The Big Picture

Star Trek Online is offering a brand-new Heritage Ship Bundle with classic references, from
Star Trek: Invasion
,
Star Trek: Armada
, and
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
.
The game’s complex process for bringing back original
Star Trek
actors involves Paramount’s approval, and a keen attention to detail in likenesses.
Star Trek Online interweaves story arcs from different
Star Trek
shows, challenging developers to tie everything together creatively.

While a lot of us grew up playing games like The Sims and shoehorning our favorite fictional characters into the worlds provided by that game, for the last few years, Trekkies have had their own open world game in which they can bypass all the shoehorning and put themselves right into the world of Star Trek. Star Trek Online is a MMORPG where players can explore a vast expanded world filled with new adventures that both reference the beloved canon and expand on it in ways you could never imagine.

Today, the game has launched a new bundle called the “Heritage Starship Bundle” which references classic Star Trek games like Star Trek: Invasion, Star Trek: Armada and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars. Ahead of the new bundle’s launch, I sat down with Star Trek Online Art Director Thomas Marrone and beloved Star Trek writer James Swallow, who worked extensively on Invasion, to chat about what you can do with these new ships and what exactly goes into creating new additions for such a massive game. We also discussed Swallow’s recent Star Trek novels, what he would write for an episode of Star Trek Online, and how Star Trek Online gets your favorite franchise stars to appear in the game. You can read our full conversation below or watch it in the player above.

COLLIDER: You both have pretty prolific careers in Star Trek. I want to jump in with a classic question when I’m talking to anyone who works on Star Trek in any form: what was your first experience with the franchise, and what about that experience made you, as a fan, want to work on Star Trek?

JAMES SWALLOW: My first experience watching Star Trek was in the early to mid-eighties when The Original Series was being rerun on BBC Two here. It would come on TV just before dinner, so I would rush home from school and I could sit and watch an episode of classic Trek. That was my first experience with it. It’s definitely my first fandom. It’s the first time I came across something where I thought, “Wow, I really wanna consume all of this, and I want to learn more about it.” I found out about the fact that there were other people who are fans and there were fan clubs and conventions and movies and books. For me, that was great because that was kind of like a banquet for a Star Trek fan to discover that all this stuff was out there. And in the intervening years, obviously, there’s been more and more of it, so the eating is good.

In terms of wanting to write about it, some of my earliest experiences of writing was writing for fanzines, writing about Star Trek and writing about the show. I kind of parlayed that eventually into being a professional magazine writer. One of the earliest jobs I had was writing for the official British Star Trek magazine, Star Trek Monthly. So, I got to parlay my nerdiness into a writing career. That opened the door to me to get into pitching for the TV show, for pitching scripts. I always wanted—beyond being a journalist because that was great and that was fun—to be a writer of Star Trek.

Often, when we would do the interviews, a lot of people would say, “Oh, it’s great to do the interviews with the actors,” but I was always asking to do the interviews with the producers and the writers and the directors because I was really interested in the mechanics of how the show worked. I also was sneakily getting myself a little bit of a writer’s education, as well, by talking to the writers. Off the back of that, I got the opportunity to pitch for Star Trek, and I got to sell a couple of stories for Star Trek: Voyager. That was pretty much the beginning of my professional writing career and my career as a professional Star Trek writer.

THOMAS MARRONE: Star Trek for me has always been kind of a family affair. I grew up watching it with mom and dad. Mom was a big Star Trek fan in the ‘60s when it was first airing, and to her, she saw everything that was going on in the country and the civil rights movement and all that stuff, so she identified with the message behind Star Trek. She liked the progressive discussions. Some of it was more deftly handled than others, but still, she liked that the show was a fun sci-fi show, but it also had something to say. She thought that was really cool.

When I was growing up, like James said, Star Trek was in syndication. I’m a little bit behind him, but it was exciting when Star Trek: The Next Generation came on air. I would have been less than six years old, and as I grew up, we would watch that together and that became appointment viewing for us as a family. I would get to stay up late to watch it because that was also syndicated, so it was on at, like, 10:30 at night or something. It was way too late for me as a kid, but I still got dispensation to watch it sometimes.

Then, I get into high school and this video game comes out called Homeworld, which is not a Star Trek game, but it’s a 3D real-time strategy game. It was actually the first real-time strategy game where you could move units in 3D—it might have been the first real-time strategy game that actually used 3D graphics. When Homeworld came out, it was around the time that DS9 was in the throes of the Dominion War and all this cool stuff was happening. So, I got into this super new game called Homeworld, and I hooked up with these guys on forums that play Homeworld, but they’re modding it, like modification—they’re taking the original game and they’re turning it into something else. So there’s this forum where people were turning Homeworld into Star Wars, they were turning it into Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica and all this stuff.

