Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
What happened to OSS voice recognition?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?
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.
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.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
>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.