introduction

The choice of the irascible but always highly honorable warrior race known as the Klingons to be the stars of the latest innovation in CD-ROM entertainment from Simon and Schuster Interactive was no accident, no simple coincidence.

Ever since their first TV appearance in the 1960s original series episode, “Errand of Mercy,” the Klingons have captivated the imaginations of Star Trek fans everywhere. They returned in such memorable episodes as “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove,” among others, and were the first denizens of the Star Trek universe to greet fans at the beginning of the series’ big-screen debut, Star Trek.- The Motion Picture.

The Klingons took on true depth during the phenomenally successful seven-year run of Star Trek.- The Next Generation, fueled by the overwhelming popularity of Michael Dom’s Lieutenant Worf. With a Klingon protagonist as a regular character, fans were at long last treated to an up-close and personal look at the rituals and traditions of the Klingon people. And with Dom’s Worf keeping the Klingon mystique going strong on Star Trek.- Deep Space Nine and Roxann Biggs-Dawson’s half-Klingon engineer, B’Elanna Torres, carrying the torch on Star Trek.- Voyager, it’s a sure bet that the legend of the Klingons is just getting started.

So, having spread their Empire through the Alpha Quadrant, four television series, and six of the seven Star Trek films as well as countless comic books and novels, the Klingons now have conquered the newest media frontier-the interactive CD-ROM.

The creation of an interactive CD-ROM, particularly one as sophisticated and revolutionary as the Star Trek.- Klingon! CD-ROM, is no easy task. It involves the coordinated effort of a great many people working together for many months, and sometimes years, to produce the final product; the best way to understand the origins and history of the Klingon!

CD-ROM is to hear it in the words of the people who made it happen.

Preproduction

Like all great accomplishments, the Klingon! CDROM was born from an idea. And the author of that ‘Idea was its executive producer, Keith Halper.

“The idea came out in a title meeting that we had nearly two years ago,” Halper recalled. “We wanted to create a suitable follow-up to the Star Trek.- The Next Generation: Interactive Technical Manual (Simon and Schuster Interactive’s best-selling “virtual tour” of the Starship Enterprise 1701-D, which Halper also produced). To match the success of the Interactive Technical Manual, this new CD-ROM would have to be authentic and visually rivetting, and take the medium to bold new places. That’s what Star Trek fans demand. Unlike the technical manual, however, we wanted this CD-ROM to use characters and plot and high action: We wanted it to have the feel of an interactive television episode.

“When we did the Interactive Technical Manual, one of the things we learned was that an interactive product allows us to explore in detail things which can be presented only superficially in a linear format,” Halper explained. “For example, when we see Picard’s quarters in an episode, we see it for maybe ten seconds and it just flashes by. There’s a lot of detail in that room. The books on the shelves were chosen with care. We know that Picard reads the British empiricists and the German rationalists, like

Kant. That’s the kind of stuff you can’t see in an episode, but it adds to the flavor of the room. In an interactive product we allow you to wander around and explore the space and learn more about these people and see some of the more subtle details, maybe learn something new about them that wouldn’t have been possible in another way.

It was obvious to me that “this story have to be about the Klingons. When we first saw the Klingons, we got to know them only superficially. They were this violent, aggressive, warlike species, and there’s really nothing very good about them. That’s pretty much all we ever saw of them in the original series…. During Star Trek.- The Next Generation we came to know a lot more about them. Through Worf, we get to see that they’re actually this noble, honorable race, and that their warlike tendencies actually have a logical basis and form the root of their culture. But that’s the kind of stuff that we learn only over time and upon examination.

” We thought that in an interactive product, we could again allow users to do something analogous to wandering around the rooms-that we could allow users to wander around in their culture, to understand the books that are on their cultural shelves, and to understand who they are in a more profound way.

“So, for instance, when you’re wandering around in the living room and stop and click on a statue, and the Klingon computer voice talks with reverence about the intertwining circles of the fulfilled and unfulfilled blood oaths on the statue, the blood-oath circles,

that’s really interesting and that says something kind of profound about the Klingons that you haven’t seen in an episode. There isn’t time in an episode to go into this kind of detail. In an interactive program, we can put tons of detail in there and allow users to poke around and find it and teach themselves.”