Of course, I was drawn as a big Star Trek fan watching it with my parents and, like James, I just became enamored with it and I needed everything. I read the Star Trek encyclopedia by [Denise and Michael] Okuda. I opened it up and just started reading it. Who does that? [Laughs] So I get in touch with these guys and I find that there are other people making Star Trek mods for Homeworld. And Homeworld was the perfect engine for a Star Trek video game, a strategy game, because it was all in 3D. It was a really cool space game and the graphics were state-of-the-art at the time. So I learned how to model and texture and do all the 3D art because of Homeworld. Long story short, that kind of builds the foundation for my game development career. I eventually get a job at Cryptic originally working on their websites, but then I move over to the Star Trek Online team because I’m such a big Star Trek fan. I started as an associate UI artist and then worked my way up to art director.

That’s awesome. I love that Star Trek is such a collective experience that it inspires people to then create more on top of it. I think that’s one of the best parts of it as a fandom. James, you worked pretty heavily on Star Trek: Invasion, and now with Star Trek Online, incorporating one of the ships from the game into this new bundle. It seems like a real full-circle moment. Can you talk a bit about your experience on the initial game and what it’s been like to come back and help give it new life?

SWALLOWS: It is kind of crazy for me. This game is 20 years old. This was the first-ever Star Trek licensed title for the PlayStation 1. I’m pretty sure it was the first-ever Star Trek console game at that time and the first combat game. It was a whole load of different firsts, and for me personally, my very first experience working in the video game industry. All these years later, to see it be so popular with people, I would occasionally get emails every now and then from people saying, “Did you work on Star Trek: Invasion? I love that game. It’s a cool ship!” That was always nice to hear.

But then to see this rebirth, this reintegration of this cool concept that we had 20-odd years ago, it’s so rewarding because everybody who worked on that project, all of the team at Warthog Games, were all people who were just really dedicated creatives who put 110% effort and energy into that. The idea that it still has an appeal for gamers 20 years later, it was just incredible to me, but really, really rewarding to have that happen.

I love that. Thomas, obviously James has worked heavily with Invasion, and you, as you mentioned, got your start with Homeworld, but what’s your experience with the trio of games that you’re drawing from for this new bundle?

MARRONE: The three ships that we’re including in the bundle are the the USS Premonition from Star Trek: Armada, the USS Typhon from Star Trek: Invasion and the USS Achilles from Star Trek: [Deep Space Nine] Dominion Wars. As a kid of that era, playing games of that era to the point where I actually got grounded and I couldn’t play video games during the school week for my whole high school career [laughs], I played all these games and I love them. Before Invasion, I was a big fan of people who worked at Warthog who did Colony Wars. That was one of my very favorite PlayStation games ever. I love that game, the gameplay, and the universe. That was an original sci-fi IP that was really cool.

Star Trek: Armada, another classic, was maybe the first Star Trek RTS in the next gen Activision era. I’m a big fan of that, love playing that with friends, just getting fleets of Federation starships. Armada had great abilities where you had a ship, the steam runner, that had this big artillery blast, and you had the Akira that had this torpedo that bounced around. They did a really clever thing where they took these canonical Star Trek ships and then they did what we do on Star Trek Online, and what they did with the Typhon on Invasion, like, “It looks a certain way but how does it act? What’s its power? What makes it unique and interesting?” It’s crucial for an RTS that you do that. It’s crucial for an MMO that you do that.

That’s one of the things that’s been really fun about translating all of these ships to Star Trek Online is finding the thing about that ship that is iconic. It was super easy because it’s just right there in the gameplay—the Typhon is a carrier, and so it’s a carrier in Star Trek Online that launches squadrons of Valkyrie fighters just like it did in Invasion. In Invasion, they have several different types of fighters, and so we brought in another type of fighter for this bundle that we pulled from Invasion. It’s got this really cool fortress mode that I actually wanna show off to you in a little bit here. I’ll pass it to James to have him talk about that a little bit.

They all have this identity of this cool ability that they can do, and that’s stuck in fans’ minds ever since. We’ve had people asking for years and years, “When are you gonna put the Typhon in? When are you gonna put the Premonition in? When you’re gonna put the Achilles in?” And it’s been great to see people ask for that and know that we’re gonna deliver. Everything that they did in those games that was exciting and special, they’re gonna be able to do that stuff in Star Trek Online too. James, if you want to talk about fortress mode a little bit…

SWALLOW: The thing to pick out on Tom’s point there is, one of the things about Star Trek is the ships are characters, and there’s always a sort of style and a look to them that they have, a sort of elegance and grace, and they always have a presence. What Tom’s talking about there with taking that style and that theme and saying, “Well, how do I translate that into something that is gameable, something that gives a player agency in the game? How do you make those things become compatible?” I love that idea.

Certainly, that’s something that we did with the Typhon. As Tom says, it’s this carrier-based starship, so in the early stages, we were very inspired design-wise by ships like the Battlestar Galactica or the Roger Young from Starship Troopers, but also inspired by games like Homeworld, of course, is a good example, Wing Commander was another game that was a strong, a strong influence on us, and obviously the the earlier Colony Wars games, because a lot of the design team came from that space combat game.

