Gaming, Star Trek Style: Starfleet Academy September 8, 2016

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the broadcast of the very first episode of the groundbreaking Star Trek television series.  Not too many classic staples of science fiction get to say that they’re still going strong fifty years later, but today Star Trek gets to say that.

On this website we’ve talked about our past with the franchise, particularly when it comes to gaming. This is after all a gaming website.  Earlier this week, we discussed a Star Trek game that never came out, Secret of Vulcan Fury. Today, we want to talk about the game I played that made me aware of Secret of Vulcan Fury in the first place, the PC flight sim Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

I first became aware of Starfleet Academy after completing Star Trek: Borg for the first time.  In 1997, I was becoming an enormous Star Trek fan. After being one of the first tourists to check out Star Trek: The Experience in Vegas, I found myself enjoying reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation and post-season 3 episodes of Star Trek Voyager.  However, even though I had a decent PC at the time, I didn’t have much money to spend for new games, due to the fact I was still in grade school. One day, after celebrating my birthday, I saw a copy of Starfleet Academy for sale at Circuit City and I happily put down some birthday money for a copy of the game and its official strategy guide.

I installed the game as soon as I got home and was greeted by this trailer once the installation concluded, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to fire myself up.  I watched the game’s live-action introduction cinematic and got through the first simulator mission.  With the first mission complete, I saved my game and selected what I thought would be the next simulation mission only to find myself watching another live-action cinematic. The game was putting a heavy focus on the personalities of the crew I would be directing through these simulations and it turned out I would be making major decisions for these trainees as the school year went on!

Starfleet Academy‘s live-action component was no small undertaking. Heck, these FMVs were so detailed they deserved to be their own game and to this day I’m shocked they haven’t been rereleased on DVD.  They included a great cast of original actors for the training bridge crew, and William Shatner, George Takei and Walter Koenig all returned to their iconic roles of Captain Kirk, Pavel Checkov, and Mr. Sulu.  These three served as the experienced mentors they needed to be, a perfect fit for a game focused on the next generation of Starfleet.

The game’s story was so fleshed out it was later adapted as a novel by Diane Carey.  I actually used the book as the basis for an oral presentation in my sophomore English class. If you want to know how well I did on the presentation, most of my peers put the class to sleep droning on about their books, but the class enjoyed my presentation, as I weaved them a complex story about a group of students dealing with a difficult year while tragedy strikes.  My peers liked it so much they wouldn’t let me step off my podium until I told them how the book ended.  I’m pretty certain I got an A.

However, unlike Star Trek: Borg, which was an interactive FMV game with a fairly linear narrative, decisions you made in Starfleet Academy could have an enormous effect later in the game. Heck, halfway into the game you could make the wrong decision in a cinematic and lose the whole game.  Cinematic decisions could also affect your simulator scores, which I later learned would have an effect on the game’s ending.  My strategy guide had no information about these cinematic sequences, only the simulations, so I had to trust I was making the right decisions as I went on.

I was never much of a flight-sim player growing up and this game’s simulation had a really steep learning curve. In fact it took me months to figure out how to complete the final mission in the Alshoff campaign. After what must have been the hundredth attempt, I was finally able to beat the mission.  Once I had that level beat, I was able to complete the rest of the game in less than two days.

If you want to know my favorite missions I fondly remember a mission based on the plot of The Wrath of Khan, a mission taking place in a nebula (where sensors were limited), the final mission and of course the mission where you actually got to play the Kobiashi Maru no-win scenario. I totally won that.

In fact I remember the night I beat the twentieth mission and saw the game’s credits roll. I was puzzled as hell that the game was over because the strategy guide listed strategies for one more mission. That’s when I realized that the final mission would only be playable depending on if you got the game’s best ending.

What can I say about getting this game’s last mission?  To this day I don’t think anyone has come up with a strategy on how to unlock it, which is a real shame because it puts the player in control of the real USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A.  The only advice I could offer is to make decisions in both the simulator and the cinematics that keep your team’s scores as high as possible, and devote as much time as you can to further studying the McClanty during that story arc in the last few missions.

In my case, I may have lucked into the best ending because of some kind of bug. After the game’s credits finished rolling, the game immediatly started rolling one of the earlier cinematics. Apparently I had been sent back to replay the last three or four missions. I figured further study of the McClanty was important to unlocking the last mission so I decided to choose to investigate the McClanty as much as possible. Of course this is not a guarantee to earn the ending because your crew still needs to have high simulator scores, and tons of different variables can affect them.

Regardless of if you can unlock the last mission or not, this game still has the best presentation of the Kobiashi Maru no-win scenario, hands down. If you want to hear more about my thoughts on it, you can read them here. I actually played this game before I watched most of the Star Trek feature films. Imagine my surprise when I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on VHS for the first time.  I felt like I was experiencing the fandom the game’s developers had for the franchise in reverse.

