Interplay had been around since 1983, and by 1991 its portfolio was already quite impressive – but it didn’t include a typical adventure game. Company founder Brian Fargo wanted to make a point-and-click game in the style of Lucasfilm Games or Sierra, and he had always been a huge Star Trek fan. But he ran into a big problem. “I had been chasing Paramount for years to try and acquire the licence for Star Trek, me and most of the company had been major fans of the original series,” he tells us. “Unfortunately, Paramount would never return my numerous calls and I had little clout. Then one day I got a call from Emil Heidkamp from Konami and he said that Paramount was all over him to try and get them to make a Star Trek game and if I was interested. We had gotten out of developing games for other companies, mostly, but I agreed to make Konami a NES game ONLY if we could have the PC rights. Emil agreed since they did not do PC, and Paramount was happy.”
As the name suggests, the game was supposed to be released on the 25th anniversary of the TV series, around early September 1991. The simple NES action game made it – but the much more elaborate PC adventure did not. This was largely due to Interplay working so closely with Paramount. There were never any
