Star Trek: Elite Force 2 is a very fun first-person shooter that arrived on PC in June 2002. While it might have been a commercial flop at the time, it has gone on to become a fan-favorite Star Trek game featuring a nice mix of puzzles, action, and dialogue. But the game would have been a whole lot different if the terrorist attacks against the United States hadn’t happened on September 11, 2001.
In a new interview with FRVR, Star Trek: Elite Force 2 lead scripter and level designer Benson Russell explained that during the development of the game, the story and opening of the game had to change in a big way due to the attacks on 9/11.
“I remember, we were making Elite Force 2, and 9/11 happened at that time,” Russell told FRVR. “One of the original scenes was, when you were at Starfleet Academy, it was supposed to get an attack, and we actually had a shuttle fly into a building and stuff like that.”
As you might expect, Elite Force 2 arriving less than a year after September 11 meant that all of that content had to be cut or reworked entirely. “Well, that was a no-no for understandable reasons, of course,” said Russell.
Despite the cuts and changes, Elite Force 2 became a popular Star Trek game that people still talk about fondly to this day. And they should, because it’s a great FPS powered by id Tech 3 that any fan of that era of Star Trek should play, if only because you get some wonderful, low-poly Picard moments. And yes, he’s voiced by Patrick Stewart.
Famously, Rockstar Games found itself in a similar situation around this time. Its 2001 game, Grand Theft Auto 3, was set in a contemporary New York City-like open world, and so the studio had to make numerous changes, including making the police cars look less like actual NYPD vehicles as planned and more generic. Interestingly, 9/11 also forced Rockstar to change the cover of GTA 3 before launch in the United States. (The European release used the cover art originally planned.) That cover became so iconic and popular that it ended up establishing the style that all GTA covers would follow to this day. Even the upcoming GTA 6 cover follows that same grid-based look created back in 2001 in response to 9/11.