Star Trek: Prime Directive

Original Release: Cancelled 2002
Developer: Digital Bridges
Publisher: Activision
Platform: WAP
Not played: No playable builds available

The main event to the starter of Star Trek: First Duty, this was supposed to be a massively multiplayer mobile game using Wireless Access Protocol (the very early internet of mobile phones). The developers boasted about a persistent universe with ten thousand players per server using Digital Bridges’ “UNITY” system.

The game would have taken place in a new area of unexplored space called the Caledonian Expanse, which the Federation has gained access to via a wormhole appearing in Federation space. The UNITY system would enable players from all over the world to work together, regardless of language spoken.

An open beta was available for a short time in 2002. I spoke to one of the developers of the game who said that people would be able to discover new star systems and name them – similar to No Man’s Sky. It was a very, very ambitious for mobile phones at the time, especially due to the limited capabilities (the developer I spoke to doesn’t think they saved any screenshots as the game wasn’t much to look at),

It ended up getting cancelled as the market for mobile games just wasn’t interested in big, complicated games, and much simpler offline Java games were becoming much more popular, so Digital Bridges moved on to work on those kinds of games instead.

The below screenshot was labelled as an image of Prime Directive in the November 2001 issue of Game Developers Magazine, but it matches an image of First Duty.