Star Trek: The Video Game

Star Trek is a third-person action-adventure Star Trek video game. It was developed by Digital Extremes and co-published by Namco Bandai Games and Paramount Pictures in association with CBS Studios International. The game was released in North America on April 23, 2013, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows platforms. It took three years to produce, and was the first in-house video game development by Paramount Studios, who opted not to license development to a third party. The production team aimed for it to be a collaboration with those working on the Star Trek films to avoid the typical pitfalls associated with film tie-in video games. Video games which influenced Star Trek included the Mass Effect series, Uncharted and Metroid Prime, and certain elements of Star Trek reflected episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series such as "Arena" and "Amok Time".

Star Trek: The Video Game

The game is set in the Star Trek Kelvin universe, between the events of the films Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, and follows the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starfleet starship USS Enterprise. The player takes control of either Kirk or first officer Spock, and investigates the theft of a terraforming device from the colony of New Vulcan by the Gorn. Together, Kirk and Spock engage the Gorn on away missions, travel to another universe and re-take Enterprise when it is captured by alien forces. This two-character gameplay was seen as a unique element, referred to as "bro-op".[1]

The game takes place within the Star Trek alternate timeline universe, following 2009's Star Trek film and before Star Trek Beyond. It follows the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk (voiced by Chris Pine) and his crew on board the Starfleet starship, the USS Enterprise. The first film showed Kirk becoming Captain of the Enterprise for the first time and the formation of the crew,[10] and so the video game shows one of their early missions. The rebooted universe was developed by director J. J. Abrams along with writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman from the 1960s American television series Star Trek: The Original Series and the six films which followed the crew's adventures.[11]

Production of Star Trek began three years before release under Tom Lesinski at Paramount Digital Entertainment.[2][12] Lesinkski had a background in video game production, having previously worked at companies such as Crystal Dynamics, Ion Storm and Kuju Entertainment.[13] He made the decision to produce a game in-house, rather than licensing it out to a third party as had previously been the case under the previous ten-year Activision contract.[12] As a result, the game was the first to be produced and released by Paramount Studios directly.[14]

The idea for the game came out of a brainstorming session in which it was decided that the game should allow the gamer to play as Kirk and Spock, and therefore should featuring co-op style gameplay.[15] During his E3 pitch, Steve Sinclair described the game's genre as "bro-op".[1] It was created by Digital Extremes, who had previously created video games such as Unreal and worked on the PlayStation 3 port of BioShock.[14]

The game was scored by Chad Seiter, who had previously worked with Michael Giacchino, the composer for the music in the 2009 film and Star Trek Into Darkness.[33] The duo had worked together on the Star Trek film, with Seiter being one of Giacchino's additional orchestrators.[34] For the video game, Seiter used Digital Performer, a digital audio workstation/sequencer software package published by Mark of the Unicorn.[35] The game featured music from Giacchino's score for the 2009 film.[36]

The first trailer for the game made its début at the Namco Bandai Global Gamer Day in Las Vegas in April 2012 and showed gameplay footage in 3D.[43] In order to promote the new video game in 2013, a trailer was produced which featured William Shatner and a man in a Gorn suit playing it on a console.[44] The idea had come from an idea by Brian Miller and Gene Augusto, who initially went back and forth on the idea in an attempt to create something that would go viral. They joked about using the line "not your father's Star Trek", and sought to recreate the fight between Shatner and the Gorn from the episode "Arena".[15][44]

Star Trek was released in the United States on April 23, 2013,[61] and three days later in Europe. This release was designed to coincide with the theatrical launch of the latest Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness.[2] The game sold poorly; after three weeks on sale, 140,000 copies had been sold across all platforms.[12] It failed to reach the top 100 best video games list of 2013.[62] Critics labelled the game as a flop.[12][13] It is considered to be one of the worst video games of all time.

