When you think of science fiction in popular culture, a few major juggernauts spring to mind. There’s the stubborn and enduring Star Trek, a beloved mainstay of nerd culture since 1966. There’s George Lucas’ Star Wars, equal parts Arthurian fantasy, neo-Western, and political drama. There’s Frank Herbert’s Dune, a foundational text for the genre that’s recently exploded into the mainstream in a way it never has as a result of Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation. But further down the list, maybe not third or fourth or even seventh, is Starship Troopers.Despite the fact that Robert Heinlein’s groundbreaking 1959 novel remains extremely controversial, it’s still one of the most influential works in the genre — its buglike alien Arachnids have influenced many depictions of inhuman extraterrestrials, and the introduction of weaponized technological exoskeletons gifted the concept of “mech-suits” to the world. But for as influential as the book is, Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film adaptation might be even more so, especially in the world of video games — at least, according to the developers at Auroch Digital, the team responsible for Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War.“I think the influence you can see, especially in games, is that they’re picking through the carcass of Starship Troopers,” says Jack Chapman, the game’s principal level designer, in an interview over Zoom. “Halo, for example, is a game that wears its influences on its sleeve a lot. It’s one-part Ringworld, one-part James Cameron’s Aliens, but then there’s a heavy dose of Starship Troopers in there as well.”Once you see the DNA of Verhoeven’s satirical cult classic, it’s hard not to see it everywhere in modern sci-fi gaming. Halo, Gears of War, even the recent Helldivers games all borrow heavily from the aesthetic or worldbuilding of the film. Which makes sense — the heavy-handed political critique doesn’t make it feel like any less of a rich, lived-in world, and Jack, producer Anthony O’Neill, and the rest of the team at Auroch took it upon themselves to make a licensed game that honored the iconic world of the film while never shying away from the sharp, incisive satire that makes the film so iconic.Inhabiting The World Of Starship TroopersOne of the very first things you notice about Ultimate Bug War, the moment you drop in, is that the game is clearly a very well-researched, meticulous labor of love. Auroch Digital roots you in the aesthetic of Verhoeven’s film from the very moment you drop into the game, with a tutorial mission that’s wholesale lifted from the Capture the Flag training sequence in the first film, and continues that thoughtful immersion with weapons, enemy types, and levels based on key setpieces from the 1997 movie. It’s the kind of fidelity that could only come with a real attachment to the material, something O’Neill confirms. “For me, I’ve always been a massive fan of Starship Troopers. It came out when I was a fair bit younger, and it was one of those films that I was definitely too young to watch, but took gleeful joy in going to my friend's house with more relaxed parents and watching it without my parents' permission.”Having a childhood soft spot for the film wasn’t enough when the developers were approached by publisher Dotemu, who had just acquired the rights to the IP from Sony — the team had to double down and truly pore over Verhoeven’s work, considering they shied away from borrowing from the original novel. “Essentially, at the start of the project, one of the first things our lead designer did was watch through all three of the cinematic films and just point down every tiny little thing we could possibly take,” O’Neill tells Inverse. “Whether it's things like the Morita Rifle or the Warrior Bug or the Hopper Bug or the Tanker Bug,” O’Neill adds. Even minute details like the green violin that appears for two seconds in the camp scene, we noted down everything that we could possibly take and we tried to fit as much as we could into the game somehow.”However, it’s not mere aesthetics that make the game feel like it could exist comfortably alongside the original film — narratively, it quite literally takes place at the same time. “Sammy's doing her training around the same time Rico is,” explains O’Neill. “They both go to Klendathu and experience the Klendathu drop. And then whilst Rico's off in his healing tank, which he's in there for an indeterminate amount of time in the film, Sammy's off having her experience of Zegema Beach. So we made a point to interlace our timeline with that of the first film.”One of the most iconic aspects of the visual language of Starship Troopers are the in-universe propaganda videos, designed to desensitize citizens to the bloodthirsty and fascistic actions of the Federation and control the larger narrative. Naturally, Auroch found a way to add them into the game in the form of full-motion videos, a classic video game trope that used live-action pre-recorded clips instead of in-game cutscenes. O’Neill says that part of the driving force behind the FMVs in Ultimate Bug War was a desire to include Casper Van Dien, who played protagonist Johnny Rico in the original film. “We obviously needed to include Casper, and he is a remarkable gentleman, but he does not look the same now as he did in the film. He's