This doesn’t just mean better graphics and an actual effort to make a good game, though those aspects certainly help. We still have abysmal cash-ins like Iron Man - which really should be the best game ever made - but Namco Bandai is pushing its 2013 Star Trek title like a real game that stands on its own, not an accessory to a movie. Fortunately, some companies are trying to do it right. A popular tie-in is a profit turbocharger, adding a whole new revenue stream to the same source material. The Present: Games Are Now a Rightful Part Of The Franchise: We'd love to claim that games are better because they’re more respected, but let’s be honest: they make truckloads more money now.
STAR TREK DAMMIT JIM LICENSE
The publisher couldn't have missed the potential of the license more than if it had made an Inception game about counting sheep to fall asleep.Ģ.
This was a licensed game in the '90s so some readers already know what ‘s wrong: it was a platformer: you were the commander of a deep-space station in a war zone and the game consisted largely of running around the ship's corridors and jumping. The other end of the laziness spectrum was the 1994 game Star Trek: Deep Space - Crossroads of Time, which technically worked but needn’t have bothered. The publisher would have been more honest if it had just sent notes to fans’ houses using letters cut out from magazine and newspaper headlines that said: “ We have your beloved franchise.
STAR TREK DAMMIT JIM CODE
The 2001 game Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Dominion Wars was a strategic starship game with a strategy that could best be described as “Make money as quickly as possible.” It was literally unplayably bad - not because it was boring but because the code was broken and the game wouldn’t run.
STAR TREK DAMMIT JIM SERIES
Whereas the Star Trek TV series and movies were celebrated for their ability to turn abstract and thorny scientific, philosophic and moral concepts into gripping stories, early Star Trek video games had the dubious distinction of embodying laziness. There was simply no point in wasting money making a good game when, thanks to the Star Trek affiliation, it was essentially guaranteed to sell. It was just another sad example of nerds getting bullied - made sadder by the fact that these game publishers employed small armies of nerds to build these games and betray their own kind. They bought it as a license to steal money from Trekkies who wanted that kind of game play. Game developers didn’t buy the license to craft an immersive and awe-inspiring Starfleet experience.
The Past: Brand Desecration And Nerd Betrayal: The words Star Trek in the title of a game used to be a guarantee that the experience would suck like a black hole. Now, Namco Bandai is pushing the latest Star Trek game, on course for an early 2013 release, and it’s teaching us how the art of video-game tie-ins has changed over the last four decades.ġ. It's an urge so strong that Paramount, the studio behind the franchise, even incorporated it into one of the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies - no matter how stupid it looked. When that technology did finally emerge, well, no nerd has ever seen the Starship Enterprise without wanting to steer it himself. Back in 1971, fans were using their keyboards to blow up Klingon warbirds in a Star Trek text game before the graphics existed to actually depict them. Another is that Star Trek's geek appeal pre-dates the advent of mainstream gaming. It's one reason the multimedia franchise that Gene Roddenberry created in the 1960s has spawned almost as many video games as Mario. Most video games are about exactly the same thing. Star Trek has always been about exploring the universe, finding out most of it wants to kill us - and then trying to do better.