Star Trek (text game)
Encyclopedia
Star Trek is a text-based computer game that puts the player in command of the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon
warships. Written in BASIC, it was widely copied to most home computer
s in the late 1970s when the Super Star Trek version was included in BASIC Computer Games
, propelling its sales to become the first million-selling computer book. Versions for a wide variety of BASICs were available, as well as ports to different languages, platforms, and more recently, the replacement of the text-based display with a variety of graphical versions.
In addition to being tied to the Star Trek subculture, popular with computer experts and programmers, Star Trek is itself a piece of hacker lore.
The game starts with a short text description of the mission, which required the Enterprise to fly through the galaxy and hunt down a number of Klingon ships within a certain time. Each game started with a different number of Klingons, friendly starbases
and stars, spread throughout a galaxy that was arranged as an 8 by 8 grid of "quadrants". Each quadrant is further divided into an 8 by 8 (10 by 10 in some versions) grid of "sectors". The number of items in any one quadrant was fixed at the start of the game, but their exact position within it (their sector) was not recorded and would change when the quadrant was left and re-entered.
The Enterprise's local surroundings can be displayed by issuing the short-range scan command (
Klingon ships can be attacked with either phaser
s or photon torpedos. Phasers do not have to be aimed, but their power falls off with distance so the player has to estimate how much power to put into the shot. Torpedoes do not suffer this drop in power and will destroy a Klingon ship with a single hit, but they have to be aimed using polar coordinates
, so misses are possible. Klingon ships move after firing on the Enterprise, making re-aiming after every "turn" a chore. Most versions of the game included a calculator that will provide the proper angle, so in spite of the tedium of re-aiming it was commonly the primary weapon used. In most versions of the game, stars will absorb torpedoes and require the user to maneuver within the quadrant using the impulse drive
(
The game normally proceeds with the player eliminating Klingons in the opening quadrant, if any. Then they use long-range scanners to look for nearby ships, selecting a new quadrant and moving there using the warp drive
(
had only recently ended its original run and was still extremely popular. Mayfield and his "geek friends" wrote down a bunch of ideas for a game, and during the summer holidays he then started writing as many as he could on a SDS Sigma 7 that he had an account on at the University of California, Irvine
. Later that summer he purchased an HP-35
calculator and often visited the local Hewlett-Packard
sales office looking for help programming it. They mentioned that they would give him time on their HP 2000
minicomputer
if he would port his Star Trek game to it, an offer he readily accepted. HP
later started distributing this version of the game on their public domain tape library. The source code TREK73.BAS contained a REMARK (C) 1973 by William Char and Associates.
David H. Ahl
worked in DEC
's education department, and as a hobby he collected BASIC games and distributed them in a newsletter for DEC users (DECUS). He found Mayfield's HP2000 version, ported it to DEC BASIC-PLUS and sent it out in the newsletter. This version rapidly proliferated through the large DEC community of the early 1970s. He later collected many of the DECUS games into a book, 101 BASIC Games, calling the DEC version SPACWR (as in Space War).
while working at Westinghouse
. During the porting process he took the time to clean up the user interface, introducing the three-letter commands that all following versions used. He wrote a letter about this version in the People's Computer Company
magazine, offering a copy to anyone who wrote him.
Ahl had recently left AT&T
(where he worked after DEC) to start Creative Computing
magazine, and saw Leedom's letter in the PCC. He obtained a copy and published it under the name Super Star Trek in Creative Computing with both of their names on it. It was republished in The Best of Creative Computing in early 1978. Later that year Ahl ported many of the games in the original 101 to Microsoft BASIC
, which was rapidly becoming a standard in the home computer
market, and published the results as BASIC Computer Games
.
This book was published right as the home computer revolution was really starting, and the game was easily ported to most of the platforms being released. Sales of the book, of which Super Star Trek was by far the largest game, reached one million copies by 1979, the first computer book to do so.
Although the history is not recorded specifically, at some point during the game's evolution Ahl obtained permission to use the Star Trek name from Paramount Pictures
. David Gerrold
, one of Star Trek's writers, was featured in Creative Computing advertising.
that is unrelated to the Super version above. Eric Allman
(of sendmail
) ported this version to the C programming language to become BSD Trek, and more recently, upgraded to become. SST2K On Linux
and BSD systems, the Allman version still exists today as part of the bsdgames package which contains several classic UNIX
text games. There was a version written in Integer BASIC
for the Apple II+, called Apple Trek
. Yet another version was written in BASICA for the IBM PC
; written by Windmill Software
, it was called Video Trek 88, and used numbers 1-9, rather than letter combinations, for most commands. Texas Instruments released TI-Trek for the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A Home Computers. This version incorporated speech if the speech synthesizer and either Speech Editor or Terminal Emulator II cartridge are present.
