Warp Factor Trek

Not only does Star Trek feature many computers, it has been played many times on computers too! A year ago, Mat Bradley-Tschirgi wrote Star Trek Video Games: An Unofficial Guide to the Final Frontier, a book about the video games of Star Trek, which he discusses in this exclusive interview.

What are your earliest recollections of Star Trek?

I was in grade three or so, and my family was living in Argentina. My dad worked for the US government, and we were living by the embassy. You could rent videotapes from there, and dad rented Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, so I got into Trek first through that movie. To not be familiar with the Star Trek crew and have the first movie be a fish-out-of-water thing – where they’re in San Francisco with whales – was a bit strange. I honestly didn’t quite understand it.

My dad would talk incessantly about how, in college, he would skip class with his friends to watch repeats of Star Trek: The Original Series when it was in syndication. However, we didn’t get Star Trek on broadcast TV, living overseas. I eventually collected the movies on two-disc DVD sets and got into the series later, when it came up on streaming.

Which is your favourite Star Trek series?

I’ll say it’s a tie, if that’s not cheating – The Original Series, because it’s the first and has something really special about the relationships between the original crew, about how they work together and argue, but I also am a big fan of Deep Space Nine. I like that it’s more political, with more serial storytelling. It was ahead of its time in that regard, although it was not as much as the writers would have wanted it to be, because they had pressure to make more episodes that were one-offs than more continuous storylines. Nonetheless, I feel like the scope of DS9 is one reason why everyone liked that series.

What inspired you to become a writer?

It came from a love of reading and part of that again was living overseas for five or six years where, on TV, often the only English-language things were CNN or cartoons our grandma would record on VHS and mail to us. So, my family went to the library and read a lot. When I was seven, I was looking over at my bookshelf, and there were some Doctor Dolittle books by Hugh Lofting. I thought, Oh, it’d be nice to be a writer someday and have enough books to fill up a bookshelf. So, I think that’s where the first impulse came from. Nowadays, I’m based out of Portland, Oregon, in the United States.

Which authors have been inspirational to you?

I was born in 1982, when the Internet wasn’t around, but I grew up when video game magazines were a thing. So, the magazines were a big inspiration, like initially Nintendo Power and later things like PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. I thought the computer magazines were a lot better written and more robust than the video game magazines.

As to writers, one was Jeff Green, who was an editor for Computer Gaming World. Jeff has such a nice sense of humour with his writing, which I think is important. I try to have humour in mine because the topics, to some people, can come off as a bit dry. I think the humour makes it all easier to swallow and keeps it fun.

Another writer who sticks out to me is the late Douglas Adams. I was a huge Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan as a kid. The humour and absurdity felt similar to some of the Monty Python stuff, and Douglas Adams even acted in some of the final series of Monty Python. His involvement in that show was very limited – it’s not like he was the sixth Beatle!

A great book on writing is Stephen King’s On Writing. Half of it is a memoir, half of it is about the writing process. It’s blunt and to-the-point. Terry Brooks’ Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life is also good.

Where did the idea for your Star Trek Video Games book come from?

I’d been writing about games online since I was twelve or thirteen, about as soon as we had an Internet connection in the dial-up days. So, I knew there was a lot of Star Trek games out there. And in 2005, I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Interactive Design and Game Development from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.

The website GOG – Good Old Games – had been re-releasing the Star Trek games, They did a batch of seven or so, and those did well enough that they did a second batch, but there are so many unreleased Star Trek games. That was the impetus behind the book. People can enjoy it by reading about the different Star Trek games, of course, but also I was hoping that, by writing the book, maybe it will, in a roundabout way, inspire Paramount and whoever has the game rights to release more of the classic games for the public to play.

They made so many different Star Trek games, in so many different genres. I think they have a lot more variety than, say, the Star Wars games, where they’re more straightforward first-person shooters or spaceship games. The Star Trek games are tonally all over the place, so they’re appealing as a subject.

Which is your favourite Star Trek video game?

It changes, day to day, but I would say one of my favourites is Star Trek: Judgment Rites. That’s one that Interplay came out with in the mid-’90s, and they later did a CD-ROM version. Voicing that was the last Star Trek thing all The Original Series cast worked on together. It’s an adventure game that has puzzles. It feels a lot more like Star Trek than some of the other games.

