Star Trek Online players are gathering in the game’s starbases and orbital zones to hold public vigils for Patrick Stewart, who died at the age of 86. Fleets of starships and crowds of torch-carrying captains have filled several of the MMO’s busiest hubs since the news broke.
Stewart played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. His death followed what was described as a “brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia.” Tributes have spread across social media, but a group of fans chose to grieve together inside the game. The same community held similar gatherings earlier this week after the death of Walter Koenig.
Galaxy-class fleets gather over Earth in Star Trek Online
PC Gamer writer Lincoln Carpenter logged in to see the memorials firsthand. His old Star Trek Online character was stuck, because years of updates to the new player experience had broken his unfinished tutorial. After an hour building a fresh captain, he headed for Earth.
In the Sol system, he found an assembly of player-captained Galaxy-class exploration cruisers parked in orbit. That is the same class as the USS Enterprise-D, the ship Picard commanded on The Next Generation. Players named their ships for the occasion. The fleet included the USS Remembrance, the USS ForEverPicard and the USS Champion, along with a USS Purple Enterprize.
Torchlight vigils on Earth Spacedock
Aboard Earth Spacedock, the hub for Federation players, mourners formed a ring around a large Starfleet seal and raised torches. The game includes that torch emote specifically for honoring “absent friends.”
Several memorials ran at once across separate map instances. Carpenter counted seven Spacedock instances that were full or close to capacity while he was online.
The gatherings were not entirely solemn. One mourner was a small Ferengi named “Shmunguss,” and an argument about atheism broke out in zone chat. Still, another player calmed things down with a farewell that borrowed from other franchises entirely: “may the Force be with you, Gandalf.”
A stand-in Picard at Starfleet Academy
Planetside, the Starfleet Academy grounds hosted more vigils across multiple crowded instances. In Carpenter’s instance, a rank 63 player named Picard, customized to look like the captain, stood silently at the center of the crowd.
Most attendees simply held their torches. Some saluted, including one player dressed as a Napoleonic admiral. Others posted Picard quotes and lines from Shakespeare. Meanwhile, one Vulcan character worked through every emote in the game that could express grief, with untranslated German text appearing alongside each one.
A small but active Star Trek Online community
Star Trek Online launched in 2010 and is now 16 years old. Publisher Arc Games still runs the MMO, though its audience today is modest. Steam showed roughly 1,500 concurrent players at the time of PC Gamer’s report.
Hundreds of those players took part in the orbital fleets, the Spacedock tributes and the Academy vigils. As a result, a large share of the active Star Trek Online population on Steam turned out to say goodbye to the actor who played their captain.