HISTORY

The following is an interview with Klingon Academy Designer Ron Hodge looking back at the development of Klingon Academy.

What is your earliest memory of Klingon Academy development?

My earliest memory is sitting down with Raphael after I was done with my normal QA shift (I hadn't been brought over officially at that point) and just brainstorming on what we thought would be fun to see in a game of this nature.

Were any of the SFA programming team involved with Klingon Academy?

Yes. Mark Murakami did much of the interface code for SFA and Robert Coultrip wrote the AI code for SFA.

What was the biggest problem the development team had to overcome apart from the reuse of the SFA engine?

Getting larger resolutions in the game.

Were you given any reasons why the project was being forced to reuse the SFA engine? Considering the less than warm welcome SFA got from the US press, why were they forcing the shaky foundation of SFA onto Klingon Academy?

The VP of Development at the time was being pressured from the top to cut costs wherever she could because (as always) Interplay was haemorrhaging money. Unfortunately, the VP of Development's only game industry experience was in marketing aspects so she did not realize the true gravity of such a decision.

What frustrated you personally during the development?

The generally poor communication between team members frustrated me to no end. This was due mostly to Raphael's decision to keep the various departments pretty much segregated from each other at the beginning. When problems due to lack of communication began to surface the team was too divided to really overcome such obstacles. Apart from Steve McLafferty and myself, there were few team members who interacted much on a personal level with any other portions of the team. It ended up creating something of an "us versus them" mentality that resulted in a ton of bitterness and ill feelings at the end.

It's pretty clear that Interplay management were against Klingon Academy, so I have to ask the question why did they bother?

It was said to me once "if you put a dog turd in a box and slapped the Star Trek logo on it it would sell." And given that Voyager had a multi-year run and Enterprise still isn't cancelled I'd believe it. :) Initially they were all for it. It was only when KA began to really drain the company coffers that were already being mismanaged and misspent that they turned against it.

For most of the development us fans were stuck with the fact that the game would be limited to a resolution of 640*480 and the reasons behind this were pretty well explained to the fans. Was the work to bring higher resolutions to Klingon Academy an ongoing goal during development or was more of a spur of the moment attempt to keep management and the fan base happy?

Blame Raphael for that. :) He, against orders from upper management, kept John P. working on it at least part time for the entire development.

When did it become clear that the multiplayer aspect of Klingon Academy would be death match only? And where there any other reasons apart from time as to why different types of multiplayer missions were not created?

It became clear when the solo-play game itself wasn't finished and Wombat's contract had already run out. This nasty situation developed when decisions in scheduling that were made for politically expedient reasons began to show how ill advised they were from a raw development aspect.

NOTE: The main reason you got more than just death match in SFA was that they ended up with about 9 months of EXTRA scripting time due to a major snafu with the compositing of the live action movie footage, all because somebody used orange tape to act as markers on the green screen sets. The orange used is one normally used in film/video effects, but unfortunately due to camera focus depths the color often bled, invading the flesh tones and the coloration of the TOS movie era uniforms. When the process was done automatically, bits of people's faces and uniforms disappeared and characters looked as if they had holes in them. The only way to avoid this was to clean the tape markers off of each frame of uncomposited video footage by hand. Every person that could be spared was put on frame cleaning duty but cleaning thousands and thousands of frames by hand blew out there schedule. SFA the game was done pretty much 9 months before the movies were done. In the interim the scripters were put to use coming up with a variety of multiplayer games (a couple of which were offshoots of scripters trying to show off their talents to get promoted to junior programming positions). All SFA fans who loved Net Profit et al. owe their thanks to a roll of chroma key orange gaffers tape.

Can you name 3 features that would have made the game better if the proper time was given?

Multi-player, the special weapons, and the Sha'kurians.

Many of the special weapons were intended to be far more grand looking than they are now. The Assault Phaser was intended to be something akin to the main gun of the SDF-1 from Macross or the wave-motion gun from Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers, a super wide beam of energy that would devastate anything it hit, with the additional effects of draining the firing ship of power causing the lights to dim and the ship to cut thrust for several seconds. The AMFP was intended to behave more like a gargantuan flamethrower and be the bane of fighters (and thus a great weapon against the Shaks.) Many ships were supposed to carry fighters, not just Sha'kurians (though they were intended to have the best fighters of all.) The GDDS was supposed to look like a translucent sphere with lightning like arcs of energy crackling over its surface. As it is the engine really limited us as to what we could do. Manny did a great job with what we had, but they were always somewhat disappointing to me.

The Sha'kurians we approved for use so late by Paramount that they couldn't be worked into the story very well. I also wanted to see a couple of video hails from one (CGI of course). We also needed more time to develop squadron AI for the fighters. As it is they're annoying at worst. They were intended to be something to be feared.

In your opinion how lucky are the fans of Klingon Academy that the game ever made it out of the door?

