There have been many Star Trek video games produced over the years. These games are all considered to be part of the Star Trek Expanded Universe and not canon with the main series but have often been referenced in other media such as the novels or each other. Quite a few of the games have the likenesses and voice actors of the series that they adapt.
Star Trek has been notoriously variable with the quality of its forays into interactive entertainment - partially because distilling the essence of the best episodes of the series into a truly interactive format is goddamn hard. The "best" Trek games to date have been somewhat more combat-focused than many of the shows really were. Of course, the fact that the license keeps bouncing between hands and developers (unlike LucasArts, who've been refining their Star Wars offerings for the better part of two decades now) has not helped matters in the slightest.
The two genres which are widely considered to have been most adaptable are strategy games (Star Trek: Bridge Commander, Star Trek: Armada, et al) for the combat elements, and point and click adventures (Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Judgment Rites, A Final Unity) for their episodic nature and ability to explore some of Trek's more ponderous aspects. 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity in particular are often held up as being the closest you can get to actually playing interactive episodes of their respective television series, complete with the complete original casts providing the in-game voices of their characters (which helps a lot with the atmosphere).
Please Note that the following is NOT a complete list of every Star Trek game out there, because there are A LOT
- Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator: An arcade game released by Sega in 1983.
- An NES game which is essentially an unofficial sequel to the original series episode, "A Piece of the Action".
- A Gameboy game, also called 25th Anniversary, which combines shmup-esque segments with top-view exploration segments and a plot that acts as a sequel to The Doomsday Machine.
- Star Trek: 25th Anniversary: An episodic point-and-click adventure game featuring the cast of the original series.
- Star Trek: Judgment Rites: The sequel to 25th Anniversary. These two games are generally considered, alongside (or for some fans, instead of) The Animated Series, to comprise the final two years of the Enterprise's five-year mission under Captain Kirk.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity: The third point-and-click adventure game of the franchise, this time focusing on the Enterprise-D, and featuring the full cast of The Next Generation.
- Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: A space battle simulator using video footage.
- Star Trek: Klingon Academy: A sequel to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy where you play a Klingon warrior. Also serves as a Prequel to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
- Star Trek: Bridge Commander: As the previous two entries, exactly the space simulator it sounds like. Set in the TNG era.
- Star Trek: Away Team: An Isometric, Real Time Strategy game set two years after the Dominion War.
- Star Trek: Armada: The prime example of a Star Trek RTS game. Got one official sequel.
- Star Trek: New Worlds: Trek's second entry in less than a year to the already horrendously overcrowded RTS market of the Turn of the Millennium, focused on planetside colonization. Vastly inferior to Armada, what with it being a Star Trek game largely without starships.
- Star Trek: Starfleet Command: Turn-based strategy starship combat. An odd kludging together of the venerable Star Fleet Battles ruleset and settings with Trek canon. Got a whopping two official sequels.
- Star Trek: Birth of the Federation: A 4X strategy game set in The Next Generation era.
- Star Trek: Elite Force: a First Person Shooter set on Voyager (for the first game) and the Enterprise-E (for the second).
- Star Trek: Generations: A Doom-era First-Person Shooter by Microprose with adventure game elements, serving as a game adaptation of Star Trek: Generations.
- Star Trek: Hidden Evil: A third person Fixed Camera Action-Adventure game serving as a tie-in to Star Trek: Insurrection.
- Star Trek: Legacy: A video game spanning all of the Star Trek eras dealing with a rogue Vulcan scientist.
- Star Trek Online, which presents a different vision of the post-Nemesis Trek galaxy than the Star Trek Novelverse.
- Star Trek: The Video Game, an Interquel between the 2009 rebooted film and Into Darkness, which follows Kirk and Spock as they investigate a terrifying new alien threat.
- A Klingon Challenge, a VHS Game where you play against a Klingon that has taken over the Enterprise-C.
- Star Trek Timelines, an online game where you collect characters and ships from across Star Trek history.
- Star Trek: Resurgence, a third person narrative console game featuring a new ship, the U.S.S. Resolute.
- Star Trek: Infinite, a 4X game where you play as one of the four great powers of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants (The United Federation of Planets, Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire and Cardassian Union) in the aftermath of the Khitomer Massacre.
These games contain the following tropes:
- Actionized Sequel: The protagonists of the games often have body counts far in excess of entire seasons.
- Adventure Game: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, and Star Trek: A Final Unity are all examples of this.
- Alternate Universe: Most of the games take place in their own separate continuities from the main Star Trek series.
- Justified Tutorial: Many of the games open with holodeck simulations or war games.
- Perspective Flip:
- Klingon Academy shows what it is like to be taught to be a member of the pre Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Klingon Defense Force.
- Star Trek: Online lets you play as Klingons or Romulans instead of the Federation.
- Space Is an Ocean: Averted as often as not with three-dimensional combat being a feature of many series.
