SPACE MAY BE THE FINAL FRONTIER BUT STAR TREK ADVENTURE GAMES WERE PRETTY MUCH THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY IN THE EARLY NINETIES. AT LEAST UNTIL STAR TREK: 25TH ANNIVERSARY CAME ALONG – A GAME THAT DARED TO GO WHERE NO STAR TREK GAME HAD GONE BEFORE
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: INTERPLAY
» DEVELOPER: INTERPLAY
» PLATFORM: PC, AMIGA
» RELEASED: 1992
» GENRE: ADVENTURE
Interplay had been around since 1983, and by 1991 its portfolio was already quite impressive – but it didn’t include a typical adventure game. Company founder Brian Fargo wanted to make a point-and-click game in the style of Lucasfilm Games or Sierra, and he had always been a huge Star Trek fan. But he ran into a big problem. “I had been chasing Paramount for years to try and acquire the licence for Star Trek, me and most of the company had been major fans of the original series,” he tells us. “Unfortunately, Paramount would never return my numerous calls and I had little clout. Then one day I got a call from Emil Heidkamp from Konami and he said that Paramount was all over him to try and get them to make a Star Trek game and if I was interested. We had gotten out of developing games for other companies, mostly, but I agreed to make Konami a NES game ONLY if we could have the PC rights. Emil agreed since they did not do PC, and Paramount was happy.”
As the name suggests, the game was supposed to be released on the 25th anniversary of the TV series, around early September 1991. The simple NES action game made it – but the much more elaborate PC adventure did not. This was largely due to Interplay working so closely with Paramount. There were never any real problems, but of course there was always time-consuming haggling over details. For the most part, the developers had a lot of freedom in designing their game – but there were also limits, as Brian recalls. “On some levels we had freedom but on others we did not. Blowing up the Enterprise was a no no, they didn’t want violence (despite all the fistfights Kirk had in the shows) and getting Shatner to agree to lines that he would have ‘never said’ was a challenge as we had to make it clear that these were the bad answers for the player to give. We did want to include the Gorn but we were waived away from that idea as Paramount thought they might be able to give them their own game series later. Also there was an Easter egg that someone threw in that Kirk’s wig would jump off his head in a 1 in 15,000 chance, run around the room and jump back on his head. Thankfully it was caught and removed as Shatner would have never worked with us again.”
