The upcoming game prequel to Paramount Pictures' Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek: The Video Game, will not be a "throwaway piece of merchandise" according to the title's senior vice president of marketing, Brian Miller.
Speaking to Polygon Miller said the game's developer, Digital Extremes is dedicated to avoiding the stigma which is usually associated with licensed games and will do their upmost to "get it right."
"When we look at the stigma of movie based games, we can kind of break down those challenges into three categories," Miller commented. "One is there was never enough time to make a game that could stand up there with the other AAA games. By the time you get all the assets from filming and you're ready to make the game, you've got about 12 months before the film comes out."
Another reason licensed games are usually mediocre, or worse, according to Miller, is that conflicting interests between studios, publishers and license holders often mean the right creative people are not working together leading to an inferior product.
"And the third is just funding it correctly," Miller added.
The executive went on describe how Digital Extremes had looked at other movie-based games and the lessons they had learned from those titles.
"When we looked back at some of the movie games and why they didn't work, one of the reasons was you were basically aping what viewers had already seen. If you made a game directly off off the last movie – now they go to the space dive, then they're going to go to the ice planet – there was no chance to change the narrative and give a gamer an experience story-wise," Miller said.
Star Trek: The Video Game is beaming to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on April 23rd.
