Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Kobayashi Maru

10. Scripting The Simulation

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan went through several treatments, several drafts, several names, and several writers before becoming the movie we know today. As detailed in Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 3, issue 05, what started as an outline by executive producer Harve Bennett in November 1980, called "Star Trek II: The War of the Generations," was then handed over to writer Jack B. Sowards to develop into a script.

Sowards' first draft of 20 February 1981, entitled "STAR TREK: The Omega System," featured a good deal of the now familiar — Khan, Captain Terrell, the Reliant, the death of Spock. It did not, however, include a simulator or the Kobayashi Maru. In fact, that first version of the script began with a deliberate beam down to Ceti Alpha V on the part of Terrell and first officer Chekov.

As also noted in Star Trek: The Magazine, it was Sowards' second draft, dated 10 April 1981, which included "the simulator sequence" and the Kobayashi Maru for the first time. In it, Kirk also "suggested that the Kobayashi Maru might be a 'no-win scenario'". Sowards' script just didn't quite work, however, so it was passed to Samuel A. Peeples, writer of Where No Man Has Gone Before. His version didn't work either.

Facing their own Kobayashi Maru, Bennett and fellow producer Robert Sallin met Meyer at his home in late 1981. There, notepad at the ready, Meyer suggested making a list of their favourite elements from each of the scripts and treatments. "I'll write a new screenplay that incorporates all the things on it," Meyer then offered. And he did, though he never got the credit.