definitely aged a bit. So we had to say, OK, we’re going to set the FMVs several years after, and it's going to be them talking about looking back at their experiences during that first Bug War.”Unfortunately no Neil Patrick Harris, however. | TriStar PicturesMarrying The Gameplay With The WorldIt’s one thing to see locations like Klendathu and Zegema Beach on-screen; it’s another thing entirely to inhabit them in the world of a video game, specifically a first-person shooter. For Jack Chapman, it was important to tailor the maps in the game to the uniqueness of the conflict in Starship Troopers. “In terms of level design as well, we knew that this wasn't going to work as a standard corridor linear shooter,” Chapman says. “And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that, but I think primarily they'll just tend to stem from the Arachnids and the size of them and how much punishment they can take. We definitely looked at the movie for references of that, and a lot of it takes place in big open battlefields, or sometimes you're back against the wall fending something off from getting into a base and things like that.”Speaking of the massive bug aliens, there are quite a few different variations in the game that don’t appear in the original movie. Auroch made a point to stay faithful to the Phil Tippett designs from the film, but also took inspiration from previous Starship Troopers games while developing their own unique enemies. “It was a lot of fun, but I think one of the primary things that drew us to specific bug designs was mainly for gameplay purposes,” says O’Neill. “We knew it needed more range of attack, so we have the Aphids and the bugs that will spit at you. We wanted the smaller ones to jump at you, the Mind jumpers. So it's primarily down to what do we need for a gameplay perspective.” The game even features the massive Tanker Bugs from the film, a decision Chapman says was inspired by old Call of Duty missions that would force players to destroy anti-aircraft turrets with C4. “That was a really cool thing for us to be like, OK, what would that type of objective look like in Starship Troopers universe?”Alongside mowing down Arachnids, UBW gives you the opportunity to play as one of them, an Assassin Bug, in a campaign that repurposes the level design of specific human missions. It was naturally a difficult challenge designing two games at once, but Chapman revealed that developing the bug missions did help out in the development of the human campaign. “I think the big benefit was obviously the bug gameplay is third-person, and you're playing as a huge ginormous bug compared to a tiny little infantry,” Chapman says. “What was quite good with the size of the bugs, we knew if it would work in the bugs gameplay in terms of space, it would definitely work for the human stuff as well. So it kind of started informing how we were building some of the stuff from a geo point of view, with some of the levels that we knew we were going to revisit as a bug. It was a bit of a thing of spinning a few plates at once, as is every part of game development, but then noticing some things we could get away with for some relatively easy wins while constructing the entire thing as a giant holistic experience.”There is something undeniably satisfying about terrorizing Federation soldiers in return. | DotemuThe Most Realistic Depiction of Warfare in GamingOf course, the most important aspect of Verhoeven’s film isn’t necessarily the aesthetics or the setpieces: it’s the satire. Auroch was keen on finding clever ways to bring the film’s themes to the game, and as O’Neill explains, part of that was the metatextual framing of the game itself. “Well, we took the perspective that if the original film was created by the Federation as a recruitment tool, then our game was going to be also made by the Federation as a recruitment tool. And whereas the film was, as you say, a satire of that jingoism, it was also a satire of other war films as well. We decided to do something similar with the game. So yes, we do lean into taking a look at games like Medal of Honor and taking a stab at the kind of things that they do.”While playing Ultimate Bug War, the main character Sammy occasionally shouts darkly funny and blindly naive statements like “war is so much fun,” which speaks to the delusion and indoctrination Starship Troopers is critiquing in the first place. Using the mindless power fantasy of the first-person shooter to step into the shoes of a Federation soldier woefully underequipped for the real horror of combat seems like a match made in heaven, something Chapman agrees with. “I think the brilliant bit that for me, anywhere that really tied all this together was when we started getting all of the FMV stuff back, and we kind of have that kind of line when it's like, ‘this is the most realistic depiction of war ever created as a video game’ and stuff,” Chapman says. “And having that playing off the fact that we're just doing very run-of-the-mill video gaming stuff, you're shooting bad guys, you're getting points for shooting bad guys and all this stuff. And in the back of the player's head, they're like, ‘This isn't realistic at all,’ and that's kind of the joke.”Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War is available now on Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.