The original Super was later ported to GW-BASIC
and shipped as part of that distribution on all new IBM PC
s in the early 1980s. By this point the era of type-in program
s was ending, and BASIC on the PC never had the same universality as it did on the 8-bit home computers. However, this version kept the game alive and under constant development due to the large installed base of machines. This led to the shareware
EGATrek, which replaced the original text-based screens with basic graphics that implemented a multi-paned display.
The original Super Star Trek game also served as the primary inspiration that led former Atari
employee Doug Neubauer to write Star Raiders
for the Atari 8-bit line of microcomputers in 1979. Atari also produced an Atari 2600
version of the original text-based game in the Sears
-only release Stellar Track.
Another commercial offshoot was 1985's Star Fleet I: The War Begins
, which was text-based and turn-based like the original, but greatly expanded detail in almost every part of the game. This game was successful enough to spawn a series.
In the late 1990s, Tom Spreen wrote the Apple Macintosh game Rescue!
that was loosely based on the original Super. Like Star Raiders, Rescue! was real-time and fully graphical, although presented in 2D in a top-down fashion. Unlike Star Raiders, or the original Super, Rescue! had a much more in-depth mission outline and many more systems to operate (transporters
, etc.) The goal in this game was to rescue a number of colonists on various planets and return them to a starbase, then strike out an eliminate the invasion fleet. Rescue! was written to take place in the Star Trek: The Next Generation
universe; by this point in time, Paramount Pictures was aggressively defending its intellectual property
, and the author was forced to re-release it with all of the Star Trek related names removed.
In 2010, Phil Conrod obtained the commercial re-publishing rights to Ahl’s original BASIC Computer Games Book and ported all the original BASIC games to the new Microsoft Small Basic
development environment for kids. The re-published book includes all George Beker's iconic Bekerbots robot cartoons.
, Netrek
and others.
magazine #38. Reviewer Mark Herro described the game in 1980 as "one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around."
Klingon
Klingons are a fictional warrior race in the Star Trek universe.Klingons are recurring villains in the 1960s television show Star Trek: The Original Series, and have appeared in all five spin-off series and eight feature films...
warships. Written in BASIC, it was widely copied to most home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
s in the late 1970s when the Super Star Trek version was included in BASIC Computer Games
BASIC Computer Games
BASIC Computer Games is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well...
, propelling its sales to become the first million-selling computer book. Versions for a wide variety of BASICs were available, as well as ports to different languages, platforms, and more recently, the replacement of the text-based display with a variety of graphical versions.
In addition to being tied to the Star Trek subculture, popular with computer experts and programmers, Star Trek is itself a piece of hacker lore.
Description
- This description is based on the most common version, Super Star Trek.
The game starts with a short text description of the mission, which required the Enterprise to fly through the galaxy and hunt down a number of Klingon ships within a certain time. Each game started with a different number of Klingons, friendly starbases
Starbase
A starbase is a facility, often in space, used in science fiction works such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Firefly. Typically they act as drydocks, battle stations or trading outposts.- Star Trek :...
and stars, spread throughout a galaxy that was arranged as an 8 by 8 grid of "quadrants". Each quadrant is further divided into an 8 by 8 (10 by 10 in some versions) grid of "sectors". The number of items in any one quadrant was fixed at the start of the game, but their exact position within it (their sector) was not recorded and would change when the quadrant was left and re-entered.
The Enterprise's local surroundings can be displayed by issuing the short-range scan command (
SRS), which prints a text-based map of the current quadrant's sectors, including stars represented with a *, Klingon ships as a +K+, starbases as an <*>, and the Enterprise itself with an -E-. The user can also use the long-range scan (LRS) to print out an abbreviated map of the quadrants lying directly around the Enterprise, listing only the number of stars, Klingons and starbases.Klingon ships can be attacked with either phaser
Phaser
Phaser may refer to:* Barber pole phaser is an analog synthesizer specially designed to create Shepard tones, an Auditory illusion.* Endosulfan, an organic compound* Phaser , in the Star Trek fictional universe...
s or photon torpedos. Phasers do not have to be aimed, but their power falls off with distance so the player has to estimate how much power to put into the shot. Torpedoes do not suffer this drop in power and will destroy a Klingon ship with a single hit, but they have to be aimed using polar coordinates
Polar coordinate system
In mathematics, the polar coordinate system is a two-dimensional coordinate system in which each point on a plane is determined by a distance from a fixed point and an angle from a fixed direction....