With the focus set firmly on Klingons, the next step in the genesis of the Klingon-themed CD-ROM was to develop a story that would form the core of a complete “Klingon-immersion experience.” And after that would come a teleplay-one unlike any written before.

“Liz Braswell, my associate editor, and I conceived originally of a sort of Hamlet-like story in which there were two brothers who were fighting over a kingdom,” Halper said. “One of the brothers is killed and then his son avenges him. Of course, we know that a Klingon Hamlet wouldn’t be troubled by all kinds of indecision like a human Hamlet.

“Keith … got the idea and I helped write one of the original scripts for it when we were still trying to decide how to do this ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style of computer game,” Braswell added. “There were several evenings where we were on our hands and knees, writing up dialogue, cutting and pasting it on on the floor to show where different story threads went.”

From that spark the torch was lit and passed to the husband-and-wife writing partnership of Kristine Katherine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. Rusch is the author of more than twenty novels and currently

serves as editor of the renowned Magazine offantasy and Science Fiction. She received the 1994 Hugo Award winner for Best Professional Editor for her work at F&SF. Smith has authored fourteen novels and numerous short stories, and was the winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1989.

“We did the story that inspired the script, and now we are doing a novelization of the script, in which Gowron initially tells the story of Pok in Quark’s bar,” Smith said. “From that telling, the Federation decides to set up the holodeck program, and Gowron agrees to take part.”

Rusch and Smith’s story was only the first step in a long process of rewriting that would continue even during production.

“Essentially, we handed Hilary Bader this big pile of storylines and outlines and sketches and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Hilary, we need a script in three weeks because we have to start building sets,”’ Halper remembered with a grin. “And Hilary really rose to the task. Hilary’s wonderful. She’s done probably a half-dozen episodes of the various Star Treks. She was recommended to me by Suzie Domnick of Paramount Licensing: She was experienced and could come through in a pinch. And Hilary did come through.”

“The writing was unusually rushed,” Bader recalled. “There wasn’t a lot of time for endless rewriting. I wrote the first draft, which went to Ron Moore [Ronald D. Moore, Deep Space Nine producer and Star Trek Generations scriptwriter] for comments. Ron came in with a lot of ideas for changes. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time to implement them. I knew I couldn’t have a second draft done by the first day of shooting without rushing through it and I didn’t want to do that. So I made sure Director Jonathan Frakes had the first two days’ worth of script before the shooting began, then I was able to finish the rewrites on the rest of the script while they were shooting the first few days.

“Because there are always problems with a script that don’t become obvious until you are shooting it, I was on the set the entire time,” Bader added. “If there was a problem, something I wrote couldn’t be shot a certain way, or Jonathan Frakes wanted to include some character in the scene who wasn’t written in, he’d ask for an on-the-spot rewrite.

“I have to say, the two weeks of shooting was the most fun I’ve ever had in Hollywood,” Bader confided. “I felt much closer to this project than I have to anything else I’ve ever written.”

“Hilary has a natural affinity for interactive scriptwriting,” Halper said with genuine admiration. “She developed a scripting format-because one didn’t exist-which we undoubtedly will use on future projects. It really worked, because it was something that told our programmers what they needed to know, and at the same time it looks a lot like a film script. Now, we’re going through a traditional production process, so we needed something that [the production crew] knew how to work with. We didn’t want to surprise the guy doing opticals or the people setting up lighting. They need to look at a script and say, ‘Well, it

doesn’t really hang together because the scenes don’t read chronologically, but I can follow these instructions.” And I thought it was just brilliant.

“In addition to that,” Halper continued, “Hilary has a very light touch; she’s very funny and she breathed life into these characters. I can’t credit her enough; I think that she did a lot in a very critical situation.”

