Mission Critical (demo)

Mission Critical is an adventure game released in 1995 by Legend Entertainment. Though its main advertising point was the presence of Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Michael Dorn, he played a very small role in the game.

In Mission Critical, you play the sole survivor of the USS Lexington and USS Jericho, a pair of starships sent by the Alliance of Free States on a secret mission to a world far from Earth. You are the only person capable of completing the mission, and saving not only the Alliance, but thousands of star systems from total destruction.

The game mostly takes place in 2134, but includes numerous references to events set before that time. Due to plot elements involving time travel, there is also a smaller part of the game which takes places in 2295, with the choice to have the player character go back to the original point, change history, and then travel forward again by the same amount.

The decades before the opening of the story had seen a steadily increasing number of catastrophic disasters and indications of long term trouble, widely thought to be ultimately connected with uncontrolled technological development. For example, there was extensive damage to Earth's ecology and atmosphere resulting from pollution and deforestation, to the extent that large forests no longer existed and could only be seen in old historical media. A letter that can be read in-game even makes reference to the widespread proliferation of a serious human medical issue known as "Chronic Environmental Distress Syndrome" (CEDS), but since no further details are given, it is not clear if the problem is physical, psychological, or both. Another serious issue that came about in the Mission Critical universe was that overpopulation led to over-reliance on wholly artificial genetically engineered plants for food. The plants were immensely viable and nutritious, but crowded out natural plants. The artificial plants also had very little genetic diversity, making them extremely vulnerable to resistant diseases. Further, there were some serious and deadly accidents resulting from unintentional releases of nanomachines, such as those intended for medical use to destroy infected tissue. Pronounced shortage of industrial raw materials, such as light metals, created an economic dependency on intentionally moving valuable asteroids inward, to stable Earth orbit, for mining purposes.