Star Trek: Resurgence is using TV tools for video game storytelling

gamedeveloper.com:

Dramatic Labs' Star Trek: Resurgence lands at an interesting time for the video game industry. There's newfound interest in partnerships between broader entertainment conglomerates and the world of video game development. Popular characters make guest appearances in live platform games, and companies like Ubisoft and MachineGames are making renewed pushes to adapt films like Avatar and the Indiana Jones series to the video game medium.

Star Trek: Resurgence is an echo of a recent attempt at that process. It's an interactive narrative video game produced by a team that's had experience working on interactive narrative video games based on licensed stories at Telltale Games. Dramatic Labs itself was co-founded by Kevin Bruner, who led Telltale during a period where it partnered with HBO, Marvel, DC Comics, and more.

Bruner (who architected Telltale's proprietary tools) found himself dismissed from the company a year before it collapsed in 2018. The technical and creative DNA of Telltale lives on in Resurgence, as players are invited to once again guide a cast of new characters through dramatic stories inspired by the show.

How well will that type of story work in a modern, more ambitious era of Hollywood crossovers? There are still some old tricks in the developers' toolbag, and we learned some of them during a trip to Summer Game Fest Play Days last week.

For the team at Dramatic Labs, the development of Star Trek: Resurgence has been a long time coming. Many Dramatic Labs employees are veterans of Telltale Games, the narrative game studio behind games like Telltale's The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands. As lead writer Dan Martin explained, the Telltale writing team has been using Star Trek as a writing reference