Star Trek Online Still Lives

USS Bataan

The IP’s MMO is still around, albeit with some disappointing discontinuations.

As Lead Developer Al Rivera wrote in 2016, Star Trek Online launched on February 2nd, 2010 - about a week after my 16th birthday, for which my mom bought me my first and only gaming PC. Before then, I’d been running Closed and Open Beta on my 2008 MacBook dual-booting Windows 7 Beta (which only supported 2 of its 4GB of RAM.) Endless waves of ground enemies, pressing the “1” key hundreds of thousands of times to whittle them away with my phaser rifle. There were bugs on top of bugs. My favorite was a swap between one’s ground and space avatars: a gigantic captain would appear in space and a little ship would appear on the ground.

Star Trek Online is inevitably very close to my heart. I was 14 in 2008 when I joined the original post-Perpetual Entertainment STO IRC channel when the game’s license was first transferred to Cryptic Studios. It was exciting to find a community of people who were looking forward to participating in a Star Trek MMO as much as I was. I originally entered into the community under the (very cringey) username “crazyhooligin,” under which my current STO account is still registered. I have never been very good at video games, but my 15-16 year-old self was particularly bad. I chose a Science Captain but wanted to fly the great (engineering/tank-focused) cruisers of The Original Series, The Next Generation, and the latter’s movies.

As Justin Olivetti chronicled for Engadget, the license for Star Trek Online was originally owned and developed on by Perpetual Entertainment, which was assaulted by a lawsuit and extensive layoffs in December, 2006. The company was sued by Kohnke Communications for allegedly selling “valuable assets like the Star Trek Online license” to an affiliated entity called P2 entertainment. Clever. A quote from the complaint as reported by Ten Ton Hammer:

“On information and belief, the assets transferred to P2 include Perpetual Entertainment trademarks and copyrights, the perpetual.com domain name, and assets related to Star Trek Online, including code and the license… Perpetual received less than market value for the assets it transferred to P2, and the transfer made Perpetual insolvent (or worsened Perpetual’s existing insolvency).”

In the IRC channel, I met Sata - host of the now-defunct MMO Junkies podcast and ex-Perpetual developer. He and the STORadio crew accepted me into their Teamspeak conversations despite how strange and unsocialized I was. I learned how extensive and beautiful their development had been. One wonders what Cryptic did with the original game and art assets and who technically owns them now.

A German
One friend playing while the other draws from their impressively substantial Star Trek knowledge.
Layiena’s streams are incredible because - while he understands theory as well as the other broadcasters in the STO Twitch community - it’s his incredible skills at live Captain commentary (calling out abilities and other command inputs as if he really is in the captain’s chair.) It may sound cringey (and perhaps it would be to many,) but his thoroughness and accuracy actually 1) make it seem pretty darn cool to me and 2) are hugely valuable in helping the viewer understand what he’s doing. After some three years, I know my one rotation fairly well, but only three or four of its steps by name. Certainly not well enough to do what he does.
Nigh-universally common threads among them: imperturbable kindness to their audience and an impressively wholesome commitment to actually having fun. Though I’m far from deeply saturated with Twitch culture as a whole, I’ve watched my fair share of Eve Online, World of Warships, World of Tanks, Star Wars: The Old Republic,

Ever unable to escape predilection with the experience of living about ten years ago

Ever unable to escape my preoccupation with life as it was about ten years ago - both in general, and #software