It was widely copied, imitated, and built upon throughout the 1970s. Its evolution culminated in 1980’s Strategic Operations Simulator, a licensed, Sega-produced arcade game that simplified Mayfield’s design into a primitive first-person combat shooter. A tie-in with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, SOS may or may not have inspired the famous Kobayashi Maru simulation in The Wrath of Khan.

From that point on, Trek games generally shook out into one of two formats: an attempt to simulate the complexity and scale of Trek through strategy games, or blistering action games that kind of ignored the measured pace and violent-averse nature of Trek’s reality. For every clever effort (Star Trek 25th Anniversary adapted the structure and pace of the TV series into an episode adventure game!) you also had some head-scratchers (Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time stuck poor Captain Sisko into a generic 16-bit run-and-gun platformer!).

Shadow Frontier belongs to a recent trend of breaking that cycle by pushing Trek into entirely new genres and styles. If Bloober Team approaches the game as a lead-in to the final season of Star Trek: Picard (in which Ro returned for a brief, self-sacrificial act to protect the Federation from the same shape-shifting Changelings who masterminded the Dominion War), a behind-the-scenes story leading up to Ro’s final mission would make for a pitch-perfect horror premise. An imminent threat from a deadly foe capable of taking on any form, which shares a communal mind within its collective species? That Trek game would delve into an area that the actual franchise has never truly been able to pull off on film. Star Trek is many things, but horror? Not really.

Well, one exception does spring to mind: Star Trek Voyager’s episode “Course Oblivion,” in which the Voyager crew slowly comes to the realization that they’re not the true crew but in fact precise duplicates whose cloned bodies are beginning to disintegrate. That episode appears to have been one of the inspirations behind the recent Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown, which launched recently to fan and critical acclaim. A huge, command-focused, narrative adventure, Across the Unknown didn’t specifically recreate the narrative premise of “Course Oblivion,” but rather tapped into Voyager’s penchant for exploring “what if?” possibilities. From “The Year of Hell” (what if Voyager suffered terrible losses during a devastating long-term conflict?) to “Equinox” (there but for the grace of God), some of the show’s  most beloved episodes have dealt with alternate realities and outcomes. Even the series finale amounts to a what-if—namely, what if Captain Janeway said, “To hell with ethics!” decades into the future and used time travel to shorten her ship’s return back to Earth? Across the Unknown embraced that tendency by putting players into an FTL-like god’s-eye viewpoint, allowing them to try their hand at a dozen scenarios pulled from the show and seeing how things work out for them. You could even let the abomination known as Tuvix live, if you dare.

Paramount and CBS have all but confirmed that Star Trek is on hiatus for the foreseeable future. All current streaming shows have ended production, and there appear to be no firm plans for films or new shows. Considering the rocky politics and legal challenges that the Paramount faces regarding its prospective merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, we likely won’t see any new Trek shows for years. Paramount Games Group head Shawn Kittelsen has announced his intentions to fill this void with interesting interactive experiences that push the boundaries of Trek and stand apart from the kinds of games we’ve seen about that universe to this point.

In a way, it feels like going to back to the beginning: after the Trek’s original run was cut short in the ’60s, fan works—especially those fan-made video games—kept it going for a new generation to discover. The difference is that this time, the fans work for Paramount. That’s a clever “parallel realities” plot twist straight out of classic Trek.