We took all those elements and said, “How do we filter that through a Star Trek lens? How do we still make it feel like a Star Trek concept?” So you have the cool Starfleet-looking ship. I’ve always felt it strongly resembles the Starfleet shuttlecraft because it’s got that boxy wedge-like type look to it. So, there’s a kind of design lineage that you can imagine crossing over there. You get to launch all these cool little fire ships which look like those have a design lineage that you can track back to the, if you remember in Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s the cool scout ship that Data pilots, you can see that there’s a design lineage between those vessels. But in its primary mode, it is a sort of heavy battle cruiser; it gets to turn into fortress mode, which is basically kind of hunkered down. It’s almost like it brings in its shoulders and becomes this little hard hat-wearing spaceship that is practically indestructible and has all these cool cannons that fire out. It just plants itself in space and temporarily becomes a battlestation.

That is also a really interesting thing to see, the kind of stuff that we saw in Deep Space Nine in the battle sequences there. A lot of the ideas we were bringing into the mix were all trying to emulate stuff we’d seen on the screen, saying, “If we saw that in the TV show, can we do that, but can we give it a different spin? Can we push it a little bit further? Can we do something different with it?” A lot of that was going on when we were developing what was the core concept for the Typhon.

That’s really cool. I love that you mentioned the design lineage because I feel like with Star Trek ships, and not just Federation ships but ships from any species in the franchise, you can look at a ship and almost instantly know which group it belongs to. How do you guys go about making sure that that stays consistent throughout and keeping that visual style for new ships that you create or things that you bring back?

MARRONE: There are a couple of tools you have. There’s the silhouette, the classics like saucers, nacelles, inspired by the great Matt Jefferies with the original Enterprise. It’s something that’s so powerful that it has become part of Star Trek’s branding. You see the Enterprise, and you’re like, “Oh, this is a Star Trek thing.” But not every Federation ship, in fact, the Typhon doesn’t have any of that. It doesn’t look like that at all. So, how do you make the Typhon look Federation? And I think the genius of what [Tarlochan Randhawa] and the artists on Invasion did was they had this new shape but then they applied all of the classic decals and the windows and the escape pods. They were very particular and careful about how they painted the ship and added the detailing to the ship so it all fits into that Star Trek Universe. That can take you really far.

You can do a lot with just making sure they’re using the right colors, and you’ve got the Starfleet pinstripes and the Delta registry numbers, the transport emitters, all that little stuff. One of the cool things about Star Trek, it’s pretty unique honestly compared to most other sci-fi franchises, is that most of that stuff on the surface of a Starfleet ship has a purpose. It’s there for a reason, it does something. I can point at it, you can ask me what that’s for, and I can probably give you an answer. So if you include all that stuff in your design, even if it doesn’t feel like a Star Trek design initially, that helps ground it in the universe and adds that form and function that you can use to tie it all together. And I think that the stuff in Invasion does that beautifully.

I love that it’s not just about looking cool, it’s also about functionality and making sure that these ships work within the parameters of the game and the parameters of the Star Trek Universe.

What’s in the New Star Trek Online Heritage Bundle?

From what I understand, Star Trek Online ships are pretty customizable if you’re captaining them. Beyond the fortress mode, what extras and features are part of the ships in this bundle that are going to make them enticing to fans who maybe haven’t played the original games?

MARRONE: The thing about the abilities these ships have is that whether or not you play the original games, they’re just really cool. [Laughs] The Achilles from Star Trek: Dominion Wars, that thing has– Defiant has a what we call phaser quad cannons; it shoots four phaser cannons. Well, the Achilles has six phaser cannons that fires at once, and then the Achilles has these dorsal quantum torpedo launchers that feel like Macross.

They feel like you’re launching a squadron of Macross missiles at a target. The Premonition summons the Enterprise F to help you out, but after it summons the Enterprise F, it splits it in two. It creates a temporal duplicate, and so now you’ve got two Enterprises at your command. Then, of course, the Typhon, we’ve talked about fortress mode. All of this stuff, the reason people remember it and the reason they want it in Star Trek Online is because it’s cool on its own. Obviously, this bundle is a bit about nostalgia and celebrating these old things, but the reason that people remember them is because they are so cool. So, there’s going to be a lot of intrinsic value.

For people who are [min-maxers], one of the really interesting things about the Typhon is it’s an escort carrier which is something that we used to have in the game, but then we took out. We used to use that designation for things like the Akira and some other ships, and we called them escort carriers, but then we decided that every carrier in Star Trek Online needed to have a two-hangar base. So, we renamed everything and put that aside. The old escort carriers became strike wing escorts; they only had one hangar bay, which means that if you have two hangar bays, you can launch basically four squadrons. It depends on the pet, but you can launch a lot of pets—fighters in this case.

So with the Typhon, we’re bringing back that escort carrier designation, but because it has two-hanger base. It’s the first carrier in the game that is also an escort, which means it can have dual cannons. It’s very nimble. So, we’re leaning into the lore of Invasion, too, not just in what it can do from the special power side of things, but from how it behaves and how you fly it. When you look at it, you think, “Oh, that’s a big ship. It’s a big carrier,” but actually, skill-wise, it’s a pretty small ship. So we wanted to honor the original scaling of the ship and its purpose. So, we’ve done a lot there, too.

