Captain’s Log, Supplemental
My mission to revisit the history of Star Trek games continues. With the first two decades of games dealt with (and a little more than that for console gaming), I set course for the last years of the 20th century, a time controlled by MicroProse and Interplay, but in the looming shadow of Activision. Can I allow myself to hope to find a great Trek game in that long-gone era?
I know that it will come as a shock to regular Tappers that I’m kind of a huge Star Trek fan. Understandably, then, I’ve been keeping a wary eye on the upcoming Digital Extremes-developed Star Trek, which got a new trailer earlier this week and bridges the gap (or at least part of the gap) between 2009’s Star Trek reboot and next year’s sequel.
There have been Star Trek video games since basically as long as there were video games, but that legacy is checkered at best. Trek is notorious for having its name on bad games, and unlike some other shaky franchises, like Star Wars, there aren’t that many really outstanding ones to offset the disasters.
Revisiting this sordid history is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it (obviously). Set phasers to…ugh, nevermind, I can’t muster a phaser setting joke.
In the early hours of this morning (about 5:20 am GMT), we were precisely one hundred years out from the moment when the RMS Titanic slipped once and for all beneath the waves of the North Atlantic. She took with her some 1,514 passengers and crew, a little more than two-thirds the total number of souls aboard. None of the survivors lived to see this anniversary. (The last passed away in 2009.)
Though she wouldn’t be rediscovered until 1985, the Titanic lived on fairly vividly, here and there, since the first word of the tragedy reached the world. The resurgence of interest in her story comes in waves, of course: following the release of the book and film A Night to Remember in the 1950s; the amazing images from the wreck in the 1980s; the release of James Cameron’s period epic Titanic (re-released in 3D to coincide with the anniversary), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, in 1997.
I think the night the Titanic sank must have been the end of the world as anyone knew it. She was the last gasp of human audacity and ostentation, of unbridled luxury for its own sake. The end of a world in which the only way anyone could imagine the two sides of the Atlantic would be linked was by such an engineering marvel. A scant two years later the Great War would begin, and for the rest of the century human ingenuity on any sort of large scale would be defined by conflict.