Gaming, Star Trek Style: Star Trek: Borg November 30, 2011

Tonight at 8pm, a documentary that I’ve been looking forward to watching since the New York Comic Con is going to air on the Science Channel. It’s called Trek Nation, and it’s being done by the son of Gene Roddenberry. With the show airing tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about my personal memories with Star Trek, and its enduring gaming legacy.

My first major experience with Star Trek gaming came when I rented the VHS version of Star Trek First Contact. My cousin had access to Pay Per View, and I remembered enjoying the film tremendously when it was shown on the service. When I finally gave the film a rent, I saw something that appeared odd during the previews section of the tape. There was some NEW Star Trek footage I hadn’t seen before. As the preview progressed I saw an extremely high quality video produced of some new characters I was unfamiliar with fighting the Borg. Then at the end of the preview they said this was not a new television series or movie, this was going to be the next Star Trek game, an interactive Full Motion Video (FMV) adventure, and it was called Star Trek: Borg. As someone who just got his hands on his first Windows 95 CD-ROM PC, I had to play that game.

Another popular electronic’s chain from my childhood was closing down for some reason and taking all of its local stores with it. My father wanted to check it out and see if there was anything worth picking up in the major sell off. It turns out, they did have some copies of Star Trek Borg in the store, but some of them had been looted. As we were about to leave the store, I found an unopened copy of the game, slightly dented but still quite intact. Didn’t cost more than $10.

I was having a problem with my audio drivers on my computer at the time, but once I solved the problem I was able to just boot up the game and play, and boy was it a lot of fun.

The story followed a young Starfleet Cadet (the player, shot in a first person view) whose father was killed at the famous battle of Wolf-359 along with the rest of his ship. Ten years later, the Borg are coming back, and all cadets onboard starships planning to go into battle are ordered off, no matter how much they want to stay and fight. As you’re leaving, Q (played by John deLancie) decides to pay you a little visit and offers you the chance to go back in time and stop that from happening. You take over the body of the ship’s head of security, an alien with a very special gift you’ll need, who was supposed to have died before the battle, and with Q’s help (he’s taken over the body of the ship’s Chief Medical Officer) you have to save the ship and your father from the Borg!

John deLancie’s Q is one of my favorite Star Trek characters, and I thought he really overdid himself in his performance. In fact, in my opinion, it’s deLancie’s best Q performance, because unlike in previous Trek episodes, where he was a secondary guest actor, Q is literally the star of this game, and really had the chance to shine. Nowadays, I’ll always watch anything he appears in whenever it ends up on TV.

It took me three months to figure out how to survive the Borg Cube sequence on the third disc, but I was very satisfied with every second of the game itself. If you’re like me, and were a huge fan of the FMV CD-ROM craze back in the 90s, give the game a look.

Unfortunately, I can’t find that commercial anywhere anymore. Even Simon & Schuster Interactive’s official website only had a teaser which put together Borg related clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Heck, when I finally did buy myself a VHS copy of First Contact, the game’s trailer was not included in it! They must have only included it with the initial batch of the movie’s VHS release.