Then, of course, with Star Trek Online, even though none of these ships come with other variants, they can use different materials and different window options and things like that. People can still get a little bit of what we call Space Barbie as they’re playing with these ships.

I love that. Beyond the ships themselves, are there any Easter eggs that fans can look forward to hunting in this new bundle that you snuck in from those original games?

MARRONE: If you buy the bundle, you’re gonna get the Valor class fighter, which was a Valkyrie Mark II. There are three Valkyrie types and then there are a couple of other types of fighters. The Valor class fighter is another hangar pet that you’ll get to use with the Typhon. Then another thing we’re including in the bundle is a ground weapon from Elite Force, the Starfleet sniper rifle from Star Trek: Elite Force. That’s actually gonna fire a big rail gun-type sniper bolt, so that’s gonna be pretty exciting too.

Then there are a couple of titles that play into the fun names of these games. The titles are Hur’q Invader, Dominion Warrior, and Armada Admiral. So, for people who buy the bundle, they would get to use those titles on their characters if they choose.

That’s awesome. To be honest, my favorite starship is still always going to be the Enterprise D. I love the classic giant cruise ship feeling of that ship. I know this is a little bit of an unfair question, but if you had to pick your favorite original ships from the games, and to just make it even harder, a favorite ship from the onscreen franchise, what would they be?

SWALLOW: For me, the favorite Star Trek ship, above all, has to be the Refit, the motion picture Enterprise. That’s always been my favorite. I had a poster of that on my wall in the 1970s that fell down so many times I had it stuck back up with tape and stuff. I just love that show. That’s my overall favorite Trek ship. But if I had to pick one specifically from Star Trek Online, I really love the Odyssey class. I just think that it is such an elegant, great piece of work, and it’s emblematic of the design quality and the structure of that game.

That’s really cool.

MARRONE: I glad to hear you say that. [Laughs] I’m proud of the work that we did with the Odyssey getting it into Picard. I’ve got to shoutout to Dave Blass and Brian Tatosky, the two guys who made that happen, and thanks to Terry Matalas for that awesome season in Star Trek. But as far as the Refit, that’s never the wrong answer as far as the best ship in Star Trek. Sometimes I go for the original, the very first Enterprise, because there was nothing like it. It really redefined what a science fiction spaceship was. I think we take starship for granted, and we take the Enterprise for granted, but what they did with that ship was so counterintuitive to what science fiction had done before.

Gene Roddenberry didn’t want any wires, he didn’t want any smoke coming out of it, he didn’t want it to feel like a rocket ship or a cigar like the classic Buck Rogers or Commando Cody stuff. He wanted to avoid that altogether, so Matt Jefferies had a really tough design problem. He had a blank canvas, but also he kind of had a gun to his head in terms of, like, “It can’t be like everything else that you know about science fiction. It has to be different.” That’s such a tall order for an artist to to be told, “Ignore everything you know about this thing and do something else,” but we’re still doing this thing, right? [Laughs] So, it was pretty incredible what he came up with, and iconic.

The actual miniature itself, I recommend anybody, if they ever have the opportunity to go to the Air and Space Museum, to see it on display there. It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. I think people have their relationship with The Original Series Enterprise. It’s muddy, it’s grainy, it’s blurry from the original model photography in the show, or it’s grainy from a bad transmission on your VHF signal or whatever, but you go see that thing that’s been fully restored by the Smithsonian in person, and it’s a work of art. It really is. It’s 11 feet long, it’s massive, and there’s a lot more detail there than you would expect.

You don’t think of The Original Series as having a lot of surface detail. And it is smooth; it’s not overly agreeable like Star Wars ships but it’s a gorgeous artifact of television and science fiction history, and so I often want to sing its praises. Often imitated, never duplicated.

Absolutely. I’ve also seen it in person, and it’s stunning. As just a casual viewer, you wouldn’t necessarily think of the model for the ship as that big, but it is. When you see it in person, it’s just sort of reverent. You mentioned Star Trek: Picard, and I was going to ask what that was like getting to see some of the Star Trek Online designs come to life in the series and create this feedback loop of the series informing the games and then the games then informing the series.

MARRONE: Again, that really is all thanks to Dave Blass and his willingness to work with us, and Brian Tatosky. Dave was a production designer on Picard Seasons 2 and 3 and Brian was the VFX supervisor. Those guys had a really open mind about it.

Dave had a problem where at the end of Picard Season 1, there was a lot of fan feedback about the Starfleet fleet that showed up, and it was mostly one starship. I think a lot of people had been aching to see that era of Star Trek, like, “What’s the post-Voyager era of Star Trek look like?” Picard gave the promise of that, but then I think people wanted more. They wanted a lot more than they got in Season 1 of Picard, and so Dave wanted to deliver that. He knew that just having one ship design wasn’t enough. In the script for Season 2, they called for a big fleet of Starfleet ships, so he had a problem to solve, and the problem was, “I need this big fleet of ships. I don’t have the money to do it all as big as I want it.”

