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Playmates Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Flight Simulator: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time (SEGA Genesis, Super NES)

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While both official and unofficial video games based on Star Trek: The Next Generation were quick to release upon or soon after the show’s premier in 1987 and have been in no short supply over the years (my inability to play almost all of them when they were current notwithstanding), that wasn’t the case for sister show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It took a good two and half years after “Emissary” before Commander Sisko and Co. started getting representations in video game form, and when it finally happened it happened a weird way.

Without rehashing the whole history of the video game medium again, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the earliest Star Trek: The Next Generation video games were fanmade or otherwise small-scale affairs for DOS and similar personal computers of the mid-to-late 1980s. The first proper “mainstream” Next Generation game I was aware of (at least, the first on a video game console) didn’t land until 1993 on the Game Boy. There is a very good reason for this, of course: It wasn’t until 1993 that it was eminently clear Star Trek: The Next Generation was a pop culture juggernaut that deserved more recognition than it was getting from tie-ins. 1991 might even have been a more on-point date, but Paramount was slow to capitalize on this and took their time getting their marketing gears in action and doubling down on quality control and brand uniformity. By the time all was said and done of course Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was out, but it didn’t get a companion release.

Of course, there certainly wasn’t a *complete* dearth of merchandise before 1993. The Playmates Toys line launched in 1992, and its quality and speed make a good case for it being the definitive Star Trek: The Next Generation tie-in. And yet even so, it is fundamentally bizarre that they should be the ones to self-publish the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine video game: Crossroads of Time on the SEGA Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Let me make something perfectly clear for those of you who are not versed in the history of the video game industry: A toy company spontaneously deciding to start a video game publishing house is not a normal thing. Sure, it’s happened before-Bandai-Namco is still around, but Namco was, you know, an actual game developer. Mattel and Coleco both made halfhearted stabs at competing with the Atari 2600 in the early 80s, but the current status of those companies gives you an idea of how well that worked out for them. The one notable exception is, of course, Nintendo, who, for a good 70+ years or so was known almost exclusively for their hanafuda playing cards until then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to aggressively expanded into other markets, namely video games.

(It is also perhaps interesting to note how Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first games went straight to DOS, while Deep Space Nine‘s went straight to home consoles. I think that says something about where the presumed audience was at that point in time.)…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 2 (Part 2)

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We also got some new action figures to go along with our new models, all based on stories from the second season. This wave is a healthy mix of variants and new figures (and, like TNG, once again spread out across 1994 and 1995), and really, just about more than anything else from this period, tantalizingly points at how interconnected the worlds of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really did seemed poised to be at one time. First up, let’s talk about the predictable variants: There’s “Emissary” Jadzia Dax and Doctor Bashir, that is, them in the TNG-style two-piece suits with the polygon design instead of the DS9-style black jumpsuit and open collar shirt. I talked about Dax the first time I did Playmates DS9 because she’s one of my favourite toys in the whole line, expertly re-using the already excellent Duty Uniform Deanna Troi body sculpt. I don’t have Bashir though, because his Wave 1 figure was already pretty good and he feels more superfluous to me. There’s also Q in the DS9 jumpsuit, from “Q-Less”. But really, when it comes to Qs, my advice is still to stick with the TNG Wave 3 judge’s robes one.
 
Q is your biggest hint as to the defining feature of this wave: In a word, Crossover. In fact, almost the entire 1994 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine wave was actually made up of Star Trek: The Next Generation characters-The only actual DS9 figures in this first batch are “Emissary” Dax and Bashir. To complete your “Q-Less” set that you apparently have for some inexplicable reason there’s Vash, who, interestingly enough, gets her one and only Playmates effigy on this side of the wormhole. There’s also, somewhat astoundingly, yet another Lieutenant Thomas Riker! And this is 1994, so well before he made his non-TNG reappearance, so it makes precisely zero sense for him to be here. He is straightforwardly the laziest and most indefensible variant in the Playmates line so far, being a literally just a DS9 Wave 1 Miles O’Brien with a TNG Wave 1 Will Riker head, creating a kitbash the likes of which will never and can never be explained.
 
I mean come on. No one, but no one rolls up the sleeves of their uniform except Miles O’Brien. That is an iconic distinguishing physical tic of the chief’s. Without even getting into questions about why the hell Thomas Riker is on Deep Space 9, that body simply should never have been re-used.
 
