When Star Trek and Doctor Who announced a crossover panel for San Diego Comic-Con, fans didn’t know what to expect. Although Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Next Generation had a joint crossover series from IDW comics in 2012, there’s never really been a sense that Time Lords could appear side-by-side with the United Federation of Planets. And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening. As of August 1, 2024, for a limited time, two distinct mobile games will feature a crossover between Who and Trek.
Following the Intergalactic Day of Friendship panel featuring Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies and Star Trek producer Alex Kurtzman, developer East Side Games Group announced that Star Trek and Doctor Who will crossover within the already existing mobile games Doctor Who: Lost in Time, and Star Trek: Lower Decks — The Badgey Directive.
While Doctor Who: Lost in Time is generally based on the franchise in a broad sense, Star Trek: Lower Decks — The Badgey Directive is specifically connected to the animated comedy series Lower Decks and features the rogue AI “Badgey” who originated in that series.
Both are story-driven mobile games with their own distinct animation style, which is where the crossover gets interesting. Lost in Time will adapt Lower Decks characters for inclusion in the Whoniverse, which means Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler will appear in a way they’ve never quite looked before. Correlatively, the 10th Doctor will be rendered to match the unique Lower Decks animation style, which comes straight for the series. So, while the Lower Decks characters crossing over don’t necessarily look the way they’d look in a “real” Doctor Who episode, the Doctor Who characters in Lower Decks do look exactly how those characters would appear in that Star Trek series.
This isn’t to say this gaming crossover is canon or anything, but because The Badgey Directive is written very much like a real Lower Decks episode and visually looks exactly like a Lower Decks episode, the Lower Decks-a-fied version of the Doctor is the closet thing to a legit visual Trek crossover that’s ever existed. To put it another way, the existing Lower Decks mobile game already emulates an episode of the series pretty well, so bringing in “new” characters (with the same aesthetic) isn’t as jarring as it could be.
The actual gaming experience here may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the novelty of this crossover should make fans of both franchises a little curious. That said, if you want to get the full effect, you’ll have to download both games.
In the history of genre franchises, this crossover is not only unprecedented but hard to imagine with different properties. Disney’s Kingdom Hearts comes to mind because it combined Disney characters with Final Fantasy characters. But that’s an example of animated characters crossing over with video game characters, which is also what Marvel vs. Capcom did — pit video game characters against Marvel heroes.
But Star Trek and Doctor Who characters exist outside of their gaming equivalents, and are franchises owned and distributed by totally separate corporate entities. The recent Skydance merger with Paramount did not also magically include a merger with Disney and the BBC. So a formal blending of two games, each representing a large franchise — owned by separate corporations — is kind of a big deal.
Will it lead to more crossovers between Star Trek and Doctor Who in other mediums? Will this precedent allow other games-based-on-TV series to crossover with other similar types of games? Thanks to this crossover, the future of licensed games feels suddenly very new.
