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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. I'd call myself fairly up to date with technology -- I even have a linux box that will play full screen flash video -- but I'm yet to actually understand what is meant by 'podcast'..... I'm going to assume this is a good thing. For some reason, the very sound of the word is enough to make me decide it is something I don't care about -- a little like twitter.

Re:Podcast?

[Thanshin]

What happened to OSS voice recognition?

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?

Re:Podcast?

[Thanshin]

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?

Sorry, I tried to use my Vista VR engine to reply.

I meant to say "you can find some info on that subject here"

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.

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

[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.

Quake 2 Map

[Amiralul]

The Quake 2 fan-made map of NCC-1701-D remains, by far, the best Star Trek game experience I've ever encounter. It had the bridge, captain's room, working transporter pads, a sickbay, Jeffries tubes and if you shot the warp core in engineering, the ship will blow up and game over.

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!

Re:Best x-mas party ever!

[happy_place]

Having worked an engineering job for an entertainment company, I can attest that life in the more fluffy parts of such companies are a completely different world with entirely different priorities. There's a continual "glam-factor" you have to deal with that's entirely counterproductive to producing a technically challenging piece of technology. At Disney their HR and Marketting departments were like professional cheerleaders. They always had some party going on--something they were planning. After a while it was a serious distraction, regardless of whether you were invited, and everything was catered. After a while I began to wonder how companies like this could stay in business... turns out only a few could. Oh and who could forget that any nontechnical jobs are stuffed with people who just want to be close to entertainment in the off hopes that while the secretary is performing some lounge-singing jazz number off the balcony (because the acoustics are so great) right next to where your cubicle is... (while you're trying to code a state machine in Verilog) that some movie exec will hear her, and she'll be made a star--hollywood movie fantasy! Ugh... No thanks.