But while the writers and producers toiled over the glamorous task of penning the script, the project’s technical experts and developers were being coordinated by associate producer Elizabeth Braswell. There was a Language Lab CD-ROM to be developed and new technologies to be explored before this ground-breaking endeavor could begin production.

At the top of the list for new technology was the Duck Corp’s innovative offering, TrueMotion, the latest advance in full-screen, full-motion video, which Duck’s Stan Marder describes as “a set of algorithms to compress video and audio where the resulting playback equals or exceeds what the average consumer sees on television…. Except it has the digital attributes so that you can, for instance, ‘branch’ the video, which you can’t do any other way, and you can add all kinds of functionality to make the video itself totally interactive.”

Duck also developed another new technology in tandem with TrueMotion, called comprending. “It’s an amalgam of two words, and it means ‘compression rendering,”’ Marder explained. “What it allows you to do is real-time compositing on the fly. What we

bring to the table is the ability for the end user to manipulate the comprended image on his own.”

Marder offered an example of what that means: “In the movie Forrest Gump, when Tom Hanks goes over and shakes hands with Kennedy, we know that didn’t really happen. When we watch this, we sit passively and watch that happen. We don’t control Tom Hanks’s movement. Comprending allows a developer to create in his program the ability to control the actors, control what is happening on the screen-in other words, move video around independently.

“So what we allow the developer to do is create a video and then manipulate that video over other video. It’s a very powerful technology in the right hands. You can do amazing things with it.” Comprending also allows “hot zones”-layers of digital information that will prompt a response on the screen from the “video sprite” cursor to alert users that there are data to be found.

Another scientific advance critical to the Klingon!

CD-ROM was the development of a speechrecognition system that would be able to help teach users to speak Klingon-which is a far more daunting proposal than it might sound. For that, Simon and Schuster Interactive looked to Dragon Systems, one of the world’s leading developers of voice-recognition software, and its resident Klingon-language specialist, Mark Mandel.

“When Liz and Keith were looking for people to do the speech recognition for the Klingon! CD project,” Mandel said, “Shawn True, who is adminstratively in

charge of this end of the project here at Dragon, told me that when he was asked by Liz if we would be interested in that, and he was able to answer off handedly that we had a major Klingon linguist on our staff, he could hear her jaw hit the floor.

“As it happens, I am a linguist-a language scientist-and a science-fiction fan. And I’ve been studying and playing with the Klingon language for about three years or so. So I got a great kick out of it.”

Armed with cutting-edge science and their own enthusiasm, Mandel and his colleagues took on the Herculean task of developing the core software of the Klingon! CD’s Language Lab. “This wasn’t just a Klingon recognizer we were developing,” Mandel explained. “The purpose of a normal recognizer is to take speech input to direct some activity or to put a word on the screen and eventually on paper or fax or whatever…. The Klingon system had things turned around because our mandate for this system was to create a pronunciation tester. Every time you say a word, it knows what word you’re supposed to be saying. And the objective is to correct your pronunciation.

I 6 So that meant we knew the word you were trying to say. But I had to figure out how to detect mispronunciations-and, furthermore, do so in an intelligent way. We’d never been faced with that sort of an issue before and we did not have the time of the resources-either in terms of money, personnel, or native speakers-to do this the proper way…. What we did was try to anticipate ways people might

mispronounce a word. So what we did was record various kinds of anticipated mispronunciations, along with the correct pronunciations. So our speakers had to produce not only correct Klingon pronunciations, but also mispronunciations, things that they’ve spent years learning how not to do. And as the experienced Klingon speakers told me after their recording sessionsi that was the hardest part-getting the mispronunciations right.”

The inclusion of the Language Lab CD-ROM obviously was motivated by the undeniable popularity of the Klingon language itself. “The [Klingon] language is so beautifully designed that it’s actually fairly simple to learn,” Braswell commented when asked what made this faux-alien tongue such a hit with fans. “There aren’t twelve different cases or tenses. It’s a very logically constructed language, because it was created artificially instead of organically. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you make up a secret code to speak with your friends. Well, Klingon is like a bigger version of that code, where you know that only other people who like the same thing you do”-in other words, Star Trek-“speak this language. I also think there’s the ‘Oh my God, this is so cool, this is a totally made-up language!” factor to consider.”

