15 Years Ago, Star Trek Gaming Leveled Up and Changed the Canon Forever
'Star Trek: Online' was the start of a new era.
Despite its reputation as a science fiction franchise committed to hope, peace, and equity in an enlightened future, playing Star Trek still involves quite a bit of pew-pew-pew shootouts. Yes, The Original Series was groundbreaking for both its serious science fiction storytelling and various representational achievements, but it was also an action-adventure show grounded in the traditions of naval adventures like C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, and westerns like Have Gun — Will Travel. The point is, that action, space battle, and conflict are a huge part of Star Trek’s various narratives, so it makes sense that not all Star Trek games would be solely focused on exploration and space diplomacy.
But fifteen years ago, one massively online game tried to do the impossible: Create an immersive Star Trek game that satisfied the action-adventure part of the equation, but also gave players the ability to feel like the galaxy was a big enough place to explore, without constantly firing off their phasers. The result was Star Trek Online, a game that launched on February 2, 2010, and is still going strong to this day. The ripple effects of the game carried out to Trek canon, too.
In 2010, the Star Trek franchise was at an interesting crossroads. While the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot film had been a smash hit in 2009, the Prime Universe canon — AKA everything that had occurred in the entire franchise up to that point — was seemingly on hold. Enter Star Trek Online, a game set in the era after Star Trek Nemesis, but incorporating the future-tense continuity from the reboot movie, specifically, the destruction of the planet Romulus in the late 24th century.
From the beginning, Star Trek Online’s goal was to create an immersive world for players, but one that was also familiar to the Trek fans who were still hoping for a continuation of the era that was chronicled in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Set in the early 25th Century, in the year 2409, initially, Star Trek Online positioned itself well outside of the canon of the then-newer films, and also beyond anything we’d seen in the TNG/DS9/VOY era. This was a safe space for the creators of the game to innovate, and to make sure that what players interacted with looked like the Star Trek they remembered.
The promise that Star Trek Online gave to its players was somewhat straightforward: To let players create their own captain and starship, and then boldly go out into the galaxy and gain experience. But because this is an online MMO, there needed to be a near-constant threat of conflict. So, Star Trek Online created a new status quo in which the Klingons and the Federation were no longer at peace, and various other alien governments were warring, too. Essentially, the fall-out from the Romulan supernova (depicted in Star Trek 2009) created a galaxy-wide shift, making everything more-or-less, topsy-turvy.
The original launch art for 'Star Trek Online.'
Interestingly, this post-Nemesis timeline became a major part of the actual Star Trek TV canon, albeit, much later. When Star Trek: Picard debuted in 2020, the show was more or less set right around the same time as the Online era, and thus, subtly contradicted aspects of the game. And yet, the basic notion that the galaxy was rowdier than it had been in the sunny TNG era remained. And by Picard Season 2, the look and feel of Starfleet was directly influenced by Star Trek Online. In fact, when it came time to assemble a massive fleet for the debut episode of Picard Season 2, the production designer Dave Blass turned to the Star Trek Online team to help import digital ships from the game, directly into the TV series. As Blass told Inverse back in 2022: “I found these ships from Star Trek Online and I was like damn, these are really good looking...I was like ‘Why are we not doing something here?’”
The result was, that for Star Trek gamers, who had been loyally toiling away in the 25th century of Star Trek Online, suddenly, ships from the MMO entered the 25th century of Star Trek: Picard. This culminated in what is probably one of the most prominent examples of game canon changing TV/ movie canon ever: By Picard Season 3, it was revealed that the USS Enterprise-F was indeed and in fact an Odyssey class starship, just like in the game. And, because Picard Season 3 was set in 2401, it was then possible to view the 2409 “future” of Star Trek Online as a possibility for the canon of any TV series or films set in that era.
Over the years, Star Trek Online has had a slew of celebrity guests, lending their voices to their original characters or alternate universe versions of beloved icons. From Chase Masterson playing a version of Leeta from the Mirror Universe to Walter Koenig as Chekov, to Wil Wheaton as Wesley to Denise Crosby, recently returning as an alternate Sela as Captain of the Enterprise, this game hasn’t just explored the regular Star Trek galaxy; but a massive multiverse, too.
As a game, Star Trek Online requires a ton of patience. The mechanics aren’t intuitive right away, and it takes time to get used to running your ship, and figuring out which missions are worth your while. But patience is also part of the rest of the Star Trek franchise, too. And for fifteen years, Star Trek Online has rewarded its players with a unique experience they couldn’t find anywhere else. And, along the way, the bold designs of the game managed to change the rest of the Trek world, too.
