History – Trekking with Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are minor spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force and for Star Trek: Voyager.

On the 20th of September 2000, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force was released. That’s twenty years ago – to my great shock – so it seems like a great opportunity to take a brief look back at what is arguably one of Star Trek’s best and most successful video game adaptations.

The Star Trek franchise hasn’t had a lot of luck in the video game arena, despite the fact that there’s a good deal of crossover between Trekkies and gamers. Most Star Trek games really only appealed to existing fans, and failed to either cross over and win support among a wider gaming audience, or to bring in any new fans. Elite Force was – for a time, at least – an exception to that. As a result it’s fondly remembered not only by Trekkies but by many fans of first-person shooters in the early 2000s.

*Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force* was released twenty years ago!

Elite Force was the first game released that was made using the Quake III engine (also known as id Tech 3) except for the original Quake III Arena, and many first-person shooter fans just after the millennium were excited to see what this new game engine would bring to the table. Elite Force also offered local and online multiplayer on PC at a time when the idea of playing games via LAN or online was becoming a bigger and bigger deal in the PC gaming sphere; it was certainly the first such game I ever played at a LAN party!

Using the tagline “Set phasers to frag!” – where “frag” is (or was) a gaming term for “kill” – Elite Force became a moderate success for its multiplayer mode. Gaming as a hobby was much smaller around the turn of the millennium than it is today, and also skewed younger in terms of the average age of gamers. Most players at the time were aware of Star Trek, which had been on a roll through the ’90s, and where Elite Force truly broke new ground for a Star Trek game was in reaching out beyond the franchise’s usual fanbase to appeal to non-fans. It’s unfortunate that the game’s release coincided with the end of The Next Generation’s era; I think if it had been released earlier in Voyager’s lifetime it might have been able to retain some of those new players and convert them to Trekkies. The idea of the “box set” hadn’t really materialised in 2000, so with Voyager already into its final season, and with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine already over, there wasn’t much Star Trek content for those who did enjoy the game and its setting to get stuck into.

In that sense, Elite Force was released at a time when the Star Trek franchise was entering a period of decline, and the end of Voyager’s run a few months after the game was released meant that the franchise wasn’t able to keep many of the players who gave Star Trek a chance. That’s a shame, but it can’t be helped!

Beyond its multiplayer mode, Elite Force told a really interesting story. The game begins with the explanation that Captain Janeway and Tuvok have created a specialist “Hazard Team” for the USS Voyager, of which the player character is a member. Elite Force was one of the first games I played that allowed players to choose their character’s gender; Ensign Munro could be male or female. It was groundbreaking in the sense that the game didn’t change at all depending on the player’s decision – if Ensign Munro was a woman she was just as capable as if she were a man, and no one aboard the ship would behave differently. That decision alone represents Star Trek’s vision of an equal future. Gender representation in games is getting better, and there are some great female protagonists. But some franchises and series have still never offered players a female lead, and others struggle with writing a female protagonist successfully. Elite Force got this right twenty years ago, so there’s no excuse!

*Elite Force* let players choose to play as a female or male character. Both were fully-voiced.

To get back to the story, Hazard Team has been assembled in response to the threat of the Borg and other dangers the ship faces in the Delta Quadrant. The first level of the game is set aboard a Borg vessel – which soon turns out to be a holodeck simulation! I liked the creative use of Star Trek’s technology to explain some in-game features; players were said to have a personal transporter buffer which contained their inventory, explaining how it was possible to carry so many items at once. That was a neat little addition!

The USS Voyager itself was recreated using the aforementioned Quake III engine, and remains one of the best in-game depictions of any Starfleet vessel. It was such a shame when fan project Stage 9 was forcibly shut down by ViacomCBS a few months ago, as their recreation of the Enterprise-D was stunning. Elite Force did something similar with Voyager, and in between missions several large areas of the ship were able to be explored. This was a complete novelty at the time, and it was amazing to be able to wander around the ship looking at every little detail that developers Raven Software had built.

The bridge of the USS Voyager was one of many locations on the ship that could be explored.

When the USS Voyager is pulled into a rift in space, it comes under attack by scavengers who reside there. The Hazard Team is deployed on a number of missions to recover supplies, defeat opponents, and find a way for the ship and crew to escape. Interestingly, some Alpha Quadrant races (including humans) are present in the “graveyard,” along with Delta Quadrant races like the Malon.

I don’t want to spoil the story too much, because it is still possible to find copies of the game both for PC and PlayStation 2 second-hand if you want to try it for yourself. Suffice to say that I found the story of the single-player campaign to have a solid Star Trek feel to it. Fans of the franchise might find a couple of nitpicks here and there, but generally it was great fun. Voyager would use a somewhat similar premise – getting sucked into a rift in space populated by scavengers – in the seventh season episode The Void, which was broadcast a few months after the game was released.

Almost the whole Voyager cast stepped in to voice their characters. The main two in terms of the storyline and in terms of who Ensign Munro interacted with were Tuvok – who is the head of security and nominal leader of the Hazard Team – and Captain Janeway. Aside from Jeri Ryan, who was unable to voice Seven of Nine, and Jennifer Lien, whose character of Kes was not part of the game, the entire main cast were present. A couple of Voyager’s minor recurring characters (Chell and Vorik) were also voiced by their television series actors, which was a nice touch. The game was certainly far better for having the proper voice cast!

