Borg / Klingon / Starfleet Academy / Klingon Academy - forgotten 90s Trek movies?

Therre were four Star Trek games in the 90s that features live action footage.

Borg and Klingon were both published by Simon & Schuster Interactive as 'interactive movies', the player would make a choice at the end of a scene to decide what would happen next. Both were filmed at Paramount using sets, props and costumes from the contemporary (Voyager/DS9) TV shows; directors, producers and even composers (including Jonathan Frakes on Klingon!) from the shows would work on them too to give that authentic feel, John deLancie and Robert O'Reilly respectively would appear as Q and Gowron. I'm almost surprised that they, particularly Borg, did not appear as extras on the TNG blu ray sets or Voyager DVDs (Klingon would go well with DS9 Season 4??) They are full-blown productions.

Ten, in 1997, three years after Generations, William Shatner, George Takei and Walter Koenig appeared in Starfleet Academy, set between movies V and VI. This was notable as it was filmed entirely on virtual sets, new technology at the time. The game, however, was a flight simulator. A sequel, Klingon Academy, featured Chang and Gorkon from Star Trek VI, again set in the same time frame.

It is cool to see these 'extra adventures' though they are sometimes forgotten. The Star Trek cast has worked on many other games, in character, with cutscenes that tell a story. They are animated though, not live action.

What do people make of these?

 

Chang was so much more interesting in KA! SFA was nice, but I like KA even more.

They also had several Trek alumni in Borg and Klingon. You can play both on youtube with all choices.

 

I never played Klingon, but Borg was a lot of fun, especially with de Lancie appearing in it.

I loved Starfleet Academy and particularly liked the cutscenes with the TOS crew. I only played Klingon Academy round a friend's house a few times, my PC wasn't so great and I wanted to buy it, but I did like that Gorkon and Chang were back.

 

I have only played KA and lover It.
I still mis the game because I can't play It anymore

 

I loved multi-player Klingon Academy, since there was an easy mod you could make by editing one of the config files and make the "fire-while-cloaked" BoP available to you in the multi-player match. You could wreak some real havoc, and they wouldn't know what hit them.

Oh yeah, and the video footage was cool, too. Though the acting didn't seem quite up to par with TUC.

Kor

 

I freaking LOVED the Borg game. There were some parts of it that gave me grief (such as the bit where you have to operate a turbolift manually) but overall it was a lot of fun.

 

KA's segmented, layered damage models were pretty amazing back then as well

 

I love how you could zoom in on the damaged hole in your saucer section, It looked so great.

 

I remember getting a huge kick out of seeing Chang lose an eye in Klingon Academy. But it always bothered me that KA had these amazing, enormous Klingon and Starfleet battlecruisers but we never saw anything like them in TV/movies.

And William Shatner looks dreadful in Starfleet Academy. I found that as a movie on YouTube but it was unwatchable. Diane Carey wrote a novelization of the story which I read years before (with the Super Nintendo version of the characters in mind) and I loved that.

The Borg interactive movie was a lot of fun, but kinda broken which ruined it somewhat. I played it in 2000 and had to cheat past some sections where clicking refused to work.

 

Most games have that problem. The canon weapons are the weakest standard ones you begin with, and then you get much more powerful ones (KHG, EF)

 

Nice to know - didn´t even realise they were games/interactive movies. Specialiced gaming press did ignore them at the time I think.
To be fair, that was a time were every few weeks there was a new release of something Star Trek related:
http://gaming.trekcore.com/chrono_list.html

 

I never played them, but I watched them all on Youtube. The uniform cock up on Q bugged me no end, but otherwise they were fun.

 

Yes that was very odd, but otherwise it looked like a lost TNG episode.

Everything was recycled!

 

Starfleet and Klingon Academy were really fun games. I would kill for a remake of them with modern graphics, along with the FMV scenes redone in HD.

Btw, about Starfleet Academy, I remember some parts of the game being really silly. For example, you could tractor beam an entire Starbase (that big mushroom one) with your ship, and you could also take it with you whenever you warped to another sector. Haha.

 

In light of Christopher Plummer's death, I got around to watching the Klingon Academy cutscenes online on youtube and, having not finished the game itself, I didn't realize just how much Plummer was in this game!

There's certainly more Chang scenes here than in the entirety of Star Trek 6! Even the youtube edit of all the cutscenes put together, minus the majority of gameplay footage, come out to almost 2 hours long, and Plummer is in the majority of the scenes. It's basically a full fledged General Chang prequel movie!

In the gaming world, when a big name actor shows up in a game, often the hype around their appearance is overblown in proportion to how much time the actor's actually in the game. The most extreme example would be Patrick Stewart in Elder Scrolls Oblivion, which was hyped to extreme levels, when actually Stewart's character is only in a few scenes and dies in the game's tutorial.

This is not the case with Christopher Plummer in Klingon Academy. He's in the majority of the game, in live action full Chang makeup and clothes (and on an Elder Scrolls note, Plummer's voiceover Skyrim character Arngeir also features in that game pretty prominently). Gaming fans are lucky an actor of his caliber put the time and effort into these game performances for us to enjoy.

 

Last year I tried to install Klingon Academy on my Windows 10, but it didn't work

 

I was able to get it to work recently, but it wasn't easy. I put together the DVD install found online, but even then I needed another patch to prevent the graphics from glitching.

 

And the material he was given was much more interesting and of course much longer than his few scenes in TUC

 

I like the Klingon Academy ships better than some STO designs. Hey Eaglemoss!

 

If they ever make old game ships, I want a Chodak dreadnought