J.J. Abrams was ’emotionally hurt’ by Star Trek: The Video Game

Recently director J.J. Abrams revealed to GamerHubVideos that he was “emotionally hurt” by the quality of Star Trek: The Video Game, even so much as to begin believing his film Star Trek Into Darkness suffered because of it.

At the launch party for the films DVD/Blu-Ray release, Abrams revealed thart he and his team dropped their involvement with the video game spin-off once the direction of the game became clear.

“The last game, which was obviously a big disappointment to me, was something that we were actually involved in from the very beginning and then we sort of realized it was not going in a place where we were going to get what we wanted, so we dropped out and they continued to do it despite… y’know.”

“To me the video game could have been something that actually really benefited the series and was an exciting, fun game with great gameplay and instead it was not and was something that I think, for me emotionally it hurt, ‘cos we were working our asses off making the movie and then this game came out and it got, this isn’t even my opinion, it got universally panned and I think that it was something without question that didn’t help the movie and arguably hurt it.”

Despite his disappointment, Abrams stated that it isn’t surprising to him that games based on films end up being low in quality.

“I think that, the thing that we all know is that anyone who loves video games and loves movies, Very, very rarely does a movie based on a game, or a game based on a movie, really work. It usually ends up being something that everyone that goes to play feels like this was a marketing decision made by a room full of people that wanted to capitalize on a title. That’s no way to make a game and no way to make a movie.”

“The dream is, and we’re working with Valve right now on a couple projects, is to say despite its existence, despite it pre-existing as a game, despite it existing as a movie, what makes this great? And starting from scratch, from a place of ‘let’s make this from the ground up great regardless of what’s come before.’ And that to me whether it’s a video game or a book or a movie or a song, anything that is based on something else needs to exist on its own terms. And a lot of times these seem to exist as ancillary products in which case it will suck.”

While the game itself had horrible reviews, even so much as members of The Cultured Nerd’s staffed attempted to play it and declined to review it because they “couldn’t make it through the first level of that horrible game,” it is worth noting though however that J.J. Abrams is still currently working with Valve to bring to life films based on the Portal and Half-Life.

“It’s as real as anything in Hollywood ever gets. Which is that we are really talking to Valve, we are going to be bringing on a writer, we have a lot of very interesting ideas.”

Only time will tell if his next brush with the video game universe is as equally disappointing in his eyes.