Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games

In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.

Comments

Podcast?

[Stormwatch]

What happened to good old bandwidth-friendly text?

Re:Podcast?

[IBBoard]

Podcasts are also often (but not always) delivered via RSS feeds, so you can keep up to date with a regular "radio show" over the Internet.

I agree, though, what is wrong with giving a transcript as well? I get the British Computer Society emails and occasionally go "that looks interesting" only to go "it's in the 'podcast' section? oh well, never mind".

Re:Podcast?

[Shin-LaC]

In 2009, everyone is supposed to have enough bandwidth for audio; that's not the problem. What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely. There are some areas where audio and video are really useful (eg entertainment), but most of the time text is the superior medium for presenting information.

Re:Podcast?

[Lord Byron II]

The parent got modded down, but he's right, Web 2.0 is just "the web" and podcasts are just mp3 files. While we're at it, blogs and tweets are journals and Googling means to search (I've heard people say things like "i'll go google that on yahoo.").

Re:Podcast?

[Kirijini]

What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely.

That may be true, but audio wins in two contexts:

Audio has much better upload bandwidth. It's a lot easier to talk about whats on your mind than to compose a written piece.

Audio is better for multitasking. You can read and walk at the same time, but its much easier to listen and walk. You can't read and run at the same time, but you can listen and run. You can also listen and drive. On the other hand, its hard to both listen and read, or listen while thinking about something other than what you're listening to. But then, its hard to read two different things at the same time, or read while thinking about something other than what you're reading.

You know you are old

[Anonymous Coward]

When they talk about OLD star trek games and you see them talking about Fury and not 25th anniversary... or the freeware/shareware enterprise simulators of the dos era...

Now get of my damn spaceship!

The old problem

[Kokuyo]

It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap. Of course, third person shooters, even if your weapon is a lightsaber, are much easier to make than space fighter simulations, especially when there actually is not one dude commanding and piloting the ship himself but a whole bunch of people working together. Nobody ever accused capturing that as being easy.

I was putting high hopes into STOnline... until I saw that video from E3, I believe it was. Two Klingons standing across the hall from five Federation type people. One of them stands directly in front of the Klingon. So what happens? A short bout of Phaser fire and perhaps a bit of one on one? No. It took them like thirty seconds to take an unmoving target down and surely somewhere among ten to fifteen Phaser blasts.

So basically, they copied WoW. You have your stats, the enemy has his and you just trade blows until the weaker one dies.

WTF?

When did that EVER happen in ANY Star Trek series or movie? They use weapons that kill instantly (or at least stun, unless you are Borg). Not swords or axes that may be excused with glancing blows.

So yes, making this somewhat 'realistic' is harder than a fantasy game for the masses. You should have realized that even before you began.

I believe Star Trek games are crappy because the developers feel we ST fans are somehow pretty dumb. That we'll gobble up any game that even hints as letting us play as our heroes. So they slap some crude Star Trek graphics on the cheapest source code they can find. They cut corners when something is harder to do.

So what do you expect?

Re:The old problem

[Zumbs]

If you want to make a good game based on a series/movie/comic book/whatever, you need to capture the spirit of the base.

Star Trek is about mystery, riddles, discovery, and technobabble. Aside from the technobabble this is difficult to do right - not many games have this at their core. Compare this with Star Wars with is about action with a touch of Mysticism. The action part has been done in a lot of games, and is easy to do right.

Re:The old problem

[RogueyWon]

It's a little unfair to say that all Star Trek games have been awful. The old 25th Anniversary adventure game which came out back in the 90s was decent. Perhaps not on the level of the Lucasarts adventures of the day, but it was certainly a game you could play, have fun with, and feel like you were doing something in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy were good, if somewhat eccentric, space-shooters, while the Starfleet Command games were decent implementations of a tactical board-game which could have been excellent with a bit more polish.

Yes, there have been a good number of stinkers as well (particularly the FMV-adventure games), but let's look at the other franchise you name; Star Wars.

Back in the early and mid-90s, a Star Wars logo on a game was pretty much a sure sign of quality. On the PC, you had the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and Dark Forces (by far the most intelligent product of the "Doom clone" generation of fpses). On the consoles, you had the Super Star Wars series, which were great (if perhaps overly difficult) platformers.

