| Star Trek | |
|---|---|
A simple version of Star Trek, running in a Linux command terminal. The Enterprise, represented by the "-E-", is alone in a quadrant with four stars. |
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| Developer(s) | Mike Mayfield |
| Designer(s) | Mike Mayfield |
| Platform(s) | SDS Sigma 7, HP 2000, DEC, Data General Nova, IBM PC, Apple II+ |
| Release date(s) | 1971 |
| Genre(s) | Strategy game |
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 computers 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.
Contents |
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 (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 phasers 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 (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 (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.
The original Star Trek developed out of a brainstorming session between Mike Mayfield and several high school friends in 1971. The Star Trek television show 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.[2] 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.[2] The source code TREK73.BAS contained a REMARK (C) 1973 by William Char and Associates. [3]
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).[4]
In early 1974 Bob Leedom saw Ahl's DEC BASIC version and started porting it to the Data General Nova 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.[2]
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.[5]
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.[6]
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.[5] David Gerrold, one of Star Trek's writers, was featured in Creative Computing advertising.[7]
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 FORTRAN 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[8] On Linux and BSD systems, the Allman version still exists today as part of the bsdgames package which contains several classic UNIX text games.[9] 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 PCs in the early 1980s. By this point the era of type-in programs 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,[10] 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. It was later ported to the atari 2600 and Atari 5200.[11]
Atari also produced an Atari 2600 version of the original text-based game in the Sears-only release Stellar Track. Unlike Star Raiders the 2600 version more closely followed the layout of the original Star Trek text game. The joystick is utilized to scroll thru the commands and the fire button selects the command..[12]
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.[13] The re-published book includes all George Beker's iconic Bekerbots robot cartoons.[14]
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 Trek73, Netrek and others.
Star Trek was reviewed in The Dragon magazine #38. Reviewer Mark Herro described the game in 1980 as "one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around."[15]