, so misses are possible. Klingon ships move after firing on the Enterprise, making re-aiming after every "turn" a chore. Most versions of the game included a calculator that will provide the proper angle, so in spite of the tedium of re-aiming it was commonly the primary weapon used. In most versions of the game, stars will absorb torpedoes and require the user to maneuver within the quadrant using the impulse drive
Impulse drive
In the fictional Star Trek universe, the impulse drive is the method of propulsion that starships and other spacecraft use when they are travelling below the speed of light. Typically powered by deuterium fusion reactors, impulse engines let ships travel interplanetary distances readily...
(
IMP) to get a clear shot. Movement, combat and shields all drain the energy supply of the Enterprise, which can be topped up again by flying to a starbase.The game normally proceeds with the player eliminating Klingons in the opening quadrant, if any. Then they use long-range scanners to look for nearby ships, selecting a new quadrant and moving there using the warp drive
Warp drive (Star Trek)
Warp drive is a faster-than-light propulsion system in the setting of many science fiction works, most notably Star Trek. A spacecraft equipped with a warp drive may travel at velocities greater than that of light by many orders of magnitude, while circumventing the relativistic problem of time...
(
WAR). They continue in this fashion until the Enterprise is low on energy or torpedoes, and then warp to a starbase to refuel and repair. Issuing commands takes up some game time, closing on the limit imposed at the start of the game. The game ends when the Enterprise is destroyed, all Klingons are destroyed, or the time limit runs out. A score in the form of a ranking is presented at the end of the game, based on energy usage, damage taken and inflicted, and any remaining time.Origins
The original Star Trek developed out of a brainstorming session between Mike Mayfield and several high school friends in 1971. The Star Trek television showStar Trek: The Original Series
Star Trek is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry, produced by Desilu Productions . Star Trek was telecast on NBC from September 8, 1966, through June 3, 1969...
had only recently ended its original run and was still extremely popular. Mayfield and his "geek friends" wrote down a bunch of ideas for a game, and during the summer holidays he then started writing as many as he could on a SDS Sigma 7 that he had an account on at the University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
. Later that summer he purchased an HP-35
HP-35
The HP-35 was Hewlett-Packard's first pocket calculator and the world's first scientific pocket calculator . Like some of HP's desktop calculators it used reverse Polish notation. Introduced at US$395, the HP-35 was available from 1972 to 1975.Market studies at the time had shown no market for...
calculator and often visited the local Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
sales office looking for help programming it. They mentioned that they would give him time on their HP 2000
Hewlett-Packard HP 2000
Hewlett-Packard's HP 2000 was a family of time-sharing minicomputers introduced with the HP 2116A in 1966 and sold in a variety of upgraded models until June 1978. The HP 2000's were unique in that they used a modified version of the BASIC programming language as its basic system, in a fashion that...
minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
if he would port his Star Trek game to it, an offer he readily accepted. HP
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
later started distributing this version of the game on their public domain tape library. The source code TREK73.BAS contained a REMARK (C) 1973 by William Char and Associates.
David H. Ahl
David H. Ahl
David H. Ahl is the founder of Creative Computing magazine. He is also the author of many how-to books, including BASIC Computer Games, the first million-selling computer book....
worked in DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
's education department, and as a hobby he collected BASIC games and distributed them in a newsletter for DEC users (DECUS). He found Mayfield's HP2000 version, ported it to DEC BASIC-PLUS and sent it out in the newsletter. This version rapidly proliferated through the large DEC community of the early 1970s. He later collected many of the DECUS games into a book, 101 BASIC Games, calling the DEC version SPACWR (as in Space War).
Super Star Trek
In early 1974 Bob Leedom saw Ahl's DEC BASIC version and started porting it to the Data General NovaData General Nova
The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the American company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova was packaged into a single rack mount case and had enough power to do most simple computing tasks. The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world, and...
while working at Westinghouse
Westinghouse Electric (1886)
Westinghouse Electric was an American manufacturing company. It was founded in 1886 as Westinghouse Electric Company and later renamed Westinghouse Electric Corporation by George Westinghouse. The company purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997...
