Star Trek: Discovery is the first new show in the franchise since Enterprise concluded in 2005, and it already has a lot on its shoulders. Debuting in September, the show takes place a decade before the original TV series and stars Sonequa Martin-Green (The Walking Dead), Jason Isaacs (the Harry Potter movies), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) and others.

Discovery will premiere on the CBS broadcast channel before moving exclusively to CBS All Access—making it the first original show for the digital subscription service. Reigniting a relatively dormant TV franchise, even after three blockbuster reboot movies (Star Trek Beyond released in 2016), while promoting interest in a new subscription service may be daunting, but if any franchise is big enough for the task, it’s Star Trek.

But even the best starship could use some reinforcements once in a while. That’s where Disruptor Beam comes in with its mobile role-playing strategy game Star Trek Timelines, which takes characters and ships from across almost the entire Star Trek franchise, including the TV shows and original movies, and offers them for players to collect and create stories with. The studio has announced that it will be adding in content from Discovery as the premiere draws closer and will continue to do so as new episodes release.

Past Becomes Future

Jon Radoff, CEO at Disruptor Beam

Disruptor Beam has a great deal of experience working with ongoing IPs. The studio also made Game of Thrones: Ascent in partnership with HBO to keep audiences engaged during the show’s off season.

“HBO had told us after the first season aired that they were interested in engaging the audience during the 40 weeks out of the year that the show wasn’t airing new episodes,” Jon Radoff, CEO at Disruptor Beam, told AListDaily. “We worked with them very closely to engage the Game of Thrones viewing audience. Today, it has over 20 million viewers an episode, and I think we played an important part in engaging that audience.”

However, Game of Thrones already had a viewing audience by the time Ascent released for mobile. How will Timelines help to promote a new show that doesn’t have viewership yet—never mind one that will be locked behind a subscription service?

“I see it as new content within Star Trek, which is an enormous franchise,” Radoff explained. “This isn’t like watching a new TV show that people aren’t familiar with. This is drawing on over 700 episodes of Star Trek and continuing the story of exploration and adventure throughout the galaxy. Disruptor Beam isn’t really launching a new TV show per se, as we are continuing a franchise that already exists.”

Radoff believes that CBS chose the right franchise for All Access, given how HBO and Netflix proved that there is a great deal of interest in subscription services when they’re anchored to beloved franchises. All the Star Trek shows, including the 1973 animated series, can be watched on Netflix. Radoff said that “between Netflix’s worldwide presence plus the interest from the Star Trek audience in seeing it come back, I anticipate that the audience will be enormous.”

Discovering Discovery

Game of Thrones is currently in its seventh season, and Ascent has had over 200 content updates that coincided with the show since it launched four years ago. With Star Trek, Disruptor Beam has over 50 years of content to work with. Timelines is well into its second year and has over 400 characters in it, but it doesn’t look like it will be running out of content anytime soon, especially as the studio works with CBS to prepare audiences for Discovery. But interest in the franchise still doesn’t address how the studio will introduce characters that fans haven’t seen before.

“One of the things that we like to do is introduce interesting characters as people are meeting them through watching the show,” Erin Prince, product owner of Star Trek Timelines at Disruptor Beam, told AListDaily. “Already, people have been introduced to some of the main characters and the first ship. So, we’re going to be releasing these characters in a cadence that’s similar to the show. As you see new characters develop into new fan favorites, they’ll be introduced into the game. We’ll be spanning this over the course of the season, not just introducing everything in one big chunk up front. The first things that you see will be things that fans have already gotten excited about from the trailers and the magazine spreads.”

“We’re not leading into the game with things that are unfamiliar,” added Radoff. “We’re taking what you’re already seeing within the show and fostering deeper engagement by giving you the ability to experience the show in a different way.”

Prince said that Disruptor Beam is in discussions with CBS Consumer Products and CBS All Access to establish a cross promotional strategy. They’re working so that the show will help drive awareness of the game and vice versa. “We’re creating a partnership where there’s a back-and-forth,” said Prince. “They love our deeply engaged Star Trek audience and we’re happy to engage with a CBS audience that’s about to become Star Trek fans.”

“We bring an audience of five million people who played Star Trek Timelines,” said Radoff. “We’ve put out over a billion impressions online for the viewing audience, so the Star Trek audience knows that Timelines exists. By adding Discovery to it, it will reinforce the show as the new canonical extension to the universe. From the CBS side, they own channels in addition to CBS All Access, and they have social media channels that have access to over 10 million fans across fan pages, StarTrek.com, email lists and so on. CBS has cultivated a lot of different channels for communicating with fans, not the least of which was the Star Trek Las Vegas convention, which is one of the largest Star Trek conventions in the world with 20,000 fans coming together.”

Engaging A Fragmented Fan Base

The Star Trek franchise is over 50 years old and spans multiple TV shows and movies, so Disruptor Beam isn’t just dealing with one kind of Star Trek fan with Timelines. Individuals may have favorite shows or characters dating back to the 1960s show.

“It’s a different fan base and one of the interesting things about that is that they have different levels of experience in gaming,” said Prince. “This is part of why we wanted to expand beyond the mobile platform—we moved Timelines onto Facebook and Steam recently, where we’re reaching an even broader audience of Star Trek fans. When we put new features and content into the game, we make sure we’re never losing any of these fan bases. We start with easy-to-understand mechanics and then we pull in characters from all over the different series plus the movies and isolate them.”

As an example, Prince said that they would take a time traveling character and mash it with other time traveling characters from other shows.

“The fragmentation of the characters benefits the kinds of games we create,” said Radoff. “There are a lot of characters out there with the big five being Kirk, Spock, Data, Warf and Picard. That said, there’s an enormous amount of interest in a whole range of other characters. Everybody has a favorite character they want to have. When we’re dealing with something as expansive as Star Trek, it’s important that we have something for everyone. They may see a character or ship from a series they don’t like, but fans realize that Star Trek is a big universe with a lot in it. It’s fine if they don’t want those characters or ships—it’s a collecting game.”

Radoff also shared his thoughts about where the Star Trek brand fits in today, especially since modern technologies outpace some of those seen in old episodes.

The story of Star Trek isn’t so much of a technological one,” Radoff said. “Yes, we now have mobile phones that are more powerful than the communicators they had in [the original] Star Trek, but we don’t have warp travel and teleporters, so we have a ways to go on that front. What Star Trek is really about is an optimistic view of the future. There’s a lot of darkness in the world right now, and that’s not necessarily new. People who watched the original Star Trek were watching at the time of the Cold War. So, Star Trek has always been a counterpoint to what’s going on in the world and the darkness and cynicism out there. It shows that the human spirit of exploration and adventure is alive and there’s an optimistic future out there beyond the stars.”