Star Trek fantasy: step aboard every Starship Enterprise with this website
Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, left us a long time ago — but his archive is slowly being digitized so it can live forever. The latest batch includes an official website that lets you set foot on almost every Enterprise bridge.
GIF by Sean Hollister / content from Roddenberry Archive
Spoiler alert: While this story won’t spoil anything, the website in question does contain a spoiler for Star Trek: Picard.
It’s not a particularly robust or mobile-friendly website at the moment, perhaps because of all the fans attempting to live out their dreams simultaneously — but if you navigate to roddenberry.x.io, click on Bridge View and then pick a ship, you might see a “Click Anywhere to Continue” message.
Click on the window and your desktop’s WASD keyboard keys and mouse should you walk around the bridge, let you sit in the captain’s chair or helm, check out Picard’s ready room, even pop into a turbolift, or open a panel or two. They’re fully decked out with flashing panels, labeled LCARS buttons and moving UI elements.
I’m not just talking Kirk’s bridge or Picard’s bridge, either — every single Enterprise seems to be represented here in some way, including those from the Kelvin Timeline and the Mirror Universe where Spock sported his infamous goatee. And while a few don’t have bridge views, like the Alternate Future Enterprise from the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation or the Enterprise-E’s slight modifications for Star Trek: Nemesis, you can also step onto the bridge of the U.S.S. Voyager to make up for it.
The incredible collection of digitized bridges comes through a partnership with graphics company OTOY, and it’s not the only fruit of their labors revealed this week. Below, you’ll find a series of videos (the first of which also has a Picard spoiler, I’m told) featuring John de Lancie (Q) exploring the Enterprise’s bridges, William Shatner excerpting a longer “hours-long testimonial” he’ll add to the archive, and other Star Trek luminaries.
Here’s something else to look forward to: The Roddenberry Archive and OTOY say they’ll be adding the voice of Majel Roddenberry, who played several roles, including the ship’s computer, to the archive “in the coming months.” Her son Rod says that in 2008, Majel “meticulously recorded her voice phonetically, with the intent to preserve it for some future technology to bring it back to life.”
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