What better time to reminisce about an ancient Star Trek game, than on the 60th anniversary of the airing of the first episode?
I’ve worked a lot of interesting jobs in my life ranging from a 21/Craps dealer to a construction supply delivery driver, from movie theater Assistant Manager to Non-Profit Program Director. One of my favorite memories comes from when I was working as an undergraduate in the university’s IT department. I wasn’t studying computer science. I was a Political Science and English dual major. That didn’t stop me from applying for a job in the IT department. As is true of a lot of people my age, I grew up programming in BASIC and eventually C++. It’s a background that made the transition to doing data analysis in R pretty smooth and that has inspired me to build a SmartyKit with my daughters this upcoming winter break. We will be building it and it will be glorious.
I will also probably try to add memory to the basic system and upload BASIC so we can do a bit of BASIC programming for fun as well. After all, what better way to spend Christmas break of your Freshman year of college than building an outmoded 8-bit computer with your dad?
When I worked in the IT department, I became friends with a couple of the admins and I remember chatting about Asimov’s Foundation books, Iain Banks’ Culture series, Tolkien, D&D, and more with them. It was almost enough to get me to change my major and had things gone a little differently in those early undergraduate days I might have. That I am currently employed as a data analyst and research analyst doing statistical analysis in the R programming language is a sign that I was on that path anyway.
In one of these conversations, I talked about how much I absolutely loved Interplay’s Star Trek 25th Anniversary game. I first played the game on the copy of Interplay’s 10th Anniversary Collection I owned. I bought it for Bard’s Tale and kept playing it for Star Trek 25th Anniversary because it was such a great adventure game that captured the best of the adventure game genre with the feel of Original Series Star Trek.
During that conversation, one of the staff said, “You know, we have an ancient Star Trek game on the server. You’ve likely never played it before.” I was intrigued, so I asked how to access it and loaded it up to play. It was a completely text-based game. Not text-based in the sense that it was a narrative game, rather in that ASCII characters represented graphics like they do in early NetHack/Hack and Rogue games.
While the interface was primitive, it was also functional and fun. It created a kind of “theatre of the mind” presentation of the Star Trek universe and I was an instant addict. I played the game during almost every moment of downtime I had. I also probably played it when I should have been doing other things, like actual work in the office.
Super Star Trek, or as I knew it at the time Star Trek, was based on a 1971 game by high school student Mike Mayfield. Mayfield’s original code is believed lost, but you can access code Mayfield wrote in 1972. Bob Leedom expanded the game, and gave it the name Super Star Trek, in 1974. The game was once again updated in 1978 by David H. Ahl and Mary Cole. This “final” version was published by Ahl and Cole in the book BASIC Computer Games.
It’s amazing that Ahl and Cole were able to publish a version that thousands of people could hand type into their personal computers only seven years after Mike Mayfield was coding it on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer using paper tape. Does anyone know what paper tape is anymore? Ahl and Cole’s initial updating of Mayfield’s and Leedom’s games is very similar to the originals, but they did add a significant change in the 1978 version by finally secured the rights to use the Star Trek brand name.
You can find a text copy of the game in David H. Ahl’s 1978 book BASIC Computer Games and you can find the original BASIC code here. If you have an emulator, you can copy and paste it. Personally, I plan on manually programming this, or at least manually copying it onto our “The C64,” in the coming weeks using the code in Ahl’s book. If you don’t want to spend all that time typing into an emulator or onto a retromachine you can play a Commodore 64 version of the game right now on Internet Archive. The old game is tons of fun, but it recently got an update.
Emanuele Bolognesi, an amateur game designer and programmer from Florence, Italy, programmed an updated version of Super Star Trek a couple of years ago. He then further refined the game by merging the classic BASIC game with the Interplay adventure game’s aesthetics. He calls his second game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary. It’s free to play and absolutely fantastic. The image below was taken from his Super Star Trek and you can see how faithfully he merged the two games using the 25th Anniversary edition’s view screen as the playing area.
I’ve already spent more than a few hours playing this excellent adaptation of Super Star Trek and it’s a great demonstration of how Old School Gaming/Retrogaming is active, and creating great content, in the video game community as well as in the tabletop roleplaying game community.