I know Interplay later released an expansion pack for Starfleet Academy called Checkov’s Lost Missions but by the time I finished the original game I could not find a single software store selling it, and to this day I’ve never played it.

I’m afraid I’ll have to end this article on a down note. After talking all this time writing about this triumph Interplay published I’m afraid to say that earlier today I’ve just read that Interplay is planning to sell off their assets. My question is what happens to Run Like Hell?  I think Bawls should get it.

The Star Trek Game That Never Was, Secret of Vulcan Fury September 4, 2016

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the incredible Star Trek Franchise.  Created by the late Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek started as a television series that took place in the 23rd Century where an international crew of explorers solved modern day problems during their trek through the stars.

While the initial series only lasted three seasons, it was a cult hit, especially among young people.  In the fifty years that followed, five television series (with a sixth on its way), thirteen feature films, numerous books and countless video games have been released under the Star Trek name.  I’ve already talked about my first experience playing a Star Trek video game, but I thought that in honor of Star Trek‘s 50th anniversary I would tell you all about a Star Trek game that never was, a game called Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury.

In the late 90s I was quickly becoming obsessed with the Star Trek brand after watching the film Star Trek: First Contact. This was a great time for Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation had ended its run but the entire series was being actively rerun in syndication. Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were airing some of their finest episodes, and companies like Interplay and Simon and Schuster were releasing  all new Star Trek games for the PC.  Heck, I even visited Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton twice. After enjoying the CD-ROM FMV game Star Trek: Borg I decided the next Star Trek game I would play would be the PC flight-sim Starfleet Academy.

I got a copy of Starfleet Academy for my birthday and quickly installed the game on my Windows 95 PC.  After the game finished installing, this trailer immediatly autoplayed.  Enjoy this first look at Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury.

What you just saw was a trailer for a fully CGI-rendered Star Trek game based on the original series. Not only did the game’s art style perfectly match the look and feel of the original Star Trek tv series, veteran Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana was penning the script and the cast of the original show was preparing to donate their likenesses and voice work to the game.  Interplay was essentially making an all-new interactive episode of Star Trek in time for Christmas 1998. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it?  In a way, it was.

As I’m sure you all know by now, the game was never released and that trailer was the only thing most gamers have seen of the game in twenty years. So what went wrong?  A few years ago someone asked about the cancelled project on Interplay’s official forums.  That’s when I discovered there had actually been a second trailer produced for the game, which premiered what would have been the game’s opening. I think this trailer was included with copies of Fallout 2, but I’m not totally sure about that.  Take a look.

That brief scene would have made a great opening for the game.  The CGI was top of the line at the time, James Doohan and William Shatner sounded great back in their iconic roles, and the trailer ended with some amazing teases including a promise to give players an interactive tour of the planet Vulcan.  How could this game fail?

Essentially Interplay had bit off more than they could chew with this game and you could see some of that when you look at all the features the trailers promised. Interplay was experimenting with fully pre-rendered CGI at a time when the technology for fully-CGI movies like Toy Story was only in its infancy. In fact the game was expected to feature even more CG footage than Toy Story, making it the most ambitious project to use prerendered CGI of its day.  While the technology was available to them, time was just not on their side.  Other development issues were mentioned including incomplete actor performances due to poor health.  This all spelled out bad news for not only the developers trying to complete the game but also for gamers who wanted to play it.

Christmas 1998 came and went without the game’s release.  Eventually information about the game was removed from Interplay’s website. Several reports have stated the game was only 5% complete when it was cancelled.  The publisher eventually lost the rights to the Star Trek license and would go on to weather financial turmoil during development of a new Fallout game.  Interplay bounced back and they currently license their properties for outside development while rereleasing their back catalog on modern distribution networks. 

With all that development turmoil happening I had no expectations anyone would ever see any more from Secret of Vulcan Fury. Then, YouTube user Ken Allen published this footage online.  It was originally shown behind closed doors at E3 1997 in Atlanta, but thankfully it is now available for the public to see!

I’m just going to say right now this footage is incredible.  It looks like it takes place right after the events depicted in the second trailer, and while the animation is still a little rough the art style matches the original sets perfectly.  He even posted up a closer look at the game’s interactive interface.

This looks like a pretty intuitive interface, and this is coming from someone who remembers the oversimplified scan and decision interface from Star Trek: Borg.

It’s a shame we never got to play this game back in the day but I want to thank Ken Allen for giving us this look at it.  Ken did mention on one of his YouTube videos he was considering releasing the game’s original design document online. Please do, Ken, we would be more than happy to report on it here.  It’s a shame this game never came out, but I would love the chance to read what is essentially a lost Star Trek episode.

As for my thoughts about how I liked the game Starfleet Academy, well that is a story for next time.