Before the web was a thing, and even before “Shareware” was a formalized idea, games were still shared between friends and members of clubs.
Software piracy was invented almost immediately after the personal computer came about! Bill Gates famously got frustrated that his company had worked so hard on a version of BASIC that he felt people shouldn’t be sharing it around for free but instead be buying it from him.
But EVEN BEFORE THAT, there was a particular game that was spread around. Yes, even before the personal computer was available.
This game, or at least variations on it (which we will get into), dates back to mainframes and minis.
Of course, given the headline you know I am talking about Star Trek.
Some versions used less of an infringing name (eg. SPACWR/Space War) and the popular characters from the show, but we always knew what the game was based on even then.
Visually, they did their best. Remember, this was a time when teletype was still a common mode of interacting with a computer, and dumb terminals were considered smart if you could position text arbitrarily at a screen coordinate.
Bitmap graphics were around a decade away from being a common sight, so ASCII text, drawn line by line, was pretty cutting edge.
This limitation is also why the player interacts using text-based commands, such as NAV for ‘navigate’. Early systems would not be aware of key presses, they would wait for the user to hit enter before processing the latest instruction.
Mike Mayfield, in his final year of high school, wrote the first version of the game in BASIC for the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe which he had ~acquired~ access to.
He must have been a huge fan because the Star Trek original series was still in syndication and had only just ended its original run a couple of years earlier.
After graduation, he had the opportunity to spend time on a HP 2000c so he rewrote it for the minicomputer, which was then included in Hewlett-Packard’s public domain software catalog.
David Ahl and Mary Cole ported it to BASIC-PLUS and published the source code in the Digital Equipment Corporation Edu newsletter.
The 101 BASIC Computer Games book included the game, but not the original version. Bob Leedom had expanded the game in 1974 into Super Star Trek. He changed the numeric codes into three-letter commands, added status reports from show characters and names for the galaxy quadrants, and added movement for Klingon ships, and an expanded library computer.
Type-In and Play
Ahl started Creative Computing magazine in 1974 and ported the games from 101 into Microsoft BASIC. BASIC Computer Games was released in 1978, just in time for the first microcomputer boom. That book became the first million-selling computer book, and versions of Star Trek were ported to almost all personal computers and BASIC dialects of the era.
Mark Herro in a 1980 edition of The Dragon magazine said Star Trek was “one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around”, with “literally scores of different versions of this game floating around”.
Play Star Trek Now!
- Play (or edit) the C64 version right now in your browser
- Play using Microsoft BASIC and my CP/M emulator, again right in your web browser
If you would like to play it now but don’t want to enter text commands, try Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary – a remake/conversion with the graphical UI of Star Trek 25th Anniversary.
The same developer also has a simple Pico-8 conversion too!
CP/M: The Linux of the Early 80s