25 Years Ago, Star Trek Boldly Took Gaming Where It Had Never Gone Before
Starfleet has a posse.
The fundamental difference between space battles in Star Trek and space battles in Star Wars, is, generally speaking, the size of the ships. Sure, Star Wars has big battleships like the Star Destroyers or the Mon Calamari cruisers, but what made Star Wars such a big deal was the way it basically took aerial dogfights and moved that combat into space. This is why a ton of Star Wars games, especially the early arcade releases and many of the '90s hits, mirrored the starfighter action of the films. A large-scale strategy game within the Star Wars universe was possible, of course, but that aesthetic was never really something that gamers seemed to want.
However, the reverse is true for Star Trek. When Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan hit theaters in 1982, with special effects direct from George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, the spaceship combat didn’t try to emulate Star Wars at all. Instead, just as in the 1960s show, starship combat in Trek was all about strategy and deployment, more like naval combat than fighter planes. But, unlike the Star Wars franchise, it took the Star Trek franchise much longer to deliver gamers an experience that matched with a more methodical type of starship combat. In fact, twenty-five years ago, when Star Trek: Armada was released, this style of Trek starship combat had really only existed for gamers in a tabletop format. For a certain subsection of Trek fans, Armada actually delivered the type of gaming experience that had eluded the franchise for decades.
Before the release of Armada, the Star Trek gaming community had thrived on the existence of a long-running tabletop strategy game called Star Fleet Battles, which, launched in 1979, based most of its gameplay on ships and situations from The Original Series, and then, later, the first few movies. Because of the slower and more contemplative nature of Star Trek’s starship combat, it made sense that a tabletop game would be the focus of this very specific sub-genre. While there was a 1983 arcade game called Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator, it took the advent of truly sophisticated PC-based games to make an immersive Trek starship strategy game a reality.
The timing of Star Trek: Armada was also one year after the 1999 game Star Trek: Starfleet Command, which, unlike Armada, was published by Interplay Entertainment, not Activision. For fans of Star Fleet Battles, Starfleet Command was the more literal video game successor to that tabletop empire. But while that game recreated the aesthetics of that tabletop era, it wasn’t quite what fans wanted at that time.
Box art from the old-school Star Fleet Battles.
The strength of Star Trek: Armada is that instead of drawing upon a sort of imagined version of Starfleet’s activities, the canon was drawn directly from the contemporary Trek shows and films of the time. In the year 2000, the TV series Deep Space Nine had just concluded, the film Star Trek: Insurrection was only two years old, and Voyager was still airing new episodes. What all these things had in common was a ton of relatively new starship action, which had never fully been realized in a blockbuster video game.
So, as a big strategy game, Armada was literally giving fans something the Trek franchise had never done: a way to command tons of starships at once, but in a kind of quasi-canonic scenario. While Star Fleet Battles (and Starfleet Command) always seemed to operate in a kind of sideways continuity, Armada positioned itself as a game that took place very much inside of the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager continuity of that era. Patrick Stewart and Michael Dorn reprised their roles as Picard and Worf, while Denise Crosby returned as the scheming Romulan Sela. This kind of storytelling aspect has been carried on since 2010 in the MMORPG, Star Trek: Online.
Star Trek: Armada gameplay.
But Armada was the first. Like a Trek version of World of Warcraft, players could pick different factions to control — Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Borg — and could build various different kinds of ships and launch massive campaigns. Finally, what everyone had seen on screen in Star Trek: First Contact, or the iconic Deep Space Nine episode “Sacrifice of Angels,” could be experienced by gamers. With Armada, Trek gaming finally had caught up with the imaginations of the fans. (Also, the game’s overall story of Picard being cloned and then that clone being used against the Federation oddly predicted the plot of the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis.)
Does Armada hold up today? Not exactly. In a sense, the sequel game, Star Trek: Armada II, released just one year later in 2001, corrected many of the complaints gamers had about the original. Whereas the first Armada had a limited number of ships, Armada II greatly expanded the different starships that were playable and created a more integrated game flow than its predecessor.
Still, from a novelty point-of-view and from the perspective of its historical importance, twenty-five years later, Star Trek: Armada remains foundational, bold, and beautiful.
