10 Examples Of Real Pop-Culture In Star Trek

Video games as we know them today don't pop up in Star Trek that often, as most Humans preferred to spend their time on holodecks during the 24th century, and things like recreation rooms and basic holographic tech were available at least a century before.

Yet, we've seen other older forms of media that still exist in Trek, like books, plays, and we've even seen characters like Tom Paris and the NX-01 crew watch television and films. It seems odd that classic video games are virtually absent from Human society in the show.

One of the only relics of the classic video game industry was a Nintendo Switch that appeared very briefly as part of Kerner Hauze's collection in the Lower Decks episode Kayshon, His Eyes Open, along with dozens of other rare artefacts from real-life and Star Trek history. You can see the console in a display case behind Beckett and Jet while they're fighting over the Kayshon doll and trying to escape Hauze's automated defence systems.

Video games have been referenced before in dialogue, and the Ktarian headset from the Next Gen episode The Game could be seen as a form of video game. Still, it seems odd that we haven't seen more references to real-world video games or video game consoles in Trek. We'd love to see more stuff like the episode Lasting Impressions from The Orville, when the crew opened a time capsule from 2015 that contained a copy of Minecraft for the Xbox 360.