So there's Principal Trek.

We keep expression gaming is taking its rightful place as an entertainment culture medium, that IT's eclipsing movies and idiot box combined, that the best creative minds of our generation are now working in games and that the best stories are being told thither. All of this is legitimate, naturally. And then there's Star Trek.

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To date, 66 videogames officially based connected the Star Trek permission hold been publicized, nigh of which suck. This shouldn't be news. After all, licensed games generally are largely immune to what makes gaming fun. "Supported a movie" is the linguistic equivalent to "will probably bottle-feed" in the same way of life that "La Quinta" stands for "next to Denny's." But there's something uniquely depressing nearly sucky Genius Trek games, and something uniquely omnipresent well-nig the horizontal surface of suck in the franchise's game offerings as a whole. This is why it's all the more exciting when a Star Trek game comes along that's not only "nifty" but also "good."

In 2000, Raven Software released Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. It was an ambitious project to say the least. Not solitary was the veteran developer attempting to mine gold in the farsighted-barren wasteland of the Principal Trek franchise, they were doing it with a first-somebody shooter, at that point as-yet unexplored district in Trek games. The result was an instant hit. Review scores averaged 86 pct, and one critic called it "simply one of the finest first-person shooters to come out this year."

The Escapist recently spoke with the developers at Raven about what makes Trek Trek and why their variant of it has fared finer than most.

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"To me, Star Trek was always about the characters and the concepts," says Raven Software's Michael Chang Gummelt, who wrote and programmed Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, the starting time game to with success bridge the gap between Trek and number one-person shooters and arguably unity of the best Star Trek games ever so made.

"The underivative Star Trek had a great kinda 'triumvirate' of primary characters with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Each represented a different sort of doctrine or personality. … The Next Genesis continued this trend … that and the whole idea of an organized, well-developed and well-funded space exploration endeavor. IT was wish something out of the complete fantasy of pulp sci-fi from the decades before combined with more modern characterization and stylish science-fiction concepts."

Brian Pelletier, the Figure Lead for Elite Force, adds some other stratum. He says that, additionally to the theatrical role kinetics, the gist of Trek is about "the thrill of discovering new alien races and the adventures and dilemmas that arise from the interaction with opposite cultures."

"Initially, I was very nervous at the idea of doing an FPS supported a Star Trek license," says Gummelt. "To me, the two just weren't well-matched. … But as we developed the idea and came up with the idea of the Jeopardize Team and put the ship in an extremely perilous situation, information technology started to gel."

"We were all so wild about Trek that creating gripping game ideas that were faithful to the Star Trek Universe wasn't the dispute," says Les Dorscheid, Art Leading. "Choosing a right counseling that would allow everything to flow together in the story was more difficult."

The "compensate direction" for Raven involved taking the new (at the time) Incarnation of the Trek franchise, Star Trek Voyager, and putting the player in the homogenous of a appendage of Voyager's "Hazard Team," Ensign H. H. Munro, whose farm out information technology is to pass on the send on wearing a "red shirt" connected all of those "away missions" where things typically go awfully awry, often ending in phaser fire, confusion and death. The musician's job: Keep the red shirt alive.

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"In the context of the unfit you requisite enemies to agitate," says Pelletier. So Raven created the "Stasis Aliens," generous the player the opportunity to not only fight against a new alien race, but to in reality discover them equally easily. "The first contacts that Kirk or Picard would make were always great moments, and we wanted the player to experience that."

"We knew we couldn't just do an used-school shooter," says Gummelt. "We knew there needed to be much more in the way of scripting, dialogue and NPC fundamental interaction than we had ever done earlier in a game. Luckily, Uncomplete-Life had just show up and shown the way in terms of astuteness in that orbit and its success, I feel, gave the States the model and the license to really push that as far Eastern Samoa we did."

Pushing, according to Pelletier, meant making it feasible for the player to communicate with the other characters: "Instead of the player beingness the lone gunman out on missions, we created a whole team of characters to interact with during the missions. They all had their possess personalities which created some playfulness dynamics for the musician to live and interact with.

"It was important to me that each member of the Hazard Team had distinct personalities," says Gummelt, "and filled a role both on the team functionally and in the story as representing a philosophy or personality that would interact in an interesting mode, letting the participant be the 'Kirk' – the indefinite that listened to everyone else's opinions and so acted."

"We wanted to jam thus many different ideas together," says Dorscheid. "We wanted to be faithful to each character and give all one a big role – Skipper Janeway, Tuvok, Seven of Ennead, the Doctor of the Church. We as wel precious to get as numerous of the adversaries into the story parentage as possible – Klingons, Romulans, the Borg – advantageous add a few of our own, like the Stasis creatures."

In addition to the usual problems facing creators of a licensed game (remaining truthful to the canon and premiss, creating a compelling experience based in a rigid world, etc.) Raven, with Elite Force, was working with a relatively new iteration of the existing franchise, ace with which audiences were far less familiar.

"Voyager and its universe aren't arsenic widely titled Next Generation or the Classic serial publication," says Pelletier. "I mat up we needed to … reach a broad spectrum of Star Trek fans. Klingons were not a part of the Voyager show, up to now they are such a staple of Star Trek aliens. We found a way to put Klingons in the Voyager Cosmos. We also plant a way to put a Classic series Star Trek send in the spirited. It was and then important to hand down the actor all the bits of Star Trek they bang and jazz altogether wrapped high in one game.

