Review by: Adam Swiderski
Published: June 18, 1999

The matching of the Star Trek franchise and computer gaming is one of the most famous pairings in the entire history of famous pairings, right up there with peanut butter and jelly and green eggs and ham. Some of the earliest games ever played on a computer were based on Star Trek, even if the ASCII characters used to display them didn’t quite live up to the show’s at-the-time impressive special effects. Since then, we’ve seen a parade of Trek titles make their way into the world. Some have been good (25th Anniversary), some have been bad, (Captain’s Chair), and some have been downright inexplicable (Star Trek Pinball), but there’s no doubt that few other licensed products have garnered this kind of perpetual interest from the gaming community.

To me, none of these games really captured the full scope of the Star Trek universe. Sure, some of them dealt with the actions of individual crews or the conduct of individual ships well enough in the context of the show and movies. Over the years, however, Star Trek has become about much more than one ship and one crew. It’s the story of an entire universe of creatures and the interaction between them. It’s about territorial disputes and interstellar diplomacy. It’s about scientific discovery and the exploration of new frontiers. Most importantly, it’s about guys in peculiar outfits with really bad haircuts and funny accents. Luckily, it appears that someone at MicroProse was performing a Vulcan mind-meld on me (except with regards to that last part), because they’ve just released Star Trek – The Next Generation: Birth of the Federation (BotF), a turn-based strategy game in the mold of the now-classic Master of Orion (MOO) series. In BotF, players are no longer solely responsible for the actions of just one ship or cast of characters, but rather for the development of an entire race. Jean-Luc Picard may have sat at the helm of the most powerful ship in the Federation’s fleet, but he never had his hands on the controls of a civilization.

The basic style of play in BotF is similar to that seen in MOO and other 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) games like Alpha Centauri. From the humble beginnings of a single colonized star system, you are tasked with guiding one of five races (Human, Klingon, Ferengi, Cardassian or Romulan) to a dominant position in the galaxy. To that end, you’ll manage the research and development of new technologies, haggle with other races over territorial sovereignty and political arrangements, construct a fleet of ships for both exploration and combat, engage in ship-to-ship battles with adversaries, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before. It’s a formula that has been repeated many times in games of this type, only with the added element of the Star Trek universe tossed in to sweeten the pot.

But don’t expect to progress from pre-warp days through the age of Captain Kirk and into the future. Because of the way Paramount handles its Trek licensing, MicroProse was only allowed to use Star Trek: The Next Generation material when creating BotF. That means all aspects of the game, including ships, stations and alien races, are restricted to the confines of Trek’s younger incarnation. This does not turn out to be as much of a problem as it might first seem, however, because MicroProse does such a good job of infusing the game with Trek atmosphere that you tend to forget about the lack of historical grounding. Everything about BotF just oozes authenticity (as much as can be said for a game based on a science fiction premise). Each of the five races has their own unique interface that mirrors fairly well the portrayal of their civilization on the show. All the ships we’ve come to know and love — from the Federation’s Enterprise-style command ship and Defiant class vessel to the Klingon Bird of Prey — are there, as well as a few new ones that still manage to look the part despite their lack of a television or film pedigree. The same can be said for the structures and technologies that can be researched by each faction.