Point And Click Adventure

Star Trek: Secrets of Vulcan Fury is a cancelled adventure game that was in development from 1997 to 1999 by Interplay Entertainment that would have been the third entry in their Star Trek adventure game series, the other two being 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites.

Like the two previous games, it would have featured the entire cast of “The Original Series“, principally William Shatner, Deforest Kelley, and Leonard Nimoy, and would have been written by Original Series writer D.C. Fontana, and directed by Original Series director John Meredyth Lucas.

Like the two previous games, it would have been a faithful recreation of the original series, an interactive episode essentially. The game would open with a plot involving the murder of a Romulan ambassador, that would lead into a whole series of stories exploring the backstory of the Vulcan and Romulan races, including why they split into two (something that has not been explained to this day in any official Star Trek television series or film).

The reason for its cancellation was apparently that the game was far too ambitious. Full Motion Video was in its infancy at the time and the game would have been entirely interactive FMV sequences using clay models similar to Interplay’s Fallout series, with full voice acting, something that was simply too expensive to produce at the time. It also became clear that the actual game was not resembling what was advertised. One only need see the trailers and compare them to actual gameplay footage to see this. All of this cascaded into a long and largely fruitless development cyclce. So the game was cancelled with only five percent of the game complete.

There are claims the entire script was recorded by the Original Series cast, however this is false. The script was never finished, and audio recording never seemed to have went beyond small bits of dialogue being recorded, much of it only for test purposes. It’s unclear if even the entire original cast would have been able to record the entire script, or any dialogue at all. For example: Deforest Kelly was apparently too ill when development commenced, and had to be replaced by an impersonator (he passed away in 1999, the year the game was cancelled). All in all, it’s unclear exactly how much work was done audio wise, and to add insult to injury, all files were accidentally deleted by Interplay, making a revival of the game all but impossible unfortunately, regardless on how much was done.

The FMV and motion capture technology however did impress Paramount Studios, the owners of the Star Trek license at the time, who planned to use it to make a CG-I television series fearing the Original Series cast and characters, but that too was cancelled. The game remains one of the more famous pieces of lost media in the franchise’s history.

Article by Let’s Have A Discussion

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