Brian Christian spent at least one day every week for the last three or four months of development convincing Brian Fargo that Raphael was not the anti-Christ and that KA would ship if they didn't cancel it. Does that answer your question? :)

How far off is Klingon Academy from what was envisioned in the design document (More to the point do you still have a copy? Might be an interesting read)

KA is only about 50% of what the designs called for. However, that said, the designs were about 25% beyond what they should have been. This stemmed from Raphael's hope that he could convince them that we should just completely scrap the SFA engine and start from scratch, which was wishful thinking and in hindsight the source of a serious number of problems in the development.

Do you have any idea how well Klingon Academy sold?

Not well. Then again, KA came out after the genre of the space-sim was pretty much dead. Even critically acclaimed space-sims didn't make a ton of money if any because the market wasn't (and regrettably still isn't) there.

There are few games that I know of that require 6 CD's, do you know why the DVD version which was created never materialized in OEM or Retail channels? (My attempts to buy up some DVD copies for people who wanted this on KlingonAcademy.com have come to nothing, Interplay just give me contact info for Activision distribution then Activision point me back to Interplay :( )

The DVD version was only on the drawing board when I got canned so I don't know anything about it.

I get a lot of e-mail from people who want to buy the game but can't find it, I have to point them to eBay. In your opinion what are the chances of Klingon Academy being re-released in a bargain basement form?

Somewhere between zilch and nada. Interplay no longer has the ability to sell Star Trek games in any form and Activision wouldn't do it because KA didn't generate the sales.

Here we are, 2 and a half years after the game was released and it's still being modded, new scripts, new ships, new sounds/music, new weapons and even total conversions. All this comes from a small dedicated community, is it surprising to you that this is happening and did you ever expect the game to still to be going after all this time?

We released a game with an astonishing amount of depth all things considered, so I expected there to be a fan following for awhile, but I never imagined it would be 2 and a half years.

When was the last time you played Klingon Academy and do you have it currently installed? :)

Over a year ago and I do not have it installed.

Will we have to wait for hell to freeze over or longer before they toss out the source code to the community? We would be more than willing to give it a good home :)

Interplay is notoriously secretive about their code. I doubt seriously that it would ever be released.

Easter Eggs! I was told there were a few throughout the game that that were removed including the Klingon Font HUD. Can you remember what others there were and why they were removed? We Love easer eggs :)

We wanted the player to be able to go to the Sol system, target and destroy George and Gracie on Earth and have the Whale Probe show up and wipe the place out. But that never really made it past the construction of the Whale Probe model. Other than that, we didn't have the time to really do any sort of Easter Eggs.

A prequel to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek Klingon Academy stars Christopher Plummer as General Chang and David Warner as Chancellor Gorkon. Under the tutelage of Chang, you will learn battle tactics and the code of the Klingon warrior. Complete with 3-D space terrain, a Gunnery Chair and the ability to command capital ships, Klingon Academy has set a new standard in space combat.

General Chang, the Empire's greatest living warrior, has established an Elite Command Academy to prepare a new generation of warriors for the inevitable conflict with the United Federation of Planets. As your mentor, Chang will instruct you in the ways of battle tactics and teach you the rigors of warship command. Prove yourself worthy and you may be recruited to fight with Chang in an even greater, real-life conflict - a conflict that will decide the fate of the Klingon Empire.

Epic Story - Star Trek Klingon Academy is a prequel to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, reprising Christopher Plummer as General Chang and David Warner as Chancellor Gorkon.

All New 3D Engine - Stunning visuals and dramatic lighting effects create a realistic 3D universe to explore and conquer.

Solo Play Campaign - 25 action packed missions put you in the middle of all out war.

Multiplayer Gaming -Blow your friends out of the stars via the Internet in a Deathmatch.

3D Interactive Space Terrain - Fight in dense nebulae clouds that disrupt sensor data, maneuver through Saturn's rings, and battle within the accretion disk of a black hole.

Command Capital Ships - Command a variety of warships: from the relatively diminutive 'B' rel' class of bird-of-prey, to the enormous 'Accuser' class Dreadnought nearly 3 times the length of the Enterprise!

Innovative Gunnery Chair - Control all your ships' weapons (forward, port, starboard, and aft) while your helmsman maneuvers your warship into position.

Cinematic-Quality Ship Detail - Blow apart an opponent's hull to reveal individually burning decks. Lights flicker as electrical power is disrupted. Plasma belches from twisted and mangled warp nacelles. Scorch marks show the scars of battle.

Over 40 Warships New to the Star Trek Universe - Be the first to battle with never-before-seen ships from the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Tholian, and Gorn races-as well as that of a new race, the Sha'kurians.

10 New Weapon Systems - Defend the Empire with new weapons technology such as the Antimatter Field Projector Device, the Frequency Modulated Particle Accelerator Cannon, and even the dreaded Assault Phaser!