Star Trek Online Interview

Star Trek Online executive producer Craig Zinkievich and lead writer Christine Thompson took some time to chat with Ten Ton Hammer about the lore surrounding the popular sci-fi franchise and how best to integrate it into an MMO setting.

Ten Ton Hammer: How does the development team prepare for such a massive amount of history and lore? Has the entire staff sat down and watched all the movies and episodes from the various series?

Christine: We are continually watching new episodes. We have times where the entire team will sit down and watch a particular episode. Those of us that are more into the history and the lore and putting that together watch more. I watch at least an hour of Star Trek every night, just going through series over and over again.

I’ve also been reading the books since last September, so I try to get a book in a week because we want to at least acknowledge the novels even if we don’t follow the plotline of every one exactly.

It’s just an amazing amount of research. We have a lot of people on the team that are hardcore Trekkies and can tell you everything from the history of the Borg to the exact height of the railing in the hallways of the Enterprise-D so we pull that knowledge base together whenever we have a question.

Craig: Even for some of the staff on the team who weren’t big Star Trek fans before they came into the project, we ended up doing weekly lunch and eats. We brought lunch in and ate while we watched an episode. We did that for quite some time. We kind of stopped recently just to get people to try and work as much as possible. But when we first started out, we bought a bunch of copies of all the DVDs and media and let people check that out and bring it home. So there was lots of stuff to bring people up to speed that didn’t already have a huge amount of knowledge.