William Shatner turned 95 today, and he is spending part of the occasion reminding people that Star Trek Online is still blocked.
A fan posted one of STO’s promotional images on X featuring generic actors in Original Series uniforms. The implication was clear enough that the fan put it into words: “They replaced you.” Shatner’s reply was brief. “I couldn’t care less. They have been blocked for years.”
When someone else amplified the exchange, Shatner added a detail that raised eyebrows in the Star Trek gaming community: “They deleted their tweets to me from back then before CBS saw them and pulled their license.”
That is a sharper claim than his prior statements on the subject. In 2021, he told fans trying to broker peace: “Don’t bother. Not interested in Star Trek Online. They’ve been blocked for years.” In 2018 he was similarly blunt: “I don’t want anything to do with Star Trek Online. Thanks.”
The origin of the block traces back to STO’s 2010 launch period, when the game’s official Twitter account and a community manager known in the player community as “BranFlakes” made repeated attempts to recruit Shatner for voice work or promotional involvement, noting that other Trek actors had already participated. Leonard Nimoy had done narration for the game. The outreach apparently crossed from enthusiastic into something Shatner found pushy enough to block permanently. The original tweets are gone, which Shatner’s comment today suggests was not accidental.
No record of those deleted tweets has surfaced publicly. The STO community has treated the whole saga as a running inside joke for years, with Reddit threads periodically relitigating exactly what the community manager said and whether the unconscious Kirk simulation appearing in one of the game’s missions was coincidence or editorial commentary.
The current STO community manager has acknowledged the incident on record, noting the person responsible no longer works there and that the team regrets how it was handled.
It reads, on balance, like a miscommunication that calcified. An overeager community team pushed too hard on a celebrity who does not forget being pushed. Shatner’s claim about deleted tweets adds an edge of deliberateness to the original offense, but without those tweets nobody can know whether the STO account crossed a genuine line or simply annoyed the wrong person at the wrong time and then buried the evidence out of panic.
None of this touches the actual game, which has used only archival audio from the 1960s series for Kirk’s appearances and never obtained Shatner’s participation in any form.
The birthday itself is going well otherwise. Pluto TV is running an all-day Original Series marathon today alongside all six Kirk-era films. Shatner has reprised Kirk numerous times over the decades and celebrated his 95th birthday on March 22nd with a free Trek TV takeover on Pluto TV. He has said a return to the role is “an intriguing idea” and that if there were a genuine reason for the character to appear rather than a cameo, he might consider it.
At 95, still active on X and still holding grudges, Shatner remains exactly the figure his fans expect: Captain Kirk to the end, which means he does not back down and he does not forget.
What do you think? Was STO out of line, or has Shatner held this grudge long enough? Let us know in the comments.
If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
NEXT: The Downfall of Joss Whedon: A Cautionary Tale Of Hubris