Starship Troopers: Extermination recently announced the 1.0 release of the co-op FPS will be coming this fall, as well as confirmed console releases. The game isn’t the first foray into the genre for developer Offworld, which previously released tactical shooter Squad in 2015. Casper Van Dien, who starred in the original 1997 film, will return as Johnny Rico in the new project, and Screen Rant spoke with Casper during Summer Game Fest to learn more.

The game first entered early access last May, and the 16-player title has already cultivated a dedicated base of fans. Taking place 30 years after the events of the film, players work together as part of the United Citizen Federation to build up a base and defend the planet against Arachnids. There are plenty of Starship Troopers surprises in fans’ futures, with the final version of the title slated for release in October.

Screen Rant Interviews Actor Casper Van Dien During Summer Game Fest

His Role In The Game & What Starship Troopers Fans Will Appreciate Most

Screen Rant: First, I would just love to hear what it was like for you to revisit this universe. Just in general, did you miss playing Johnny Rico?

Casper Van Dien: Johnny Rico is something that people yell at me every day. They know quotes and things like that. People tell me, “It’s why I joined the military. It’s why I became a writer. It’s something I used to watch with my dad,” or, “My mom took us to this by accident, but I think she’s just the coolest mom for doing that.”

I’ve always had these things, so it’s always been a part of my life. My kids have grown up with people yelling at me, just yelling quotes, and they do it with so much love and passion, so I absolutely love it. But then, when Offworld came and they said, “We have a game we want to do,” they took Johnny Rico from when he first signs up, for a girl, and then becomes a great soldier and just does his job, knows what to do, and now he becomes a general by this time.

He’s gone up in rank, and lost his rank and come back again, but now he’s a general again. He still wants to get the mission done, but he cares about his troopers more than anything. I love that, the growth that he’s had. They really honored it. They honored the world of Starship Troopers, and for me, it’s just a thrill. Yes, I love it 100%

Are you a big video game fan in general? Do you like to play in your free time?

Casper Van Dien: I play a little bit of video games, but mostly when I’m with my daughter hanging out. We’re going to actually stream and play together, Starship Troopers. But we’ve played Valorant. What’s the other one we played, Grace? What was that?

Grace Van Dien [off camera]: Dead by Daylight.

Casper Van Dien: Dead by Daylight, yes. We played Dead by Daylight. I’ve done other shooting games before, but I know I’m going to get back into it with this because I’m just so excited about it. It’s so much fun for me to be in this world.

Have you had a chance to check out the 1.0 version of the game yet?

Casper Van Dien: Yes, I got to play a little bit. I also got to play it in “god mode.” I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell that!

What does “God mode” entail, exactly?

Casper Van Dien: He just doesn’t die. He can kill all the bugs that way. But I think that’s just – they just do that when they’re making the game, so I was just kidding. There’s not a real “God mode.” But it’s so fun.

Is there something that sticks out to you as particularly cool from the final release of the game?

Casper Van Dien: This release that they’re doing, they did the pre-release and they’re going to have more coming out in the month, and more coming out again. They have plans. They have at least a five-year plan right now, and it’s amazing to see what they’re doing. But I love that they’ve taken – they’re huge fans, so I go up there and I meet all of them. They all have Starship Troopers T-shirts on. They’re all really into the movie, all the movies, actually. They’ve taken all the constraints that they had in these subsequent movies and they’ve added what we’ve missed for them, so they made it better. They’ve enhanced the bugs, made them better. They’re all the bugs from all five, plus new ones, new skins, new things.

Everything is just – you can see that they’re real enthusiastic fans of gaming and the movie. That just made for a beautiful marriage, and I love to be a part of it.

Story-wise, do you feel like Extermination touches any of the more allegorical commentary elements of the film, like on the military industrial complex or propaganda, stuff like that?

Casper Van Dien: You know, I’m fortunate that film politically, it still holds up, and maybe even more in this political climate. They touch on it in a way that’s true to the film. It’s still satire, but they have a respect and a reverence for the players. It’s an all-inclusive community, which is what Starship Troopers was in the movie itself. There’s no revising. This is about them together. General Johnny Rico, his journey now is, he still wants to be Commissioner Johnny Rico, but he cares more about the troopers. The value of people in the game, it’s important. You need them to build the forts and do this.

I think it’s more positive in this way, the reinforcements of this. It’s still a war game, you’re still killing bugs and everything like that, but you are trying to work together with all these other people. You’re going to die, you’re going to have all these things, you’re going to have incredible bug experiences and you come back as another trooper. It’s a good experience. I like the way they’re doing it. For me, it seems a lot more fun. It’s exciting, it’s exciting for me to do it. I went in, I was like, “Oh my God, I feel like I’m in the movie again.”

When it comes to video game adaptations of movies, what do you feel are the most important things when it comes to bridging that gap between the two mediums?

