Paramount: Star Trek's development prolonged to coincide with Into Darkness
Star Trek has been in development for about three years at this point, which is a "huge amount of time when you're talking about a movie game," Paramount Pictures Senior Vice President Brian Miller told us during a GDC-adjacent demonstration of the game earlier this week.
"Most movie games that we've ever worked on, and I would say most people ever work on, you're lucky to get twelve months," Miller said. "You're in the middle of production on a movie, you're trying to hit a target date of when the movie comes out, all the assets aren't in there, so you wind up having to rush things through."
In Star Trek's case, however, the situation was reversed – development on the game was extended by a full year in order to coincide with the release of Star Trek Into Darkness, the franchise's latest theatrical romp.
"This game was going to come out at a different time," Miller said. "We didn't know when the next movie was going to be, we didn't know if it was going to be holiday, we didn't know if it was going to be summer, and we were just striving for it to make a game. Then when they all started lining up, it was like 'Okay, the movie is going to be here, let's give ourselves a little more development time to make sure they line up and come together.'"
An entire extra year may seem like more than "a little more development time," but that's the sort of call you get to make when you're Paramount. Miller told us that while interaction between Paramount, developer Digital Extremes and writer Marianne Krawczyk was an "amazing collaborative back-and-forth," Paramount's wishes are still, well, paramount.