And what is Klingon’s appeal for linguists? “Natural languages generally have a certain degree of symmetry in their sound structures. Klingon’s is twisted. It’s warped. Distorted. Mare Okrand [the linguist who created the Klingon language] had a lot of fun building it,” Mandel remarked humorously.

Preduction With preproduction completed-except for the script, which would continue to undergo revision during shooting-and the technological foundation firmly in place, producers Halper and Braswell entrusted the reins to director Jonathan Frakes.

Frakes, best known as Commander William Riker of Star Trek.- The Next Generation, also is an experienced director, and one whom the producers felt was the logical choice for this ambitious foray into interactive media. Frakes’s decision to direct the product was motivated by two simple factors: curiosity and opportunity.

“It was something new I’d never done before. I was offered the job, and that was it,” Frakes quipped.

Robert O’Reilly reprised the role of Gowron, leader of the Klingon High Council, which he created in numerous appearances on Star Trek-The Next Generation, and production commenced.

Frakes soon found that directing an interactive CDROM differed in many ways from directing for film or television. “There’s no ‘coverage,’ which means you have to do the point of view in a continuous shot,” he said. “It’s linear, as opposed to shooting a master shot and then cutting in for close-ups, which is confusing to a player. So you have to design shots that don’t cut. You don’t want to break the flow. We fell out of that a couple of times and took some dramatic license, but as a whole, that point of view needed to be maintained through the whole game. It was tough.”

A testament to Frakes’s uniquely well-suited talent for directing interactive products was that he realized that the new medium would have its own technical considerations as well as logistical needs.

“I had to go to Tokyo over the summer,” recalled Duck Corps’ Marder. “While I was in Tokyo I checked in with my office and found I got a call from Keith [Halper]. I called Keith from Tokyo and he told me that Jonathan Frakes wanted to know if I could send one of my engineers to Paramount to be there when they set up their lighting and start the shooting process so that Jonathan could get some test compression done on the soundstage, so that he could see what final results were going to be.”

“We were concerned about the lighting,” Frakes explained, “because Klingons’ costumes are dark, their sets are dark, and the feel of them is dark. We were afraid because a lot of CD-ROMs look dark anyway. And we were right, we had to use brighter light. Later it was transferred and compressed down to a color we liked.”

“This was the first time that I’ve had a director say that’s what he wants to do,” Marder said admiringly of Frakes. “And it was so important, because he realized this wasn’t going to be seen on television, it wasn’t going to be in a movie theater, it’s a new medium.”

Although Frakes found directing interactive to be different from his work in film and TV, actor O’Reilly felt right at home in the new medium. “It’s really not that different,” the actor confessed. “It really doesn’t

make that much of a difference to an actor. I’ve even filmed different endings to TV shows or films. It happens in our business. It happened even before the CD-ROM came on the scene. Producers might not like an ending or they might feel unsure of an ending so they’ll film it twice. It’s a rarity but it does occur. In television and film you really have to learn how to turn on a dime with what’s going on, so CD-ROM is nothing unusual. You’ve got three or four different answers and you know you have to do the work, so it’s just like life. You do it.”

Even once shooting had started, the merry chaos was far from over. Many of those who were on the soundstage have vivid memories of the more absurd moments.

“There was one day of shooting when we had a crew come in from Entertainment Tonight, and they were shooting during lunch hour,” Halper divulged conspiratorially. “Since they were shooting during lunch hour, we kept the soundstage doors shut. Now, what happens when you’re using smoke and have lights on all day is the temperature in the place goes way up, and you open up the doors during lunch to cool the place down. Well, we never did that. So when they came in the afternoon, it had to have been 115 degrees in there. And then it kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and there was poor Robert O’Reilly with his Klingon mask melting right off of his face.”