A darling of early-2000s LAN parties and a pioneer of first-person shooters in the online multiplayer space, Elite Force is a rare example of a Star Trek video game that broke the mould and expanded beyond the fandom. It’s also one of the better Star Trek video games both in terms of gameplay, where the Quake III engine provided a rock solid first-person shooter experience, and in terms of storyline, which for the most part felt like players were taking part in a real episode of Voyager. It’s a wonderful game, well worth playing for any Trekkie, and it would have been a shame to let its twentieth anniversary pass by unnoticed.

So here’s to Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force! Happy anniversary!

Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force probably remains the copyright of Activision-Blizzard. Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force is available for purchase on PC via GOG. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Voyager – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day – that’s Victory in Europe day, when Germany officially surrendered at the end of World War II. British, Canadian, Australian, and American soldiers would continue fighting Japan until August, so this wasn’t the final end of the war, but for the nations of Europe, the USSR, and American armies fighting in the European theatre of war it was. History is one of my big passions, though it’s not something I talk about often here on the website. But today is a great opportunity to look at a couple of great documentaries about the war as we celebrate this poignant anniversary.

Cameras had been present in every conflict since the Crimean War in the 1850s, so photography was not really new by the time of World War II. The American Civil War is often cited as the conflict that invented the idea of a “war correspondent”, reporting the facts and taking pictures for newspapers back home. And during the First World War a generation earlier, video footage was routinely captured to be used in newsreels – and propaganda.

But the Second World War saw photographs and video captured on a much bigger scale – almost every army detachment would be assigned an official photographer, and many soldiers would take their own cameras from home with them when they went off to war. I have several family photographs in my collection from my grandfather and great-uncle, both of whom fought in the war and, by a very strange coincidence as they were assigned different roles in different units, both saw action during the Battle of Crete.

I’m going to look at two documentaries in this article, one British and one American. They both look at the same conflict from the same side, but with very different perspectives. The American documentary I’ve chosen in Ken Burns’ The War, which was released in 2007.

*The War* was released in 2007 and looked at the conflict from an American point of view.

The War is, by the standards of other works looking at the conflict, narrower in scope. It has a focus on individuals from a select number of smaller towns across the United States, and while it does of course deal with the conflict’s major events, it often does so through that lens. It also begins not with the events of 1939, the widely-accepted beginning of the Second World War, but with the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, which marked America’s entry into a war that had already been raging for more than two years.

The decision to begin the documentary in 1941, while at the same time providing only minimal background to the United States’ declaration of war, is a limiting factor because it means the whole story of the conflict isn’t told. However, The War doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive look at the entire conflict. As with Ken Burns’ other works, it is a uniquely American film looking at how the war affected the United States and how Americans participated in it. Whether you consider this limitation to be problematic or not may depend on where you come from – from my own point of view with my family history tied to the conflict, the Battle of Crete, which saw my grandfather captured and interred by German forces, had already occurred several months before The War begins its coverage. It is, in that sense, an incomplete picture.

Nevertheless, The War is an interesting and well-done television series, drawing on a vast amount of historical data and documents to tell the story of the later two-thirds of the conflict very well. It also covers the Pacific Theatre of the war in far more detail than many other works do, as Europe is often the focus of Second World War documentaries. Keith David, who’s a well-known voice actor and has appeared in many films and video games, even voicing the role of Admiral Anderson in the Mass Effect series, is The War’s narrator.

The second documentary I’ve chosen to highlight is The World at War, a British series made in 1973. Don’t be put off by when it was made, because this documentary is about as comprehensive as it’s possible to be.

There’s something of a “sweet spot” when it comes to studying certain past events. Too close to the event in question and people can be reluctant to talk openly and honestly about what happened, but wait too long and too many of the principal players have died or are not available to participate. The World at War lands right in the middle, and as such is able to interview many senior and prominent people who were involved in the decision-making process during World War II.

Such important figures as Anthony Eden, who had been the UK’s Foreign Secretary for almost all of the conflict, Karl Donitz and Albert Speer, who were senior German cabinet ministers under Hitler – Donitz would even be named Hitler’s successor and formed a short-lived government, Traudl Junge, who was Hitler’s secretary and on whose memoir the 2004 film Downfall was based, Lord Mountbatten, actor James Stewart, and many others were all interviewed for The World at War. Getting the perspectives of such important figures makes the series such incredibly riveting viewing. Hearing people like Speer in particular discuss what it was like working with Hitler is absolutely fascinating, and brings to life a period of history that we only really think of as being in black-and-white.

Former Nazi government official Albert Speer was among the many significant interviewees for *The World At War*.

With 26 episodes and clocking in at a massive 22 hours, The World at War is a huge time commitment, but well worth it. No other documentary series has tried so hard to cover World War II in such comprehensive detail, looking at every aspect and every major front in the conflict – even the pre-war conflicts between Japan and China, and the rise of Hitler’s Germany from 1933-39, both of which can be overlooked by other studies of the conflict.

Award-winning actor Lawrence Olivier provides The World at War’s narration, and the series is definitely the better for his involvement. At the time it was made, The World at War was the most expensive documentary ever produced, and its use of archive footage from the time, as well as its extensive interviews with veterans and prominent wartime figures makes it incredible for anyone with an interest in the conflict.

So it was a bit of a different article this time, taking a break from the world of fantasy and sci fi to look at the real world for a short time.

The 8th of May 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day. The War may be found on DVD and Blu-Ray and is the copyright of PBS. The World at War is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray and is the copyright of Thames Television and ITV. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Category: History

Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force (Twenty Years Later)

VE Day – marking the 75th anniversary with documentaries