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Behind the Scenes
Written by J.Swallow

From the end of 1998 to early 2000 I was involved in the production of Star Trek Invasion, the first officially liceneced Star Trek game for the Sony PlayStation console. I was brought on board initially to give the script and storyline a 'polish', but by the end of the project I'd helped to create a wide range of new background materials for this action-packed space combat title. Like most big writing projects, there's always a few things that go under the radar or get lost on the cutting room floor, and this collection of notes and articles aims to bring those to light, as well as providing a snapshot of the processes behind the development of a Star Trek game. Be warned! Much of the material included here contains major spoilers for the Star Trek Invasion plotline.

My work on the game spun out of one of those 'right-place, right-time' chance meetings at the ECTS trade show in late 1998; at that time, Star Trek Invasion was still under the working title of Star Trek: Red Squad (which to be honest, I liked better) and the demo team, led by designer Haydn Dalton, were showing off their earliest build of the title.

Haydn and a lot of the team at developement studio Warthog had worked on the Colony Wars series; Invasion had a lot of similarities to this popular title, and they'd been busily adding a Trek spin to their expertise with space combat games. The spectacular artwork you see here to the right was a poster for the game which was never used in the final advertising.

Chatting about the title, Haydn told me how he'd been using material from The Official Star Trek Fact Files as resource information and to my surprise it was all stuff I'd written - after that impromptu audition, a couple of months later I was on the project, to help the non-Trek fans at Warthog make sure they knew their Astrometrics from their Elba II, so to speak…

Part of the job was to transform a script created by gamers who were not writers into something voice actors could handle; this also meant dotting every I and crossing every T when it came to Star Trek lore. Fans of the show are notorious for spotting errors in continuity, so it was important to tie the game as closely as possible to the Trek universe.

Sometimes that meant substituting 'phaser' for 'laser' and 'warp drive' for 'hyperspace', but on other occasions it involved a serious bit of research and rewriting to fix a game element in place. Invasion had not been written by Star Trek afficionadoes, which meant that several pieces of narrative in the original script did not fit with established Trek history - it was my job to change them so they did, but not so much that they impacted on the game mechanics. It was difficult line to walk, and sometimes a frustrating one. After work was completed on Star Trek Invasion, I went on to work on another tie-in game which had less success. Activision's newly acquired subdivision Expert Software hired me to work on a PC game project they were developing, also with a Star Trek flavour; however, in the process of Expert's absorption into the Activision framework, the release of the game was cancelled, despite all the design work, programming and writing being complete.

For me, the best moment working on Star Trek Invasion came when I was writing the player manual; for the first time, as the intro began, I heard actors Patrick Stewart and Michael Dorn voicing the characters of Picard and Worf, reading the lines that I had written for them…it was pretty damn cool. After the launch, Invasion sold well, routinely scoring in the top ten percent of all game reviews; with the PlayStation 2 on the way, the Warthog team were already talking about a sequel, although at this time of writing it seems unlikely that work on Star Trek Invasion II will go ahead. Another developer, Classified Games, also announced they would produce a port of Star Trek Invasion for the GameBoy Advance handheld console, but the project foundered when the company closed. Briefly, plans were bandied about for a special one-off Star Trek Fact Files edition to tie-in to the game in the UK, but these never got past the discussion stage, and neither did my pitch for a spin-off Star Trek novel that would continue the game's narrative. But Star Trek Invasion still has a keen audience, and with the launch of the PS One console, the game lives on.

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