Dan Stapleton for IGN described it as "a barely serviceable, paint-by-numbers third-person shooter".[56] He wrote that both playable characters were too similar, the combat was "completely generic" and that errors in the animation looked clumsy with "objects clipping through each other; crazy, badly lip-synced dialog (not that syncing it with this corny writing would fix it); and general screwups make Star Trek play like a blooper reel."[56] Stapleton was surprised that the game continued to be playable, as he noted that several scripted events during the game failed to start as scheduled. He also felt that the mini-games throughout the game were "so mind-numbingly simple and repetitive and/or frustrating they made me eager to get back to just being bored."[56] He said that the game seemed unfinished, and gave it an overall score of 4.2 out of ten.[56] Edge magazine said that the game "[has] more bugs crawling on it than a Fear Factor contestant",[51] and mentioned issues such as the characters running through walls, enemies becoming immortal and camera angles showing the inside of Kirk or Spock's skull. Star Trek was otherwise described as bland, even running through to the achievements with boring titles and the co-op system "succumbs to awkward banter and gimmicky co-op puzzles".[51]

Starship simulator games create the experience of commanding and operating a starship, and usually allow the player to handle a variety of functions, and to allocate resources such as ship power and systems. Some early Star Trek games in this category have had a huge effect on subsequent games in their genre, often leading to new level of depth and complexity in programming and/or gameplay.

This game category includes both computer games and non-computer board games, since the Star Fleet Battles game series provides a starship simulation, and is wholly a tabletop board wargame. As well as the Star Trek RPG by FASA which allowed players to take charge of specific areas of a ship's functions (such as the engineer allocating power) during combat.[citation needed]

Starship simulator computer games which are set in the Star Trek universe occupy a large role in the history of computer games. Some of the earliest and more influential space simulator video games were Star Trek simulations designed to run on mainframes.

Decwar in 1978 was also a groundbreaking game. Another is Super Star Trek, an early text-based, DOS-based game. This game created an impressive starship experience using only text-based commands and graphics. The game Begin is considered notable for having a convincing model of game dynamics, as it has very few random elements, and is highly mathematical. In 1986, the game Multi-Trek (MTrek) was brought online at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Written in C for a PDP mainframe, and also available via dialup and later TELNET, MTrek was arguably the first ever game to combine a persistent world, online multiplayer environment with a real-time, true 3-dimensional game engine and versions of the game still have an active player base.

In later years, fewer games were produced within this genre, and more games were produced in the adventure games genre. The first new recent game was Starfleet Academy, which incorporated many Star Trek elements, but was criticized for depicting starship operation as more akin to fighter planes than capital ships. A sequel, Klingon Academy, was actually quite different, and was one of the first games to depict starship operation with an appropriate amount of complexity.

Several online games have appeared on the Internet. Vega Trek is a game mod which is planned to eventually become active as a multiplayer game.[4] Flashtrek: Broken Mirror, first created by Vex Xiang, is one of the online Star Trek games, and is entirely browser-based. It has spawned several sequels. One sequel was created by Vex Xiang, and multiple others were created by fans. A newer game titled Star Trek: Broken Mirror was being developed by a man named Darkwing for several years, but was apparently abandoned in 2014.

Hasbro's Kre-O USS Enterprise (from the Original Series) toy was distributed by video game retailer GameStop with pre-orders of the Star Trek video game. Those who pre-ordered the game from the UK outlet Game won a ticket to see Star Trek Into Darkness at Cineworld and were entered into a prize draw to attend the film's premiere. [30]

"Resurgence's" adventure-driven game narrative delivers a space-faring story set in the period following the events of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and centers around the dauntless crew aboard the starship U.S.S. Resolute in the year 2380.

Written by Andrew Grant and Dan Martin, and accompanied by evocative illustrations from artist Josh Hood ("Avatar: The Next Shadow," "Star Trek: Mirror Broken"), "Star Trek: Resurgence" gives imaginative readers a chance to explore tragic happenings aboard a Federation starship that preceded the game's storyline. 041b061a72