Space Quest V

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation
Developer(s)	Dynamix
Publisher(s)	Sierra
Designer(s)	Mark Crowe and David Selle
Engine	SCI
Platform(s)	DOS
Release	1993
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation is an adventure game released on February 5, 1993.

Premise

Space Quest V is unusual in the series in that it is primarily a specific parody of Star Trek; while there are some references to other fiction movies, like Predator, Alien, and The Fly, the game never moves too far away from its primary target. Roger's new ship features a command bridge and several officers to whom he can give orders, and eventually adopts a facehugger mascot called Spike, who "isn't quite housebroken": he leaves puddles of caustic acid behind him wherever he goes.

Plot

This game starts in a space station as Roger cheats to pass a StarCon Academy final exam. He's then given his own command— the garbage scow SCS Eureka, which looks like an oversized vacuum cleaner. The game involves several small missions, similar to ones seen in typical Star Trek episodes. Some missions are:

• Roger is hunted, alone, on a jungle planet by W-D40, a homicidal gynoid (the apparent sister of the Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike from Space Quest III). The gynoid has an invisibility device and a laser very similar to the plasma caster of the Predator.
• At one point Roger is in the process of being teleported when a fly buzzes into the beam. The teleporter malfunctions, and Roger ends up in a tiny fly body with a human head. He then must find a way to restore his body, while the fly, in Roger's body with a fly head, acts rather stupidly (even by Roger Wilco standards) and jumps into garbage piles.
• While visiting a "space bar", Roger must free his chief engineer from the brig, where he ended up after starting a fight triggered when he overheard a rival ship's crewmember refer to the Eureka as a garbage scow. This parodies the bar fight scene in the famous Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles"—except that in this case, as Roger points out, the Eureka actually is a garbage scow!

Roger's son from the future saved him at the beginning of SQIV, and later he shows a hologram of Roger's son's mother. Roger meets this woman in SQV and must protect her, or else his son would not exist, and thus neither would Roger.

The main plot is to stop a mutagenic disease that is spreading through the galaxy by discovering its source, and fighting everyone that got infected. In the end, the disease infects the crew members of the SCS Goliath, the StarCon flagship, whose toupee-wearing commander, Raemes T. Quirk (a rather blatant spoof of Captain Kirk, as portrayed by William Shatner), subsequently attacks the Eureka. In the end, Roger sacrifices his ship to get rid of the plague - and suddenly, if temporarily, becomes the commander of the fleet's flagship.

Roger is presented in a more positive light than usual. He's still a bungler and flies a ship that's falling apart at the seams, but along the adventure he gains the genuine respect of his crew and gets the girl in the end.

SCS Eureka

This information is from the beginning of the game.

• Crew positions:

Captain - Roger Wilco

Pilot/Navigator/Tactical Officer - Droole

Communications Officer - Flo

Engineer - Cliffy

Science Officer - Unfilled

• Systems (working ones):

Engines (warp and conventional)

Communications

Sensors (short- and long-range)

Shields

Weapons (Proton Torpedo launcher)

Teleporter

EVA craft

Cryogenics

Garbage retrieval

Garbage compression

Chicken Egg Timer Self-Destruct

Once Roger defeats W-D40, Cliffy rebuilds her and programs her as a science officer. Also, Roger must retrieve the cloaking device from W-D40's ship (which looks a lot like a Klingon Bird of Prey) and have Cliffy install it on the Eureka.

Development

This game was the first in the series not designed by the "Two Guys from Andromeda", as only Mark Crowe worked on the project. It was also the first Space Quest game that wasn't developed in-house by Sierra On-Line, but instead by Sierra's sister company, Dynamix, to which Mark Crowe had relocated shortly after the release of Space Quest IV.

Space Quest V was also the only Space Quest game, and the second Sierra title overall (Leisure Suit Larry 5 was the first) to be sponsored by a real-life company. The logo for Sprint would appear following any communications transmissions, appear on a billboard in the Spacebar, and also appear in the ending credits. Additionally, at one point in the game, there is a dialogue between two people where one denounces MCI's "Friends & Aliens" plan as "just not worth it." Space Quest V was one of several Sierra games given away as a reward for signing up for service with Sprint.

Although this game came after the CD-ROM version of Space Quest IV, it was released on floppy disks only, and early plans for a "talkie" version of the game were scrapped. According to then-Dynamix artist Sean Murphy, this was because Dynamix was in financial trouble at the time, and they were eager to release new games instead of working on "gold versions" of already-released games.

The game's copy protection involves the player's being required to input five-digit target navigation coordinates in the warp drive (each coordinate represents a different planet or space station).