Gowron is glaring at me out of a browser tab. Not a screenshot, not a clip – live, paused, mid-holodeck, that famous stare fixed on me because I clicked the wrong thing and a Klingon chancellor now suspects I might be a coward. He wants to know if I’m sick. Injured. Or just too slow to be worth the trouble. There’s a shock stick on the table and he’s made it clear he’ll use it.
This is Star Trek: Klingon, the 1996 full-motion-video game, running in Chrome in the year 2026 because somebody decided it should.
*SPOLIERS*
It’s not a game as you think a game should be. The conceit is that Gowron – Robert O’Reilly, reprising the role with total commitment – has built a holodeck programme to teach soft Federation types how to think like a Klingon, and you’re the soft Federation type. You play Pok, a young warrior on the day of his Rite of Ascension, whose father is murdered before the celebration is over. You and Gowron swear a blood oath. Then you spend an hour clicking on objects every thirty seconds while the great man decides whether your choices are honourable or whether you’ve behaved like a Terran and should be ashamed of yourself.
It is, structurally, a Klingon language course in a trenchcoat. The third disc was a thing called Power Klingon, a cultural primer narrated by Michael Dorn, complete with the correct way to cook gagh and the news that worms are the highest delicacy on Qo’noS. Jonathan Frakes directed it. Marc Okrand wrote the language. The whole thing is the most 1996 object imaginable – prestige Trek talent pouring real effort into an interactive CD-ROM whose central demand is that you prove your worth by not clicking on the wrong warrior in a mess hall.
I found it because the title of this post arrived in my head fully formed and I couldn’t immediately place it. ‘I have honored my house, but will you?’ It’s the line a virtual Martok delivers at the start of Bat’leths & BiHnuchs, the Klingon tabletop game the ensigns are playing in the Lower Decks episode ‘The Least Dangerous Game’ – the one where Boimler decides to say yes to everything and gets hunted around the ship for his trouble. The game-within-the-episode is a Ferengi knockoff. There’s a throwaway gag about somebody trying to get the Gowron expansion for months.
And here’s the bit that made me sit back. Lower Decks wasn’t inventing that out of nothing. It was taking the mick out of exactly this – the campy interactive Klingon media of the nineties, the VHS board games and the FMV discs where a man in forehead prosthetics earnestly demands you honour your house through the medium of point-and-click. Bat’leths & BiHnuchs is a parody of the real artefact. And the real artefact is sitting in my browser tab, threatening me with a shock stick.
The circle closes properly when you notice that J.G. Hertzler is in both. He voices a Klingon called Ler’at in the 1996 game, and twenty-six years later he’s the virtual Martok reading the parody. Same actor, same register – the sincere version and the piss-take, separated by a quarter of a century. Nobody planned that. It’s just how Trek works if you stand inside it long enough.
The reason any of this is playable is Owen Davies – ODVS, if you know him from Discord or Reddit – who pulled the footage off the original CD-ROM, dragged it up from its native 320×200, and then wrote the entire branching logic engine from scratch in JavaScript so the thing actually runs in a browser. No emulator, no abandonware torrent, no fighting dgVoodoo to coax a 1996 executable into booting on Windows 11. You click a link and Gowron starts judging you. And he didn’t stop at one pass – he’s upscaled the footage across multiple formats, the sort of belt-and-braces thoroughness that means it’ll run on whatever you point at it. That is the work of a man who could not let the thing go, and I mean that as the highest compliment available. So – thank you, Owen. You’ve done your house proud.
Check it out klingonremastered.com
The footage still looks rough in places, and Owen is the first to say so. Klingon only ever came out on CD-ROM, so the source is tiny and brutally compressed and there’s a hard ceiling on what you can rescue. The companion project, borgremastered.com, looks markedly better, because Star Trek: Borg got a DVD release and the source was kinder. I haven’t played that one yet. I’m saving it, in the way you save the nicer biscuit.
Mostly I keep thinking about the title. The most dangerous game is the one where you’re hunted for sport and have to die well to earn your place in Sto-vo-kor. The least dangerous version of it is this: a bloke clicking a mouse in a browser tab while a thirty-year-old hologram asks him, with complete sincerity, whether he has honoured his house. I have not. Gowron’s shaking the camera again.