What was your process for writing Star Trek Video Games?

When I pitched it in June 2023 to the publisher – White Owl Books, which is based out of the UK – they liked the pitch. After that, they wanted a table of contents, which is pretty common with a non-fiction book. So, I gave them one that ended up being a bit different than what’s in the final book, which is fine. You have to figure out where to focus.

You have your word count you have to hit, and you have your deadline. Initially, I thought it would take me six months to draft. It ended up taking me a year.

It took a long time to get interviews for it, and then the week before it was due, I had three people say, ‘Okay, I can do an interview this week.’ I was excited, but at the same time, there was the stress of getting those final interviews done fast and getting them in the book, but it all worked out in the end.

After I finished it, I sent them the Word file of the main manuscript, 120 images from the games – upscaled to the required resolution – and a separate manuscript with the credits for each image. Making changes from the editors took about another month. Eleven months later, it got published. So, from the time that the pitch was accepted to when the book was published, I think it was a little over two years.

You mentioned there was a word count. Was there a page count you had to meet as well?

No, just a word count. When most people look at books, they think, Oh, how long is it, how many pages? But when you’re talking to editors and book publishers, they just want to know the word count. Traditionally, it’s 250 words to a page, so a thousand words is four pages. 10,000 words is forty pages. And for this one, I think initially the word count was 30,000. It ended up being closer to 40,000 – maybe 38,000 – as the final word count.

Did any other aspects of the book turn out different to what you originally planned?

Yeah, a little bit. I had to cut some chapters on certain games to not exceed the word count, and I had originally thought I could get interviews with maybe some of the Star Trek actors who did voices for the games, but that kind of went nowhere, for whatever reason. That happens – you know, actors are very busy people. But that was still fun to go through the process.

What was the editorial process like?

After I did my first draft, I took time off, like a week, of not looking at it myself, and then looked at it again. I probably did three or four separate edits of it, just correcting spelling, grammar, and sometimes formatting, because I tend to write in Scrivener and then export that to Word. So, getting it ready for exporting is extra work. Also, things like improving the flow or seeing, Does this make sense? or, This joke doesn’t work. Maybe I’ll take this joke out.

When I handed it to the publisher, I think they had maybe three different edits on their end, but their changes were not as much as I was expecting. They were pretty happy with what they got, which was nice to hear.

How have your friends and family reacted to your writing success?

This past Christmas, I visited my family in Atlanta, Georgia, and I got to see my niece Reagan, who is around seven or eight. I had mentioned I had written a book, and my mom had a copy of my Star Trek book on her dinner table. I showed it to my niece. Her jaw dropped, and she was smiling. To see her have that reaction was really heartwarming. I think that’s been my favourite reaction to it.

As far as friends, they’ve been supportive. Some of them have bought the book, which is always nice. The promotion part of writing is, in some ways, more difficult than writing the book itself because it never stops. There’s always someone who might not know that you have written a book that they might want to read.

How would you say AI has changed the craft of writing?

For my day job, I’m a technical writer working in computer software development, and certainly AI has come up in that. It has a lot of potential, but I don’t think it’s going to replace every job out there. I think ultimately it’s a tool that will change many jobs. I don’t think it can replace the experience of a human writing a book, but it can help with research. Right now, I think it’s still early. People are figuring out where it’s going, what it can do.

What advice would you give to new writers?

Don’t be too hard on yourself. Set aside a consistent block of time that you do your writing, ideally uninterrupted, and keep at it. As long as you’re taking these steps, eventually you’ll get a book done, but it takes patience and endurance. It’s challenging every time.

Do you think there will ever be video games as realistic as the holodecks and holosuites in Star Trek?

Eventually, but to make things photorealistic is expensive. I would rather see abstract art or some more fanciful escapism.

Are you working on anything that you would like to promote?

Nothing I can talk about, except my Substack (at https://matwbt.substack.com/), where I do a few articles per month. They tend to be reviews of genre films, like science fiction or horror movies. But sometimes, I interview the filmmakers or authors for it. It’s free to read over on Substack, which is a good platform for writers. It’s fun to write shorter pieces for that and build an audience.