Casper Van Dien: I think that if you can stay true to the story in some aspects, and if you can make it look better. What they did in here, they made things that we couldn’t do in 1997 possible, and they’ve added things. We can do these jumps in the uniform, the actual uniform. They made them viable and workable. They’ve kept to the story and they have some of the sense and sensibility, some of the humor that’s still in, the satire in it.

They brought in me, they gave me a great arc for a character, and I felt really – I literally went in, and I would talk to the different people that were doing, “I’m creating this. I’m creating this for the game. I’m creating this,” and they’d ask me questions about the movie. I’d tell them, “Well, I carved this in on my gun.” “Why don’t we put that in?” So the little details – I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that – but all these little details that they did that people wouldn’t even know, they added that in. To me, that’s magic, when you can take the time to respect the original IP so much so that you want to put in even more details. That, to me, shows that you really care.

Offworld’s very family-oriented, it seems like they’re just great. They get along very well. They’re really cool to go up and hang out with. That, I think, is going to really make it more enjoyable for the players, the people that come in, because they’re going to be like, “Oh, these people really care about it. They really get it. They really wanted to do this.” You can see it from everything they do. The head developer, he went and saw Starship Troopers twice in the theaters. He was like, “I had no money then. I still had to see it.”

Everybody, they’re like, “I don’t care. I’ve seen the movie 32 times, not just two times, but he only saw it twice in theaters,” but it’s like, they’re bragging, they’re having fun. To me, that’s enthusiasm. I think it really shows in the game and it shows in my – when I went up there, I saw the trailer. I was like, “Oh my God! Ah!” I thought I was a kid in a candy store.

You’d mentioned a little bit that they used details about your character that the developers maybe didn’t think of and they wouldn’t have had. In general, what was your experience like recording and contributing to this game? Did you have a lot of input in how your character looked or anything like that?

Casper Van Dien: They made him look like me, so I think that’s what my parents did. They can give all the credit to them. They made me look like me, which is incredible to see yourself even more cartoonish than you already are, but when we got to do the lines together, I got in there, they created a script. When I read the script, I went, “Oh, Ed Neumeier, who wrote Starship Troopers and RoboCop and all the rest of the Starship Troopers universe, he would be very proud of the dialogue.”

I say more dialogue in this game than I did in Starship Troopers 1 and 3 combined. So I’m in this game, and they let me – I improved some things. They’re like, “That was great, Casper. Hey, could you try it with this?” We had so much fun, we played off of things. We threw in a lot more improvisation, but we had a strict script that was really great, spot-on. They really got it, and they threw in a lot of quotes from the movies, so.

What do you think, for fans, will really stick out to them, Easter egg, tiny detail-wise, that they’ll really appreciate?

Casper Van Dien: Anybody that loves the film is going to love it. The Easter eggs in it that they have – I don’t know what I can say without getting in trouble, but I do know that there’s one time that they showed this thing. In Starship Troopers 3, there’s this funny scene from my introduction where something gets blown up and a shovel goes through a trooper. That’s not funny, but in it, I pull the shovel out and then I go, “Hey, Trooper, give me a hand and pick up this foot,” or whatever it is. But they have a guy who’s impaled by the shovel in there, and you can take it out and fight some of the bugs with it.

That’s awesome.

Casper Van Dien: They just told me that. They put in details like this that you wouldn’t think of, and it’s not in every game. They have the knives, they have everything, they have all the details. They also have a detail they told me about, that Seth Gilliam, who plays Sugar Watkins, then he was on The Walking Dead as the preacher in that. He’s a good friend of mine. He doesn’t know this yet, so I’m going to announce it here. He, at the end, nukes the bugs. They say, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m just trying to kill some bugs, sir.” They have now, what is it called? The Watkins –

Crew: The Watkins trigger.

Casper Van Dien: The Watkins trigger. If somebody’s going to die, they can blow themselves up and they do the Watkins trigger. They do tributes to the whole movie like this, details you don’t even know. It’s so surreal. They have all the different guns. They tried to make them look everything like that. They’ve added things onto it and different pieces on. They have different skins you can wear. I’m just so overwhelmed and blown away by what they’ve done. I can’t wait for the fans to see it. It’s something that everybody’s going to be like, “Thank you for really respecting us.”

For players who aren’t necessarily super familiar with Starship Troopers, what about this game do you think should still entice them to try it over another squad-based shooter-type game?

Casper Van Dien: Well, first of all, it is about teamwork. It is working together, so if you want to do that, if you want to get a camaraderie going with a whole bunch of people, you’ve got it in here. But this game is – there’s been so many games that were inspired by Starship Troopers. Even if they haven’t seen the IP, if they love all these different games, they’ll be like, “Wow, this is such a great game.” This is what it was based off of, so these guys are all a whole bunch of nerds and geeks that wanted to make a movie that inspired Halo and Helldivers, and just so many different games that this is what it inspired.

Those games that everybody loves come in, and now you’re playing in that universe, and it’s done by fans. I think it’d be something that, if they didn’t play, they’d be missing out on a huge opportunity to be respected as a gamer.

Source: Screen Rant Plus