. During the porting process he took the time to clean up the user interface, introducing the three-letter commands that all following versions used. He wrote a letter about this version in the People's Computer Company
People's Computer Company
People's Computer Company was an organization, a newsletter and, later, a quasiperiodical called the "dragonsmoke." PCC was founded and produced by Bob Albrecht & George Firedrake in Menlo Park, California in the early 1970s.The first newsletter announced itself with the following...
magazine, offering a copy to anyone who wrote him.
Ahl had recently left AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
(where he worked after DEC) to start Creative Computing
Creative Computing
Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from 1974 until December 1985, Creative Computing covered the whole spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically-oriented BYTE. The magazine...
magazine, and saw Leedom's letter in the PCC. He obtained a copy and published it under the name Super Star Trek in Creative Computing with both of their names on it. It was republished in The Best of Creative Computing in early 1978. Later that year Ahl ported many of the games in the original 101 to Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC, and the first high level programming language available for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist microcomputer....
, which was rapidly becoming a standard in the home computer
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
market, and published the results as BASIC Computer Games
BASIC Computer Games
BASIC Computer Games is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well...
.
This book was published right as the home computer revolution was really starting, and the game was easily ported to most of the platforms being released. Sales of the book, of which Super Star Trek was by far the largest game, reached one million copies by 1979, the first computer book to do so.
Although the history is not recorded specifically, at some point during the game's evolution Ahl obtained permission to use the Star Trek name from Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
. David Gerrold
David Gerrold
Jerrold David Friedman , better known by his pen name David Gerrold, is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one...
, one of Star Trek's writers, was featured in Creative Computing advertising.
Other versions
The original Sigma 7 version, and its descendants, were ported or copied to a wide variety of platforms. David Matuszek and Paul Reynolds wrote UT Super Star Trek, a version written in FORTRANFortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
that is unrelated to the Super version above. Eric Allman
Eric Allman
Eric Paul Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.-Education and training:...
(of sendmail
Sendmail
Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for email transport over the Internet....
) ported this version to the C programming language to become BSD Trek, and more recently, upgraded to become. SST2K On Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
and BSD systems, the Allman version still exists today as part of the bsdgames package which contains several classic UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
text games. There was a version written in Integer BASIC
Integer BASIC
Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette, then included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners...
for the Apple II+, called Apple Trek
Apple Trek
Apple Trek is a computer game for the Apple II family of computers based on the Star Trek science fiction series.-Summary:This is similar to the earlier mainframe-based Star Trek game. It runs in text mode and was written in Integer BASIC....
. Yet another version was written in BASICA for the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
; written by Windmill Software
Windmill software
Windmill Software is a Canadian software company. Windmill Software today publishes property management software and management information system software, but the company is more notable for its past role as a developer, marketer, publisher, and distributor of computer and video games...
, it was called Video Trek 88, and used numbers 1-9, rather than letter combinations, for most commands. Texas Instruments released TI-Trek for the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A Home Computers. This version incorporated speech if the speech synthesizer and either Speech Editor or Terminal Emulator II cartridge are present.
The original Super was later ported to GW-BASIC
GW-BASIC
GW-BASIC was a dialect of the programming language BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq. It is compatible with Microsoft/IBM BASICA, but was disk based and did not need the ROM BASIC. It was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles by Microsoft...
and shipped as part of that distribution on all new IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
s in the early 1980s. By this point the era of type-in program
Type-in program
A type-in program, or just type-in, is a computer program listing printed in a computer magazine or book, meant to be typed in by the reader in order to run the program on a computer....
s was ending, and BASIC on the PC never had the same universality as it did on the 8-bit home computers. However, this version kept the game alive and under constant development due to the large installed base of machines. This led to the shareware
Shareware
The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...
EGATrek, which replaced the original text-based screens with basic graphics that implemented a multi-paned display.
The original Super Star Trek game also served as the primary inspiration that led former Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
employee Doug Neubauer to write Star Raiders
Star Raiders
Star Raiders is a video game for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, released in 1979 and programmed by Doug Neubauer. It was also later ported to other Atari computer and game platforms...
for the Atari 8-bit line of microcomputers in 1979. Atari also produced an Atari 2600
Atari 2600
The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in October 1977 by Atari, Inc. It is credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor-based hardware and cartridges containing game code, instead of having non-microprocessor dedicated hardware with all games built in...
version of the original text-based game in the Sears
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Sears, officially named Sears, Roebuck and Co., is an American chain of department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in the late 19th century...
-only release Stellar Track.