O’Reilly and his fellow Klingons enjoyed their share of laughs as well over at the Paramount Commissary. “You get a lot of looks,” he said matter-of-factly. “Certainly, when you walk down the street, eyes turn, and there was one time when we were filming for the CD-ROM, we were walking by and some Paramount executives had some people from the network affiliates as guests. And they were fascinated by it, because most of them had never seen Klingons up close, and there were about six of us. And it’s unusual to see that many Klingons at once, anyway, except in a dream, and I’m not sure if that would be a good dream.”

Perhaps the most memorable moment during the filming of the Klingon! CD-ROM was the inaugural performance of the Klingon National Anthem.

“There’s just something wonderfully absurd about working with a room full of Klingons, aside from the olfactory pleasure,” Frakes joked. “The night that we constructed the Klingon National Anthem, [the Klingons] rising to sing on the bridge of the warbird, is a night that we will all remember for a long time. Complete, total absurdity…. I think it’s the high point of the piece.”

“Magic,” was how Halper described the moment that the anthem became reality. “All the Klingons are sitting on the bridge of the Bird of Prey and they’ve just … found a big clue on their great quest. So now they feel like they’re not wandering around aimlessly, but instead they have a purpose. There’s nothing more stirring than a Klingon with a purpose, so all of a sudden, Gowron beats his hands against his chairBam! Bam! Bam!-and then the gunner stands up, because she knows the song that he’s beating the time

to-it’s the Klingon National Anthem. And she begins to sing this very moving song-‘HoY, Kahless PuKLod… . ‘-and everybody jumps in…. I felt like I had participated in Star Trek history at that moment.

“The way that was written was that Hilary wrote something in English, then she faxed it out to Mare Okrand,” Halper continued. “Then Okrand translated it to Klingon and put his literal translation below the Klingon verses. The literal translation is always skewed at bit, so if you send him ‘Row, row, row your boat,’ you’ll get back ‘Propel, propel, propel your craft.”’

Bader recalled her own slice of surrealism from the two-week shoot. “During much of the shoot, there were a few actors who were in almost every day,” she said. “The poor actors, Kahless bless them, would come in at some horrendous hour, like around four A.M., and get Klingonized. By the time I arrived at a reasonable eight or nine A.m., there was a studio filled with nothing but Klingons.

” During the filming of any movie, there is a lot of downtime for the actors. One of the actors, his name was Paul, would come over and hang with us. After two weeks of long days, I got to be quite friendly with him.

“One day we were staying late to shoot some scene involving only one actor, probably Robert [O’Reilly]. The other actors were released to costuming and makeup to be de-Klingonized. As we’re shooting, this

nice-looking guy comes up to me and starts talking to me. As if he knows me. Very friendly, very chummy. I thought, ‘Who the heck is this guy?” I was growing uncomfortable.

“Finally-he must have sensed my discomforthe said to me, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?

I’m Paul.” I was shocked. This was my Klingon bud. The guy I’d spent the last two weeks with for hours every day, and I didn’t recognize him. In fact, even after he told me who he was I still felt weird talking to him.”

Postpmduction

By the time shooting was finished, the final phase of the Klingon! CD-ROM already was well under way Like a film or TV episode, the CD-ROM needed to be edited and its various software components assembled in their proper sequence.

Being a producer of interactive CD-ROM is “somewhat similar to being a television producer,” Halper said, “with the one caveat that you have this whole other element TV producers don’t have to worry about, which is programming. And the people who are programming have as much creative input as anybody else in the process.”

“Once the raw Klingon CD footage was shot, Keith passed it all-all this video, all this music, all this audio-into my hands to finish up the technological side,” Braswell remarked. “I act as the contact with the developers-Dragon Systems and Touchscreenand I make sure this project goes from being just video to being not just a game, but a true interactive experience.”

The edited and enhanced video and audio materials from the production team at Paramount, the speechrecognition protocols from Dragon Systems, and the TrueMotion software from Duck Corp. were then delivered to the technical wizards at Touchscreen, who assembled it into a digital product. The step-by-step process of how that transpires was provided by Touchscreen’s Cheryl Meollenbeck.

