Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:55, 16 August 2009

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.

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 and stars, arranged in an 8 by 8 grid of "quadrants". Each quadrant is further divided into an 8 by 8 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 would change when the quadrant was left and re-entered.

The user guides the Enterprise from quadrant to quadrant using the warp drive (WAR), looking for the enemy. When the player enters a quadrant, they normally issue the short-range scan command (SRS), which prints a text-based map of the quadrant, 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. Torpedoes do not suffer this drop in power, but 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, and as the torpedo is normally a one-hit-to-kill weapon, 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 any 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. 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 command takes up some game time, closing on the limit imposed at the start of the game. 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.

History

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 show had only recently ended 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 Star Trek to it, an offer he readily accepted. HP later started distributing this version on their public domain tape library.

David H. Ahl worked in DEC's education department, and as a hobby collected BASIC games and distributed them in a newsletter for DEC users. 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 these 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 Nova while working at Westinghouse. During the port he took the time to greatly clean up the 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.

Other versions

The original Sigma 7 version, and its descendants, were seen by many programmers and 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.

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, 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 for former Atari employee Doug Neubauer programming 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 was aggressively defending its intellectual property, and the author was forced to re-release it with all of the Star Trek related names removed.

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 Trek73, Netrek and others.

Reception

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."

See also

• Galaxy Trek
• Netrek
• Star Fleet (game series)
• Star Trek (script game)

References

1. "Super Star Trek Rules and Notes"
2. ^ "Star Trek - To boldly go... and then spawn a million offshoots - "History"". Maury's Super-basic Home Page. 13 December 2000. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
3. "Star Trek". Pete Turnbull's website (Clara.net). 26 March 2005. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
4. ^ David Ahl and Mary Cole, "Super Star Trek", BASIC Computer Games, 1978
5. John Anderson, "Dave tells Ahl; The history of Creative Computing", Creative Computing, Volume 10 Number 11 (November 1984), pg. 66
6. "Creative Computing" (advertisement), Popular Science, February 1981, pg. 25
7. "Star Raiders - One of the best games ever. - "History"". Maury's Super-basic Home Page. 1 January 2001. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
8. "Stellar Track". Atari Protos.com - Atari 2600 Prototypes. 2002. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
9. Herro, Mark (June 1980). "The Electric Eye". The Dragon (38): 53–54.

External links

• Online TRS-80 version: here. This version has numerous changes, including three levels of "depth".
• Pete Turnbull's Star Trek game ports page
• Chris Nystrom's Classic Computer Game: Star Trek page
• EGA Trek at Classic Gaming
• Star Trek 3.5 manual
• TrekUnited - "The Ninth Trek Day of Christmas" (The Text-Based Computer Game)
• GameSpot's History of Star Trek PC Games
• Star Trek Galactic Conquest
• Star Trek: The Game

• 1971 video games
• DOS games
• Mainframe games
• Star Trek: The Original Series video games
• Star Trek starship simulators
• Video games with textual graphics