He was looking around the internet for Star Trek ships just to get his bearings on what he could do, and he kept seeing, like, “Oh, that’s a cool ship design. What’s that from?” Star Trek Online. “Oh, that’s a cool ship design. What’s that from?” Star Trek Online. That happened a few times, and then eventually he reached out to me on Twitter and we started talking.

He brought me and then Hector Ortiz, the senior concept artist for STO, in to do a bit of iterative work on the Stargazer early on. It wasn’t quite early on in the process of designing the Stargazer for Season 2, but he wanted some some things for Terry to react against, basically some alternative options. So, Hector and I did that, and that worked out pretty well. After that, he pitched the idea of using STO models to Brian Tatosky, who was originally reluctant, which I understand because real-time video game models are very differently built than models for a TV show or a movie.

But Brian, like I said, had an open mind about them, and he took a look at our stuff. Thankfully, we had been updating a lot of our models, up-resing them, because modern video cards are a lot more powerful than they were in 2010, and so our ship detail had basically quadrupled in that time. Long story short, they were good enough for them to use as background elements and extra elements in the shots and stuff.

So, we sent them some models, and we remastered a couple of them specifically for Picard to make sure that they were up to snuff. The Enterprise F I had to rebuild from scratch, basically, and I didn’t even know that they were gonna use it as the Enterprise. Dave just asked, “Do you have the Enterprise F?” He didn’t say what it was going to be for, and I didn’t ask because I didn’t want him to tell me it wasn’t going to be the Enterprise. [Laughs] But I spent three weeks just nose to the grindstone, triple shifts, banging that thing out to make sure that it got done in time for them to use it, and then I didn’t hear anything for a long time.

Then, the New York Comic-Con trailer comes out for Picard Season 3, and they just put the Enterprise right there in the trailer. You could see the registry number and everything. That was a moment I’ll never forget. People are texting me, “Did you see it? Did you see the trailer?” And I’m like, “Picard’s cool, but what are you talking about?” And then it was like, “Oh, shit, it’s in there.” So that was delightful. And if my career has peaked, that’s fine. I can live with that. [Laughs]

I think you have plenty more exciting places to go, especially in Star Trek.

James Swallow on Writing Expanded Novels for the Star Trek Universe
Image via James Swallow

Speaking of Picard, I do have to take a little side quest here and ask: James, I know you’ve written a ton of expanded universe novels, many of which are still on my TBR list, but I quite literally chased down The Dark Veil on the day it came out and consumed it all in one sitting. Can you talk a bit about crafting that story to fill in the gaps for Star Trek: Picard?

SWALLOW: What happened with that was Kirsten Beyer, who is a producer on Star Trek: Picard and Strange New Worlds and Discovery, she was originally one of my colleagues as a tie-in writer before she got kicked upstairs to work on proper Star Trek. But when she became a producer on the show, she kind of led the charge for us to try and make sure that what we were doing in the world of the tie-ins dovetails a lot more closely with what was being done on the TV show. It’s the same kind of thing that you’re seeing with Tom’s work turning up on the TV show—the idea that making sure all these different tie-in elements do feel like they hive more closely to the leading material.

She came to me and she said, “We want to do a novel that picks up some elements that we talked about in Picard.” The idea was we would do a story about Wolf getting to be captain of the Enterprise after Picard leaves Starfleet, and we were gonna do a story about the Rikers and talk a little bit about their son who you don’t see in the show, but you hear this story about how they had a son and he died. I looked at those two elements, and I said, “Well, that’s two different novels. I can’t put all of that in one book. I can only do one piece of that.” I said, “The Rikers are my favorite characters on TNG,” so I said, “I’ll do the Rikers’ story. I’ll do the Riker on the USS Titan story.”

So, part of the brief I had was that the story had to strongly involve their son so we could learn a little bit more about that character who we never got to see on the TV show, and that was kind of the genesis of The Dark Veil. It ties into some of the plot elements that we see in Season 1 of Picard, but I was also given a lot of freedom to develop the characters and to develop the direction that story went.

So, for me, it was great. I had a fantastic time writing it, and I was really given just so much opportunity to add new stuff to that universe and build it out. With tie-ins, often the door only goes one way and you’re told what you can do, and that’s as far as it goes. But it seems with this newer iteration of Star Trek and these new shows, all the secret hideout shows that have been coming out, the door swings both ways now and it feels like we’re generally getting to feed back into the creation of this big patchwork quilt that is the universe of Star Trek.

I love that. If you were to write an episode for Star Trek Online, what kind of story would you want to tell within the game? What characters would you use and what ships would you use? I feel like the two stories that you did for Voyager both leave a lot of room for the audience to make up their interpretation of what happened to these characters in those experiences, and I think that really lends itself to a game like this and a world that you can inhabit as a player.

SWALLOW: That that might be because I was a role-playing gamer before I was a writer. My prose writing experience definitely draws from years of being a GM and playing with a group of gamers and trying to come up with stories that go in different directions. But that’s a great question. Star Trek Online has got such a massive expanded universe. There’s so much going on in it. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really. I’d be hard-pressed to pick, like, “Oh, I’ll do a story about that,” you know?

