Zachary Quinto, the actor who played Spock in last year’s Star Trek reboot, says that his bow in the forthcoming Star Trek Online game will be his last voyage to the stars for a while.
“I’m stepping away from Star Trek for at least two years — no movies, no conventions, no anything for a while,” Quinto told Wired.com in a telephone interview. His planned absence from geekdom was a major motivation for doing the new game. “I did this game to make an investment in the fan base,” the actor said.
Quinto doesn’t play Spock in the forthcoming game, but rather provides the voice for a holographic doctor — the Emergency Medical Hologram Mark VI. New players of the MMO will hear Quinto’s voice as they make their way through the game’s opening tutorial. Quinto himself played the game’s opening and found his own voice instructive.
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“I did exactly what I told myself to do and I survived,” he said. “I passed the mission with flying colors.”
The actor, who also plays the evil Sylar in sci-fi show Heroes, admits he’s not much of a gamer. He’s too busy with work and other pursuits. But he understands the draw of a game like Star Trek Online — one that lets you captain a starship and explore strange, new worlds.
“The appeal is the investment you make,” he said. “I was shocked at how much time and energy one could spend on just creating their avatar for the game,” adding that the connections players make online provide another hook.
“You get invested because your friends are invested,” he said. “Or you get invested because you are fighting against a certain group of people that have been dogging you the whole time.”
During his shore leave from Star Trek, Quinto has several projects in the replicator. He plans to do some acting that doesn’t require green screens or eyebrow plucking. “I’m stepping away from that genre and exploring a lot of other territory,” he said. The actor said he hopes his fans, used to seeing him in more fantastical settings, will join him.
“I want to invite them along with me on my journey, which is going to take them out of their comfort zone and into other areas and other styles of storytelling,” he said.
Quinto isn’t abandoning geekdom entirely. Before the Door, a production company he founded with friends and collaborators, aims to develop television shows, websites and several comic books for publisher Archaia. Quinto says properties he’s helping produce as graphic novels “could be really interesting as games.”
Star Trek Online launches for PC gamers Feb. 2.