My good old poor Enterprise has taken a beating in the last few minutes. She flies one loop after the other – a little untypical for the lumbering pot she actually is – but nevertheless my opponents, an inexplicable copy of the Enterprise flanked by two Elasi pirate ships – landed many more hits than Mr. Sulu and Scotty can't keep up with repairing the protective shields either.
They're actually sitting there quite calmly, the officers of the Enterprise, past whom I occasionally see an enemy ship whizzing past on the main screen in an attempt to get one of them in the middle of my crosshairs.
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But the onboard systems gradually fail, and thanks to a final, devastating volley, my proud Constellation-class ship is destroyed in a ball of fire. This probably means that I can load the save game again and have to plunge into this seemingly hopeless battle for at least the twentieth time.
Do you know that feeling when you've been puzzling through an adventure game for several days and are suddenly confronted with an action sequence that is both annoying and far too difficult for someone who actually turned on the computer to ponder?
The very last mission of Star Trek: The 25th Anniversary represents exactly such an unwanted and terrible move. I myself played it on my home PC sometime in 1995 or 1996.
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But despite all the frustration, this was the first fully serious and multimedia – to use a buzzword from the 90s – Star Trek game. Before we delve deeper, a quick look back at what the franchise had to offer in the gaming sector in the years and decades before. Because it wasn't much.
Source: Simon & Schuster
The Promethean Prophecy, one of two early Star Trek text adventures from the publisher Simon & Schuster
Because Star Trek has always fascinated the nerds of the world, as early as 1971, two years after the end of the original series, there was an unlicensed game on early mainframe computers that was called exactly like the series itself, Star Trek.
It looked very crude, because even though it depicted a space simulation – flying around and fighting enemy spaceships – there were no actual graphics, everything was text-based, for example the Enterprise was simply represented as the letter E.
This tactical game was a bit like “Sinking Ships”, except that there was no human opponent, but rather two dozen cruisers scattered all over space.
But crazy enough, this is the one Star Trek game that I still play most often, but in its 1992 version, Wintrek, with graphics and sound for Windows systems. The quarter-hour games often inspire and refresh me during breaks from writing [Emulator anwerf].
So, here I am again. The first actually licensed games came indirectly from our own company. Since 1966, the parent company of the Star Trek production studio Paramount was the large conglomerate Gulf & Western. In 1984 it went on an extensive shopping spree and acquired the New York publisher Simon & Schuster.
He was then supposed to publish a Star Trek computer game as quickly as possible, but because the publisher had no gaming expertise, they ventured into the genre that is closest to literature, interactive fiction, with a text adventure.
Renowned Star Trek novelist Diane Duane took over the story from The Kobayashi Alternative, whose dialogue scenes between Kirk, Spock and McCoy were very entertaining and aptly written. But the actual programming was extremely poor, the text adventure came onto the market completely buggy and received correspondingly devastating reviews.
However, Simon & Schuster didn't let this stop them, because just a year later the second Trek text adventure was released, which came out under the first anniversary label and could therefore have been called The 20th Anniversary, but instead it was titled The Promethean Prophecy .
Commendably, they had learned from the mistakes of its predecessor and the contemporary trade press came to the conclusion that this was a truly successful Star Trek adventure, albeit of course without graphics.
Despite this success, the publisher Simon & Schuster ended its foray into gaming and fans had to wait three years to finally be able to hold a contemporary Star Trek game in their hands. In 1989, the fifth film Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier was released by developer Mindscape.
Source: Paramount Home Entertainment
The Promethean Prophecy, one of two early Star Trek text adventures from the publisher Simon & Schuster
There were some cutscenes that were digitized in great detail for the time, but in terms of gameplay it was a wild and half-baked mix of spaceship simulation, space shooter and even beat 'em up, because in one scene Kirk has to officially play the Klingon Captain Klaa beat up.
Typical of the quickly sloppy film adaptations of the time, the reviews were more bad than good; only the ASM gave a glowing review, which concluded with the words – unfortunately hardly true – “months of fun are guaranteed”.
But now! The silver anniversary was here – or rather we were a good year before it, because something like this needs to be well prepared with a view to game development periods. Enter Brian Fargo, head of the legendary games company Interplay, which, among other things, started the role-playing game series The Bard's Tale in the 80s.
Fargo was a man with a keen sense of what makes a good game and what doesn't, and above all, a die-hard fan of classic Star Trek. As such, his biggest dream was to create a fitting gaming memorial for his personal favorite series' 25th birthday.
But Fargo wasn't the first with this idea, because Paramount had already given the Japanese studio Konami the license for anniversary games and they set about developing games for the Nintendo consoles that were popular at the time, with the focus on the original series.
The clever Fargo then approached Konami and suggested that his company Interplay could take over their work, program the version for the Nintendo Entertainment System and, now that he already had his foot in the door, in exchange for permission received the opportunity to develop his own game for IBM PCs. So his plan was to make a game that he had to develop in order to get permission to make a game that he was genuinely interested in making.