But I really love some of the crazy expansions they’ve done, like the epic stuff with the mirror universe and all this stuff that’s happening now with the alternate reality Borg and the time travel stories they’ve done. Those are so much fun. But I think if I had an opportunity, I’d try and find a little small corner of the Star Trek Online universe that hasn’t been explored and maybe tell a smaller story there. That would be fun. It’s a fantastic universe to be able to participate in.

Absolutely. You also have a Strange New Worlds book coming out soon. Is there anything you can tease about that before we switch back to Star Trek Online?

SWALLOW: I just finished writing it this morning.

MARRONE: Oh, nice! Congratulations! That’s awesome.

SWALLOW: I literally finished the first draft, and was kind of like, “Oh, god,” and just had that moment. I’ve still got loads of rewrites and stuff to do, but I kind of put the end of the first chapter today. Again, that’s been a really great experience to have the opportunity to do that. I’m absolutely loving Strange New Worlds. To me, it’s going back to what is, at its core, essentially Star Trek—the episodic storytelling and the look and the feel and the excitement and adventure and the fun of it. All of that stuff is really, really great.

The story I’m doing is mid-Season 2. Luckily, I’ve been given access to a lot of the material they’re doing for Season 3, so I’m seeing where the show is going and I’m getting the opportunity to put a few sneaky little hints in this. So, if you read the book, and you watch Season 3, you’ll realize I’m kind of prefiguring a few of the events that are gonna happen in the third season of the show.

I was really inspired by the two characters on Strange New Worlds that I really love the most; Captain Pike and Erica Ortegas were the two characters that I just really, really warmed to. So, Toward the Night, the novel that I’m writing, they play a very, very strong role in that story. I especially wanted to dig into the background of the character of Ortegas, about where she came from and what made her who she is, and I had a lot of fun writing that. Also, Pike is such a great character too—just being able to write stuff with him just being a captain and being cool.

All the characters have got such strong voices, as well. One of the characters that I didn’t realize I would enjoy writing so much was Number One, Una. She gets to do some fun stuff. She gets to have a face-off with a female Klingon commander, and they have a very sort of flinty kind of fight sequence where they’re battling with each other but not in a starship combat kind of way. It’s sort of like this battle of an argument that the two of them are having, and I had so much fun writing that. So, it was really fun to get my hands on those characters. I hope everybody enjoys it as much as I did writing it. It’s gonna be out in March of next year.

I can’t wait to read it.

Image via Star Trek Online

Bringing it back to Star Trek Online, when you guys are creating a new bundle and the next release to go out in the game, how do you decide which parts of this massive franchise to then integrate into the game? Is it mostly based on player requests? Is it a matter of personal preference for story arc, or a mix of both? How do you go about creating each next new thing?

MARRONE: With a game development, you have different lead times for different things. So, a ship lead time is much shorter than an episode lead time, and a lot of that has to do with the complexity of the asset that you’re making or how many dependencies, like how many departments you need to contribute to something. An episode requires literally every department in the game to touch it for a long time, and it requires months of work from animators and content designers, environment artists, effects. Episodes are massive, which means they require a lot of planning.

Usually, we have a story arc planned out years in advance, like a year or two in advance. Currently we’re working with a story arc created by our former creative—he’s moved on to a different company—Al Rivera, who is a creative director. He worked with our former lead writer, Paul Reed, and they they came up with this Borg multiverse arc. We had a transition from the mirror arc that we just finished into this multiverse arc, which started with a really cool story with Tholians, and then bled into something bigger. If people will notice, we have these rifts in this current storyline, and visually they’re based very closely on the rift at the end of Picard Season 2.

What we love to do with Star Trek Online is, like James talked about, “What can we pull on a? A thread to expand on and really dive deep and connect different things together?” So, you had that rift show up, but you never knew who made it, what they wanted. It was very open-ended, and so we decided to clamp on to that for this story arc. I’ll just leave it there because I don’t wanna get too far into spoilers.

But it’s always that. We wanna make sure that we find the fertile ground to tell new stories. We know that for people playing Star Trek Online, it’s a Star Trek theme park—you have Voyager Land and TOS Land and Discovery Land and DS9 Land—and so we wanna make sure that with any new story that we bring into the game, we have these critical touch points, these different Star Trek shows, and we’re tying them together if we can.

So, this multiverse story arc with the Mirror Borg, we have the mirror stuff from TOS and Enterprise, but then we brought in Mirror Janeway, inspired by what IDW did with their Voyager, their mirror comics. We also brought in V’ger from Star Trek, the motion picture, in our mirror thing. They have nothing to do with each other on the surface, but we figured out a way. Then we have a mirror Wesley Crusher. It’s wild and fun.

It was really fun working with Al and Paul and seeing what they would come up with. They had their big conspiracy board of, like, “And then the Mirror Traveler comes back with V’ger, and then they get Mirror V’ger, and then they have this big battle.” It’s definitely Charlie Day. [Laughs] But that’s one of the supreme joys of working on STO is doing that and making those connections. I think one of my favorite things that we’ve done is the Hur’q. The Hur’q were the featured villains in Star Trek: Invasion, which is really cool and inspired. James, were you the first people to make them Insectoid? Did that come from you?