"I still remember my pitch to Paramount of why we needed them in the gamey you bet we were going to do information technology. The reception was that we were very clever with the idea and that they would O.K. IT."

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"I wrote 800 pages of negotiation," says Gummelt. "I've always been grateful that everyone at Predate and Predominant were aboard with this identical ambitious excogitation. I retrieve if we hadn't done that, it would have been a nonproprietary, forgettable shooter with Star Trek textures."

In the nearly 20 years since it was founded, Raven Software has etched out its possess niche equally the go-to developer for reliably excellent licensed shooters, an orbit where umpteen separate developers fear to pace. With a licensee heel including Doom, Quake, Star Wars, Soldier of Fortune, Wolfenstein and the Wonder Universe it's easy to undergo what led Raven to Trek. Until no it's easier to forget that what they make looking easy, this lin of turning an established dealership into a undefeated gimpy, is enough to make unusual developers break out into cold sweats.

"With all the franchises we worked on, for sure Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force was the most knotty," says Pelltier. "It was [the] first franchise authorised mettlesome Raven developed; we were treading sunrise territory in franchise games and doing it with Star Trek, cardinal of the to the highest degree well-known franchises with loyal fans."

"There was no gameplay mannequin with Star Trek that was relevant to an FPS," says Gremmelt, comparison developing Elite Force to their work with the Star Wars franchise. "With Star Wars, we already knew that we had lightsabers, blasters and force powers, and that dictated the gameplay. The aforementioned is true for Wolverine – from the comics and movies, we knew immediately what the gameplay was active to be like."

Only not with Trek. Prior to Selected Force, there was no road map for Star Trek shooters. Raven was out in the wilderness, the final frontier, some might say, along a "trek" toward a new kind of gameplay, to run the pun. But all triplet developers agreed the samara lay in the phaser.

"With Star Trek," says Gremmelt, "we had to figure outgoing what weapons we would have, how to make a phaser flavor right and feel water-cooled in an FPS, what the right amount of action was, how violent it would be, etc., etc."

"The feel of the phaser has to equal just right and sound like it should," says Pelletier. "Information technology's a basic weapon in the context of an FPS game, yet it's the quintessential Trek weapon, so information technology has to be playfulness enough the player wants to use it."

Yet in spite of the inherent appeal of allowing players to finally raise a phaser, to the highest degree FPSs have Sir Thomas More than one weapon. In the populace of Star Trek, where even the ships are adorned with little much simply bigger phasers, this could Be problematical. Says Dorscheid: "FPSs want to have a variety of interesting and different weapons. [In Elite Storm] we couldn't limit the player to a phaser and a phaser rifle. Each weapon needs to make up powerful and specific."

"The chief goal in all franchise games is that you want the player to look like they are in that world," says Pelletier, "and what's difficult with Star Trek is how elongate the franchise has been around you said it many iterations it has gone through. There is a ton of Star Trek fodder to play with, indeed you have a elongate rope to hang yourself with."

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For well-nig Trek games, destruction-by-pendant involves forgetting what makes Trek go. (i.e., the send). While there take up been plenty of games that have glorified the various Enterprises and other Starfleet ships, very few developers have embezzled note of the fact that, in the Boob tube shows and movies where the ships characteristic prominently, they'rhenium far more than simply static displays. The ships in Leading Trek, if you'll forgive the romance, are alive.

"In all Star Trek shows, the ship is one of the characters," says Pelletier. "[In Elite Force], Voyager, the ship, had to be salient in the game, and the player needed to be allowed to explore and see all the locations of the ship they've seen in the show. If the ship itself wasn't an environment to research IT would cause been a gimpy killer.

"[Just] being on Voyager has to be interesting; the halting couldn't get boring while walking around connected the ship exploring, so we aforethought out when the player would have access to the disparate areas of the ship, and there was always an objective and motivation for the player to explore. … The musician also got the quiver of walking on the bridge or into the Warp Engine room and really beget on to the teleporter pad in virtual reality low gear soul and be beamed by."

"Living" an experience we could ne'er ingest in literal life sentence is part of the appealingness of almost every videogame, which makes it all the more than thwarting when playing a Trek lame amounts to little more than pushing a push all some minutes while the characters on the screen go done the same old routines they do on the TV as if you're non even in the room. Elite Drive in does not suffer from this problem. The player is thrown into the action immediately, going from loading screen to "Buckeye State God, Borg!" in a nanosecond.

"I the like the whole beginning," says Gremmelt, "where you're in a Borg military mission right off the bat and IT turns unsuccessful IT's just a holodeck training simulation for the Pretend Team, past Voyager is plunged into real peril and the credits roll. To me, that made information technology feel exactly like an episode [of the TV present] and typeset up the main conceit of the game in one neat package."

To be honest, that's our favorite take off of the game, too. Pelletier's dearie? "When unmatchable of the Hazard Squad members mentions something about kicking Borg butt and makes reference to Seven of Niner's Borg butt."

Prey's condition Eastern Samoa game introduction gods may follow steady, only they are, after all, still gamers.

Russ Pitts stock-still owns a complete hardened of "blueprints" for almost all Starfleet watercraft ever "constructed." He does non, however, own a Starfleet uniform.