“The traditional media gets delivered to us in some kind of videotape format, DAT tape format, or audioCD-type format,” Meolienbeck explained. “We receive all of the media from whoever has done pieces of this project, digitize it, or we compress it-if it’s video footage it gets both digitized and compressedand then we take care of all the synching-up of the audio to the video in a digital format. And that would be media preparation-converting all the assets into a digital format.

“Once they’re in that format,” Meollenbeck continued, “we have to have a staff of programmers work to build an ‘engine.” For Star Trek.- Klingon! there were two engines needed-one to support the interactive episode, and the other one was a gaming engine to support the Language Lab.

“My partner, Dennis McCole, has a strong television background,” Meollenbeck added. “He was the technical director on the shoot, working with Jonathan Frakes to ensure that the point-of-view perspective was portrayed properly, that from a user interaction standpoint the scenes would work. Jona than’s kind of a traditional film director, but this product was shot in full point of view, which is not a typical way to shoot a film. So adherence to the core design was our responsibility-during preproduction, throughout the shooting, and again in postproduction.”

Once the early working prototypes were delivered to Simon and Schuster Interactive by Touchscreen executive producer Halper paused to reflect on the nearly two years he had devoted to bringing this project to fruition, and the roles various people played in making it happen.

“I was showing the beta version off at the Paramount lot, and a lot of people were very surprised that we were able to do something like this on a computer,” Halper said proudly. “I am really appreciative of the work that Duck did. They have something which is truly revolutionary”

But while Halper was pleased with the final result or his labors, he mused that the personal cost was higher than he had expected. “I was on the Paramount lot for the whole prep, the shoot, and all of the editing,” he said. “I got involved in this to a degree that I don t want to repeat. At one point I was listening to all the sound effects and evaluating the Foley and saying, ‘Oh, no, so-and-so’s footsteps would be much heavier than that.” I’ve been told that Rick Berman gets involved like this, gets his hands in every single detail because he feels it’s critical to ensuring the quality of his show…. It’s inspirational.”

“Inspirational” is a word ‘ that might be applied to the reason for all this work and invention, the Klingons themselves. Undoubtedly, their popularity motivated the Klingon! CD-ROM’s genesis, and its creators are hopeful that it also will spur the three-CD-ROM set on to record sales. But what do the people behind its creation think makes these ridgepated, easily provoked disciples of honor so popular with the fans?

“They’re a cultural archetype,” Braswell offered as a possible explanation. “They’re the Vikings, the samurai, the Native Americans. They’re a pure warrior society, the likes of which America hasn’t ever really known. We may be striving toward that Star Trek.- The Next Generation sort of peaceful coexistence, but there is something in us all which really longs for simple, pure animal release, the spartan lifestyle, the notion that honor is what’s important, not remembering to set your VCR to tape Frasier or get your taxes done on time. Klingons represent a simpler way of being which we don’t have now.

“And in Klingon society if you don’t like your boss you challenge him to a duel,” Braswell remarked wistfully. “If you kill him, you get to take his job, which is the American dream.”

“Klingons, ya gotta love ‘em…. Because if you don’t, they’ll kill you,” Bader quipped. “Seriously? I feel like it’s not for me to say. I love them. The fact that honor is what drives them, yet they keep room in their lives for art, poetry, song.”

“They smell. As a breed, they stink,” Frakes declared without hesitation. “But they have a primal connection. They are warriors, they are direct, they don’t seem to work with much of a hidden agenda. And they wear turtles on their heads.”

“Because they’re sort of straight-on people and they’re uncomplicated,” O’Reilly said with the conviction of one who knows. “They have honor, which they prize above all else, and I think that’s what humans really want more than anything else, but we get a little bit convoluted in our lives…. Everything is either right or wrong for them…. In some ways, they’re almost like the knights of King Arthur’s court before the fall. Plus, they know how to have fun.”

And in the end equation, fun is what it’s all about.

Qapla’.