SWALLOW: Yeah, I think so. I think Chris Graham was the guy who was the designer on that. I do remember the inspiration for them was very much army ants and beetles. That shiny carapace kind of look was definitely themindset for them. And if you look at the designs that we did in the game, they have these inverted triangular heads, like a kind of forehead, but it’s all like a shiny bug carapace and a bunch of spectroid eyes on it. Pretty cool designs.

MARRONE: So, we did do our own take on it, but we started with the Invasion idea of them being Insectoid. So, the Hur’q in Star Trek Online are their own kind of Insectoid race, maybe a little more inspired by locusts and stuff. Then we did the Iconian arc. The Iconian arc was nuts because we pulled in stuff from Voyager with the Vaadwaur and then the conspiracy from TNG—those bug aliens that possessed people. You never heard about those guys again, so we tied that into an arc in STO. So many of these things that, on the surface, seem unconnected, it’s really fun to bring them together and then let people experience all that. I could go on and on about it. [Laughs]

With this particular pack, did the final product come out as you envisioned it when you started or how did things evolve as you were designing this bundle?

MARRONE: One of the great things about all the new Star Trek shows is they keep forcing us to do more and more complicated stuff. We’re always like, “How the heck are we gonna do that?” By the time we got to the Typhon and the Achilles and the Premonition, I think the Premonition was maybe the most challenging, getting the Enterprise to split into two copies of the Enterprise and getting the effects timing and all that. But once you do the Section 31 Dreadnought from Discovery where you have little drones peeling off, that thing was a monster.

We were scratching our heads, like, “How do we replicate this faithfully?” So, a lot of the stuff that we had to do for this bundle was actually pretty tame in comparison [laughs], even though it’s super cool. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, the Typhon folds up and then it does a gatling gun barrage for a while.” It was like, “Yeah, okay.” Everybody knew how to do that. We had done stuff like that before.

We have a lot of ships in the game that transform and have modes. Starting with, I think the original starship to do that in Star Trek is the Bird of Prey from Star Trek III [The Search for Spock], originally designed by Nilo Rodis. It has the wings that go up or down depending on what it’s doing, and so we’ve got that in STO. Then you follow all the way through to Booker’s ship from Discovery. That was another one that was just wildly complex, but we do have it animate in the game. I think it even does the ramming thing where all the pieces fly apart and then reconfigure and then fly through.

So, these ships were actually pretty tame from what we thought, but they turned out wonderfully. I wanna call out Tobias Richter, the ship artist who did the Typhon and the Achilles. Tobias is a well known Star Trek fan who’s a professional VFX artist. We’ve contracted with him for a very long time on Star Trek Online. He’s done a lot of ships for us. It’s great working with him. He’s super professional, super fast, super high quality, and he really brought these ships to life.

Then the third ship, the Premonition, with Invasion, the endgame models were pretty low poly, but they still had some pretty defined textures and stuff. Then we had really good concept art that we found, and then in Invasion, there’s also a really high quality CG cut scenes that we could look at, too, to kind of up-res. Creating them for Star Trek Online meant for our modern graphics card, we had a lot more detail than they had to work with on the PlayStation one, and so we up-res’d the designs. I call it kind of wiping the grease off the lens or bringing it into focus where it’s still the same thing, still the same silhouette, all the details are still in the same places, you’re getting a look at the the same thing but in sharper focus.

So, for the Achilles and the Typhon, that was easy to do, but the Premonition, because Star Trek: Armada was a real-time strategy game, that meant their models were super low detail because they had to have dozens of them on screen at once. Back in the year 2000, that meant your models had to be hundreds of triangles, not tens of thousands of triangles. So, the Premonition was really low detail. The concept art didn’t really have a lot of information in it, so we felt like with the Premonition, we had a bit more room to push the design and interpret it in a more unique way.

For that one, I hired Eric Henry to design and model the new Premonition for us. Eric is a fantastic artist. He’s super skilled at designing and modeling ships. He has a great YouTube channel where he does a lot of breakdowns of Star Wars ships, and he’ll do his own custom design stuff. He’s just a tremendous artist, and I love working with him, and I think the Premonition turned out wonderfully. We were working on it earlier, and we were trying to nail what we wanted to do, and I was like, “Alright, well if you took the Vesta and the Sovereign, and they had a baby, what would that look like?” So, if they’re Vesta fans, and they see the Premonition, I think they’ll enjoy it.

How Star Trek Online Brings in Your Favorite Stars From the Franchise
Image via Star Trek Online

That’s really cool. I just want to say how amazing this game is and just what a huge achievement it is in general having this massive world that Trekkies can create themselves into. Then just to experience these stories firsthand is really, really special. I know your specialty is ships, but you also do a little bit of character design. Several actors from the franchise have come and done voice work for STO, so what’s the process of getting those people back? Do you know who you can get in advance and then craft the story around that or is it the other way around?