 
Thankfully, the remainder of this first batch is considerably more interesting. Miles O’Brien gets a lot of love (his body being repurposed for a nonsensical Thomas Riker notwithstanding): Next year he’ll be outfitted with his dress uniform, but in 1994 he gets an absolutely vital variant: “Chief Miles O’Brien in Starfleet Duty Uniform”. That’s right, this is Transporter Chief Miles O’Brien. Miles O’Brien from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As one of the very first characters to be introduced in the modern age of Star Trek, it’s wonderful to have a representation of Miles from this stage of his career.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 2 (Part 1)

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1994 didn’t see Playmates unveil a lot for fans of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine side of the Paramount lot, but what it did release was more than enough. Because for the first time, Starbase Deep Space 9 was finally immortalized in plastic.

If you wanted a model of the one-time Terok Nor back in the day, your options were pretty limited. There was, of course, the laughably expensive and decadent pewter desk sculpture I talked about in my essay on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine, but you weren’t going to be getting that. AMT/ERTL released a model kit of the station in 1993, but model kits are aimed at a very specific sort of fan, and I was not that sort of fan (I did eventually get one, as well as the 1995 re-release that had a fiber optic lighting system, but my crafting skills are so hopelessly inadequate I was never going to be able to do it justice). No, for the overwhelming majority of people, it was going to be up to Playmates to give us a version of Deep Space 9 we could take home and display on our shelves. It’s kind of surprising this wasn’t a 1993 release: After all, you’d expect people would want the titular space station straight away-The Enterprise was among the first wave of releases for the Star Trek: The Next Generation line. But the Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line was always smaller and more subdued than its sister, and maybe there was concern during development as to how the new show was going to take with people.
 
 
Even when it did come out, I remember this being a right bastard to track down. I seem to recall only actually seeing it in the toy store once, and I keep kicking myself for not springing for it then and there. I never saw it again until eBay was a thing, by which point it was going for astronomical prices as a collectible. Long story short I finally was able to find one for a more reasonable investment (*in 2009*) and I’m proud to say DS9 now occupies a prominent position in my collection. In terms of detail, this sadly trends to the toyetic side of things, and some of the more subtler nuances of the shooting model have been lost in translation. But, it’s of a piece with the Playmates Enterprise at least. Speaking of! The Deep Space 9 toy actually comes with a little miniature Enterprise that snaps into one of the docking pylons! It’s little touches like this that really endear the Playmates line to me, and to this day this is one of my favourite things about this model.
 
 
Primarily because it demonstrates how intertwined and interconnected Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were supposed to be in the beginning. The Enterprise is featured prominently on the box art, and Deep Space 9 is specifically called a “command post”, which reminds me of those old jumbo GI Joe or Micro Machines playsets you could get to play with all your figures in.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 1

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I first learned Playmates were going to be doing a line based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on the cardback for one of my Star Trek: The Next Generation figures. In fact, on the back of my new Sela figure you can still see in bold red lettering the excited announcement that “toys and accessories” from the new show are “coming soon!”. Some of the figures from Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 and the Original Series line (here called “Classic Star Trek”, which is how I knew that show for ages) even came with a mini checklist of all the Playmates toys released so far, with headshots of the figures and close-ups of the vehicles, playsets and prop replicas.

On the back of that checklist was one of the first-ever promotional shots of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast-It’s the one where everyone’s standing around in costume in front of a brown shag curtain haphazardly draped over the walls and floor of a photo studio somewhere. This was the first static image I ever saw of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast together in one place, and it was the first chance I had to get a good look at them. What’s also interesting about this promo is what it promised was coming in the Deep Space Nine line: All of the characters you’d expect, as well as vehicle toys of Deep Space 9, the Runabout and a Caradassian Galor Warship. That will be interesting to go back and examine in a few months, methinks.

Even though I followed this launch fairly closely (well, as closely as I could at the time at least), it took me a *very* long time to actually bring anyone from this line home. At first it was due to simple wariness: While the characters looked cool and all and I dug the general design aesthetics, in 1993 I still wasn’t completely 100% sold on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as an overall thing yet. So while I definitely saw these on store shelves at the time, I took care to admire them from afar-I was afraid to outright ask for them, and given a choice between spending my action figure money on one of these as opposed to a Wave 2 Star Trek: The Next Generation figure, the choice seemed clear. This turned out to be a cripplingly poor decision on my part, however: Within just a few months I was utterly hooked on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and I would have killed for these figures and, of course, that was just when the Playmates Star Trek line in general was starting to retreat from department stores, and the first casualties were the lowest selling toys. Namely, the comparatively more niche Deep Space Nine figures, which seemed to disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

For practically an entire *decade*, I languished in regret knowing I had very likely missed my one chance to bring home my second space family, as well as the last remnants from the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew (namely Tasha Yar and Ro Laren).…

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