Another commercial offshoot was 1985's Star Fleet I: The War Begins
Star Fleet I: The War Begins
Starfleet I: The War Begins is a 1985 computer game designed by Trevor Sorensen and developed by Interstel . It was released for Apple II, DOS and Commodore 64. Versions for the Atari ST and Atari 8-bit were released in 1986 and versions for the Amiga and Macintosh were released in 1987...
, which was text-based and turn-based like the original, but greatly expanded detail in almost every part of the game. This game was successful enough to spawn a series.
In the late 1990s, Tom Spreen wrote the Apple Macintosh game Rescue!
Rescue!
Rescue! is a Macintosh shareware computer game first released in April 1993 by Tom Spreen. Based on Star Trek: The Next Generation, it combined arcade-style action with strategy...
that was loosely based on the original Super. Like Star Raiders, Rescue! was real-time and fully graphical, although presented in 2D in a top-down fashion. Unlike Star Raiders, or the original Super, Rescue! had a much more in-depth mission outline and many more systems to operate (transporters
Transporter (Star Trek)
A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern , then "beam" it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter...
, etc.) The goal in this game was to rescue a number of colonists on various planets and return them to a starbase, then strike out an eliminate the invasion fleet. Rescue! was written to take place in the Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: The Next Generation is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the Star Trek franchise. Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Michael Piller served as executive producers at different times throughout the production...
universe; by this point in time, Paramount Pictures was aggressively defending its intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
, and the author was forced to re-release it with all of the Star Trek related names removed.
In 2010, Phil Conrod obtained the commercial re-publishing rights to Ahl’s original BASIC Computer Games Book and ported all the original BASIC games to the new Microsoft Small Basic
Microsoft Small Basic
Microsoft Small Basic is a simplified variant of the BASIC programming language introduced by Microsoft in October 2008. With a bare minimum of concepts, Microsoft accredits this as an easy programming language for beginners to grasp. The language itself has only 14 keywords, and the environment...
development environment for kids. The re-published book includes all George Beker's iconic Bekerbots robot cartoons.
Unrelated games
The popularity of the original Star Trek show in the early 1970s unsurprisingly generated a wide variety of games known as "Star Trek" or simply "Trek", but that are otherwise unrelated to the games discussed above. Examples include Trek73Trek73
TREK73 is a computer game based on the original Star Trek television series. It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee. The game was played via Teletype. Roderick Perkins adapted the program for the LHS DECISION computer located at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley,...
, Netrek
Netrek
Netrek is an Internet game for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software. It combines features of multi-directional shooters and team-based real-time strategy games...
and others.
Reception
Star Trek was reviewed in The DragonDragon (magazine)
Dragon is one of the two official magazines for source material for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and associated products, the other being Dungeon. TSR, Inc. originally launched the monthly printed magazine in 1976 to succeed the company's earlier publication, The Strategic Review. The...
magazine #38. Reviewer Mark Herro described the game in 1980 as "one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around."
See also
- Galaxy TrekGalaxy TrekGalaxy Trek is a space game written by Larry E. Jordan in 1982 for Capital PC Software Exchange.- Description :In Galaxy Trek, the player commands the USS Columbia on a mission to stop a group of warships from attacking Federation Headquarters...
- NetrekNetrekNetrek is an Internet game for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software. It combines features of multi-directional shooters and team-based real-time strategy games...
- Star Fleet (game series)
- Star Trek (script game)Star Trek (script game)Star Trek was a text-based mainframe computer game written by Don Daglow on a PDP-10 timesharing computer at Pomona College in 1972, and upgraded periodically through 1974, including contributions by Jonathan Osser...
External links
- Pete Turnbull's Star Trek game ports page (includes the original 1972 HP BASIC source code)
- JavaScript port of Bob Leedom's Super Star Trek (based on Birken's port)
- JavaScript port of Ahl's 1978 Super Star Trek (based on Nystrom's C port)
- Chris Nystrom's Classic Computer Game: Star Trek page (C port of the Ahl version)
- GameSpotGameSpotGameSpot is a video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information. The site was launched in May 1, 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein. It was purchased by ZDNet, a brand which was later purchased by CNET Networks. CBS Interactive, which...
: History of Star Trek PC Games - C, C++, and C# conversions of the 1976 Tiny BASIC version
- EGA Trek (1992, DOS shareware)
- Visual Star Trek (1990, DOS), features a mouse-based interface
- Star Trek 3.4 TRS-80 version (in Java). This version has numerous changes, including three levels of "depth".
- Star Trek: The Game (Ahl's version in PascalPascal (programming language)Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...
) - Startrek - an open sourceOpen sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
version (written in Seed7) and a history of Startrek