MARRONE: So, I came up as a UI artist and became a ship artist. Now I’m the art director, so I oversee the whole art team on STO, so I can speak to that a little bit. I was never a character artist, although I do work closely with them as art director. It always starts with a story. We have a story outline, and these are the people we want to bring in, and then we have to get that list approved by Paramount. They say, “Oh, this person is gonna be used by this show, so you probably should stay away just in case they do something that doesn’t jive with what you wanna do.”

And that’s happened a few times where we’ll pitch somebody to them, like Wesley was in Picard Season 2. Originally, our mirror arc with Wesley, it was gonna be Prime Wesley and there was only gonna be one Wesley anywhere. It was going to turn out to be that he had been corrupted somehow as Traveler and was gonna be running that.

I have vague memories of what the original plan was. I think it was Prime Beverly, or something. Maybe it was always a Mirror Wesley, but it was gonna be Prime Beverly because we hired Gates McFadden to come back and be Beverly, but because of what was going on with Picard Season 3, they didn’t want us to use Beverly at all. So we were like, “Well, can we do Mirror Beverly?” And they were like, “Yeah, that’s fine.”

So it ended up working better, actually, because there was more connection between Mirror Beverly and Mirror Wesley, obviously, and we got to tell a really cool story about Wesley. It was really truncated, but we got flashbacks to Wesley growing up and discovering he has Traveler powers, but what does that mean in an environment like the Terran Empire where everybody is out for themselves. He probably would have ended up dissected in a lab. I know Paul, our writer at the time, drew a lot from the IDW comics and what they were doing with their TNG mirror universe stuff.

So, we push that past Paramount. If they agree, then we go to the actors and we say, “Hey, are you interested in working with us?” We get everything signed and we’ll start just doing their likenesses. That process, depending on how we do it, that can take five or six weeks internally or several months if we’re working with our [Extent] partners to nail down those likenesses. It’s very, very challenging. I don’t know if I should say this, but a lot of attractive people look the same [laughs], and so you have to find the very, very minute details that bring their specific look and personality into them, and it’s really hard to just like intuit that stuff as an artist.

As an artist, you don’t understand how a minute little tweak, how much difference that can make in the difference between a generic handsome man and Captain Kirk, right? There’s a lot of really, really subtle stuff going on in likenesses. So, that’s something I’ve been involved in as art director, in remaking a few likenesses, and it’s always probably one of the most challenging things about the job is trying to nail down what makes a person register as that person. How do we do that in the game engine with the technology limitations that we have? And how do we do it within a time box of a few weeks, a couple of months? It’s a lot of iteration back and forth, “Try moving this. Try changing that.”

I think that’s something that people who aren’t game developers don’t understand, and I think anybody who’s creative knows this, is that if you see something really cool– And I do this, I know. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite video games, and then I play that game like, “Wow, the people who did this are geniuses.” And they are, but I think people forget that, yes, they’re geniuses, they’re skilled, they’re very smart, but they spent years iterating to get where they are.

There are mountains and mountains of unused, discarded work, where it’s like, well, maybe [this character] looks like this. Maybe she has dreadlocks. No, we’re not gonna have her have dreadlocks.” So they have to remodel her hair. It’s just like that. For anything that’s good, or almost anything—I’m sure there are Mozarts and people like that out there—it’s on a throne of skulls of discarded work. It’s like bad drafts. [Laughs]

SWALLOW: I always think, like, when you watch an action movie, you never see the scene where the guy falls off the bike or drops his gun. You only ever see the good take, right? You only ever see the best of what could be done.

MARRONE: James, which episodes did you do?

SWALLOW: I did the original story premises for two episodes, one from Season 4 and one from Season 6. The first one was called “One,” which is the story about the Voyagers going through a radioactive nebula and everybody’s in suspended animation, and Seven of Nine has to pilot the ship on her own because she’s the only one who can survive, and starts to go crazy halfway through. That’s a little homage to The Shining on Voyager, basically. Voyager is the Overlook Hotel—that’s the pitch that I did for that one.

The other one is “Memorial.” That’s a story where the crew start having flashbacks to being in this battle that they were never in and they don’t understand why. Turns out what it is is it’s a war memorial that’s broadcasting this event.

MARRONE: I remember that one. That was a really cool sci-fi story. I love both those episodes, but that one I thought was really fascinating.

It’s so thought-provoking, the concept of making people understand your trauma by having them live through it.

MARRONE: Right, but also the morality of forcing it on them too. [Laughs]

Exactly.

SWALLOW: The idea of that is that the device is malfunctioning. Normally, you would have the terms and conditions at the beginning of it. So everybody’s being forced to experience this thing, and that’s why at the end of the story, they say, “Well, should we turn it off?” And they say, “No, no, no, it’s too important for that. We’ll fix it so that it works correctly.”

Just to end on a fun question, if you’re captaining a starship, what’s on your bridge playlist?

MARRONE: So for me, it would probably be like, you know that yo yo ma violin piece or Master and Commander. That would be there probably. Or the Hunt for Red October soundtrack, you know anything.

SWALLOW: For me, it would be, Scorpions Rock You Like a Hurricane.

The new Star Trek Online Heritage Ship bundle is available to purchase in game now.

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