Old Trek Game Proposal Concept Art

Hi all.

This isn't exactly "fan art" per se, but what I'm going to post in this thread is some concept art and mockups that I did for a few Star Trek game proposals. As per my handle here on Trek BBS [EDIT: then it was DS9Sega], I was a game designer on the DS9 Sega Genesis game (also released on the SNES), but before and after that I worked on a few pitches for Trek themed games that didn't get picked up. That's what I'm going to post here.

First up are two screen grabs from a demo I did in late 1986 for a game called "Balance of Terror", the brought the Romulans back in the movie-era. This was for a company called Novotrade (later Appaloosa), who did the DS9 game I worked on years later, and was for a pitch to Simon & Schuster, who had the videogame rights at the time.

Left image is actual resolution of 320x200 (x16 colors). Right is 50% resolution.
The running Romulan was from a repel-boarders sequence.
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I'll come back to this game another time, but what's notable about it is that these aren't just screen mockups. I actually created a 2 minute animation of what the game might look like to help sell it. I modeled starships in very early 3D software, rendered out "sprites" and then animated them in a cel animation program.

This game was rejected by Simon & Schuster, with the comment that they wanted a game that "didn't require hand-eye coordination". Might I suggest a Star Trek version of Sorry?

Eight years later in mid 1994, as the DS9 game was working towards its finish, I mentioned this earlier game concept to the guy I worked for at Playmates Interactive Entertainment, and he expressed interest in seeing a new take on the basic idea. I pitched him the idea of jumping back 100 years and doing a space combat game set during the Earth-Romulan War. He liked the idea, so I wrote up a detailed game concept document and did some concept art to go along with it.

Below are some of the concept drawings for the game, which had the working title:

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This baby was partly inspired by the Greg Jein model of a prospective Romulan cruiser from the wars, small pix of which appeared in the Star Trek Chronology. I took the basic layout of Jein's ship (as much as I could make out from the crappy pix of it then available) and made a much smaller, sleeker craft in a similar shape, with two side by side seats. Note the underslung tail-fin: an inverted nod to the oroginal TOS Romulan ship. The "eyes" are like the window ports on a Gemini space capsule, or a Space: 1999 Eagle.

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I did sketches of uniforms that were a little more severe than the TOS ones, and borrowed the "belt" from Kirk's first TOS wraparound shirt that ended with a sideways delta, and adapted that as a uniform motif for the UESPA forces, using the "boomerang" shape seen on the Enterprise pennants. I repeated this on the bindings for the boots, with the boomerangs acting as buckles.

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I even did sketches of equipment. I wanted to have communicators that felt related to those seen on TOS, but without literally repeating their flip-top gag. I quickly hit on keeping the grille as an antenna, but, instead of flipping it open, you'd pull it up like a radio antenna, revealing the controls underneath. I quickly moved on to a spring-loaded version where the antenna grille would snap up if you squeezed the device, and you'd push it shut to "hang up". I toyed with the idea of making them clear like The Cage communicators, but decided that looked dorky, so I compromised and made the face of the device clear, but the body black.

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That's all I was able to dig up at the moment. I'll try to find more.

 

This stuff is fantastic! The communicator and uniform designs are great. I am totally buying the slide-up grill antenna... If you find any Federation ships from the proposal I would definitely love to see them - this is another great take on the "Enterprise" era.

 

Excellent design work.
I could definitely buy the Shrike as an easily recognizable Romulan craft.
And your idea for the slide up grill is great.

 

That's top-notch work, DS9Sega. Impressive.

Joe, impressed

 

First, that is so cool. I love that game. And I find it tremendously cool to have you on here. You should really talk about some of your experiences working on that game (if you haven't already and I've just missed it.)

Wow! I'd love to see that 2-minute animation. I love the Romulan sprite.

Uh... okay. That's just...

[LEFT]
Ahhh, then you've answered my question from the other thread, and it could work with the 'bigger' version of the configuration as a battle cruiser to this fighter. (I'm guessing this would be around 40-50 feet long?) That is really cool. And I did note the tail-fin.

[LEFT]
I absolutely love these uniforms. At the risk of being 'that guy,' I wish we'd had something like this on ENT. The belt the way you've done it is particularly inspired.

And I really, really love this:

[/LEFT]

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It's really amazing, amazing work. I love it!!

I hope you do find more!

 

Well, if anyone wants to take a crack at it, I have some crude elevations of it. What might not be entirely obvious in this sketch is that the nacelles have line-of-sight on each other under the hull, for instance. Ironically, I showed the upper sketch to Andy Probert for his opinion with the idea it would be a cruiser. He said, "It'd be better as a fighter," and thus it became.

 

Found some more uniform sketches. This was a dress uniform variant. I had the idea of using the little triangular ribbons from the TOS dress uniforms arranged to imply the later delta insignia. There's another communicator, and a Jefferies-proportioned Daedalus doodle as well.

Click for larger image.
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Oh, that's interesting. I wonder what he would have the cruiser version look like...

I still love that uniform and communicator. I really like the way you incorporated the striping arrow belt as a recurring theme/brand.

 

Now i wish this Game was made

 

I like it, but it looks more like it would make for a good TOS reboot than for something from the E/R War. But then I'm a bit biased.

 

You realize, of course, this was 1994, long before Enterprise was even a gleam in a marketing persons eye.

 

Yeah, but I still have to admit that a lot of the stuff I see intended for the era seems way too close to TOS in terms of technology level and the general look of things to seem like a 100 year gap exists there. :shurg: that's just my opinion, of course, unless things were fairly stagnant for a while. Keep in mind this is a general remark and not meant as a criticism or anything, just something I've noticed from more than one fan project.

 

Well, that's fine if you think so. To my mind, a cruiser from 1940 looks not so different from one from today, or an Army uniform for that matter...over even a business suit. Some thing change radically (cars from 1903 to 2009), other things not so much.

 

Edit: I decided to PM you this instead - I don't want to come off as trying to thread-jack or start an argument.

 

Thanks. But I've got no big ego to bruise on this. These were just project proposals like the scads of others I've done over the years. I did my best to come up with what seemed logical and in-keeping with the license, and if it doesn't meet with everyone's approval, so be it.

 

Didn't mean to come off that way, sorry.

 

Ask and ye shall receive.

I haven't managed to convert all the animation files and preserve the sound effects yet. It looks to be a more annoying process than I hoped. In the meantime, I made some more screengrabs from the animation files running on an Atari ST emulator (STeam). Here they are:

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Keep in mind that the computer these were created on could display 320x200 pixels in only 16 colors at a time from a palette of 512. The screens above are actual pixels, unscaled (how far we've come), and no screenshot is more than 16 colors.

 

Wow! I have a feeling I would have love this game! I imagine it wouldn't quite usurp my favorite space combat game from those years (TIE Fighter for PC) but I bet it would come close. Any chance of making this playable as a Flash game or something like that? It seems pretty simple. But then, beyond writing little codes to italicize words on forums and writing simple formulae in spreadsheet applications, I'm certainly no programmer. but it sure would be un to actually play!

--Alex