However, around about the time the sequels started appearing, the quality took a nose-dive. The Episode 1 games ranged from the mediocre and unoriginal (Pod Racer) to the downright awful (anything with Gungans in it). In fact, you could even argue that the rot set in earlier; Supremacy and Force Commander were very poor games, while X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was a disappointment to most people. The TIE-ins (no pun originally intended, but I found I'd typed that and decided to keep it) with the later prequels were no better.

Ok, the games have pulled back a little now from their Episode 1/Episode 2 nadir. KoTOR was excellent (though we can blame BioWare for that), Jedi Knight 2 was fairly good, a few of the RTSes have been ok and X-Wing Alliance repaired much of the damage done by XvT. But the Star Wars gaming franchise still has a pretty chequered history over the last decade, certainly as much so as Star Trek.

Re:The old problem

[falcon5768]

The difference you have is Star Wars games up until recently where all made BY Lucas. His company made them. Paramount didnt really have a strong game house to develop games. Notice when Star Wars games started to lack quality was right around when Lucasarts where not making their games anymore.

Re:The old problem

[Bieeanda]

God forbid they skip some of Star Trek's 'realism' in order to make the game more playable. Jesus, it's not like SWG's light sabers cut people in half with one swing, or the assortment of blasters one-shotted storm troopers either.

Phasers one-shot targets for one reason, and one reason only: plot. The only times that combat was a going plot concern in any Star Trek series, the phasers were plotted out of existence or plenty of cover and bad marksmanship was provided.

I don't think this game is going to be any better than the array of godawful Interplay releases, but complaining that a weapon in an MMO doesn't kill people outright is ridiculous.

Re:The old problem

[rodrigoandrade]

>It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap.

Easy. The creator of the former built its own game studio to make sure the games were made right; the latter whored out its IP to anyone who asked.

Re:The old problem

[taucross]

It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap.

I think that is because, conceptually, Star Trek is deeply layered, insightful, and eloquent, using masterful techniques that do not translate well into simple video games. When placed into the context of an interactive piece, Star Trek feels hollow.

Star Wars, on the other hand, was always about the special effects and excitement. These kind of concepts are more consistent with modern video game techniques and as such, the Star Wars games translate easily.

Starfleet Command

[Supurcell]

Why can't they just make more Starfleet Command games? Forget the third dimention of outer space for a second. Yeah, it might have well been old earth sailing vessels, but those games did a good job of simulating battles between heavy-hitting space cruisers at a reasonable pace. The only problem was the incredibly boring and repetitive missions in the single player.

I especially enjoyed the 3rd game in the series for bringing it up to the more recent era of Trek and adding in customizable ships.

Best x-mas party ever!

[Korbeau]

That quote made me smile:

He points out other roadblocks to development, such as Christmas party planning distractions

Yeah, because had everyone ordered supper and stayed late instead of going to the party and got in early the morning after instead of over-sleeping from alcohol intoxication during a Saturday, they surely would have made their deadline! Hey, they even provided the sleeping bags.

Oh, and Bob and Cindy spent a couple of hours planning the party each few weeks prior to it. 30 minutes of video footage lost right there!

Management primer: if you're seriously thinking about making your employees skip a Christmas party, the schedule started slipping a looong time ago!

BotF

[mseeger]

Hi,

The game Birth of the Federation has been an
excellent Star Trek game. Friends of mine still play it on a regular basis
even though it's a decade old.

CU, Martin

Licensed properties are always problematic

[jollyreaper]

1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones.
2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market.
3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good.
4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers.
5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game.
6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.

There was a game based on the old Starfleet Battles tabletop game. Came out yonks ago. It was pretty much half-completed. It had a lot of ambition, you could tell it had the potential to be a good game, but it was seriously only half complete! Sure, the graphics were pretty, single ship and small fleet actions played out fine, but the entire strategic element was obviously spanked together in a weekend. They released a sequel not too long after that. Was it the game they originally planned, this time completed? No. If anything, they broke what did work and replaced the half-baked strategic mode with the distilled essence of pain and suffering, squeezed from the souls of the unborn.

Terribly disappointed.