“We had to be the main driving force creatively,” says Brian Miller, senior vice president of Paramount Pictures and producer of Star Trek: The Game, “I think it wouldn’t have worked any other way.”
Star Trek is in development at Digital Extremes, a studio responsible for the confident storytelling in The Darkness II and therefore a natural fit for a movie adaptation. Namco Bandai is also co-publishing, but it’s not a designer or Namco producer we’re talking to today. Miller’s presence at this hands-on event for Star Trek is more than just lip-service; it’s a reflection of the depth of involvement and creative control that Paramount itself has commanded over the project.
“The only way to get this one done was to have us at Paramount be sort of the lead,” reasserts Miller. “Star Trek is an important brand to us. It’s been an important brand for over 40 years. It’s bigger than any one movie, it’s bigger than any one episode. There’s been a lot of movie-based games where things didn’t work out so well, and I think our involvement is key to this.”
The result of the partnership between developer, film studio and filmmaker is a glossy thirdperson shooter with a co-operative focus – an angle picked, says Miller, not because side-by-side shooting is currently trendy, but because it captures the intense relationship between Kirk and Spock that resides at the heart of JJ Abrams’ films. “There was no other game we could possibly make”, Miller argues. “We wanted to make sure that the actual experience, the actual relationship between Kirk and Spock came through in the game.”
In practice, this means shooting enlivened by Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto reprising their roles as the Enterprise’s cocky captain and his half-Vulcan first officer. It means a canonical script to which the film’s scriptwriter Roberto Orci has lent a hand, and it means dialogue that perfectly captures the dynamic established at the end of the 2009 movie. When Kirk decides he’s going to personally head a rescue mission to a beleaguered space station at the outset of the game, Quinto’s performance conveys just the right amount of repressed frustration at his captain’s “seemingly endless desire to stretch [his] legs.”
But when the shooting starts, it’s a relationship between equals rather than opposites, with both Kirk and Spock sticking to cover and leaning over it in order to pop off phaser shots with equal competence. That’s not the gamut of their abilities, admittedly – both can use a tricorder to hack and scan various pieces of level furniture (turning on sprinklers to snuff out a fire blocking their path in one instance) – but there’s no pretending that Star Trek offers co-operative mechanics of a complexity to rival Portal 2. There are intense moments, however, such as one sequence in which the player controlling Kirk must singularly defend the pair while Spock bandages his captain’s wounded leg.
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