I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I absolutely loved it. All of it. As a kid I wanted to live Wesley Crusher's life. I wanted to be friends with Data and Geordi, and hang out in Engineering learning by osmosis. I had a ton of TNG action figures, including Data with a bunch of circuit access panels (which I lost) and Commander Riker with parts of his shirt torn for reasons I can't quite remember.

As I approached my teens, I found a game for my Amiga sitting on a cover-mounted CD. It was a public domain game set in the Star Trek universe called SoloTrek II. You named your ship and you explored the galaxy. Simple as that. It was kind-of turn-based and featured all manner of awesome random encounters, from Borg cubes to quantum filaments, even Q! I loved that game, and to this day I still play it in an emulator.

When Star Trek Online was announced I had a difficult time being excited about it. I'd dabbled in MMOs. World of Warcraft bored me, Guild Wars didn't hold my interest, and City of Heroes was awesome on the outside and incredibly repetitive and mundane on the inside. That said, I wasn't not going to try the open beta. That'd be madness.

Star Trek Online isn't a realization of what I wanted as a kid. It's so much more than that.