Star Trek: The Next Game Around

A new CD-ROM from Spectrum Holobyte poses some technical SNAFUs.

Romulan Spies searching the universe for the new designs of the Starship Enterprise should stop looking on Starbase 121 or Alpha--or any other base, for that matter. The designs are being drawn up in Alameda, California, at the design labs of Spectrum HoloByte, which is producing the Star Trek: The Next Generation game, due this spring on 3DO, Sega CD, Nintendo and IBM CD-ROM. A virtual reality version may even run at Paramount theme parks.

Producing a game from a TV series entails a numher of unusual steps: The studio (Paramount) must approve the story line, characterizations and presentation; the actors must approve their animated likenesses; and the game's designers and writers must study the series' scripts, characters and equipment to get the facts straight. And even after all this, problems can still arise--like no one mentioning that Lt. Worf (the Enterprise's Klingon security chief) was going to grow a ponytail this season.

Although a ponytail may seeen a trivial detail, it's essential that games based on film or television include all of the familiar details about characters and stories and build on them. Although they followed Paramount's writers' guidelines and technical specs, the story line and the game situation were generated at Spectrum HoloByte.

Work on the Star Trek game is divided: The Enterprise, the alien ship and the interface were all designed on Macs; however, some of the sequences were created as OuickTirne movies and ported to 3DO. More complex actions, like character movement and lip-synching, were created as wire-frame models on a Silicon Graphics Indigo.

The game's plot is simple but with the added twist of random simulation: The Enterprise has been attacked and immobilized while orbiting an alien planet; the player assumes the identity of one of the Enterprise bridge crew and leads an "away" team Each character provides a different solution to the crisis based on the way he or she would approach the situation.

The presentation and actions are not all encoded. Even if you play the same character twice in a row, events will not necessarily unfold in exactly the same way.