Originally published at: Brief history of Star Trek video games | Boing Boing
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No mention of Star Fleet Command? It’s a computer rather than console game, but then so was the Basic text game mentioned in the beginning.
edited to add: Oops I didn’t see the rest of the article and had mistakenly thought it was in chronological order of release.
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Too often do these games bear a superficial resemblance to Star Trek, but fail to replicate its substance.
I feel like the features that make Star Trek great are difficult to translate into a good and profitable video game.
It’s all too easy to just churn out endless games all about, for example, battling the Borg. And while the Borg are compelling, I tend to find Borg battles boring.
I’d love to see a game where you’re stuck on a planet until you can figure out what the hell “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” means, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
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No mention of Netrek, which is based in the Star Trek universe and is one of the original MOBAs?
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I remember loving TNG as a kid but even then thinking nothing about it would translate well to a 16 bit video game. Too many characters, too complex of plots, and space battles that were molasses slow.
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Yes, it is explicitly mentioned.
Whereas Birth of the Federation, which was a flawed but ambitious 4x game doesn’t get a look in. (Again, probably because it was PC only?)
I also remember a game on my Atari ST back in the late 80s - Google tells me that it was called The Rebel Universe although I don’t recall that.
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The alpha and as far as I’m concerned, the omega:
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Pretty sure I’ve got a version of this in one of my ancient “BASIC Computer Games” books. Now, if I felt like manually transcribing several thousand lines of BASIC…
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Adventure (the original Crowther/Woods version) was the first computer game that I played, but a DECUS version of Star Trek, which had been reworked to use VT52 or VT100 terminals instead of a teletype, was the second.
If that’s David Ahl’s book, I have a copy of that, too. And the Star Trek listing isn’t printed out well enough to OCR.
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I can’t help but think that the Bioware that made Mass Effect 2 would have made a really good Star Trek Discovery game.
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I just checked my copy and the reproduction isn’t… terrible? But it’s much smaller print than the other programs so I imagine I’d run into similar problems. Not to mention that this binding is already suffering badly…
Really, the main thing that has stopped me from trying to implement any of these programs in a modern language is my utter bafflement at BASIC, especially when data statements come into play.
EDIT: Fun observation: there’s a note on this program that indicates that the name Star Trek is “Used by permission of Paramount Pictures Corporation”. That’s something you certainly wouldn’t see today.
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DATA statements are just a way to store a list of numbers. Each READ statement grabs the next number off the list until the end is reached, and reading beyond the end is an error. It’s commonly used in a loop to initialize an array. A RESTORE statement will reset the list back to the beginning.
Still, BASIC, especially in its early varieties with line numbers and GOTO spaghetti, can be rather tedious to work with.
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I don’t know why they call it a video game, we only had Teletypes.
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Mind you, this was a lot better and inspired a lot of multi-player games.
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They don’t mention my favorite – the freeware/shareware Trek universe ship combat game “Begin”
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Still waiting for this one to be released, I guess it was delayed because it was too addictive and caused strange anti-social activity.
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Actually…
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Bridge Crew has hands-down been my favorite VR experience over the last few years, and especially during COVID, when hanging out with friends on the bridge of the Enterprise is a nice alternative to isolation. But shame on Ubisoft for effectively abandoning it just as it was hitting its stride, and refusing to address its numerous bugs. This could be one of the Great Games, but instead feels just a step above a demo.
ETA: And if any BoingBoing’ers have the game, I’m always looking for a crew…
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I think frankly most game developers are incapable of understanding Star Trek fans.
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What? No mention of the Star Trek arcade game?! I blew through a lot of quarters on that game back at the Fernandez Fun Factory in Kapa’a, the only arcade I ever found it at. Too bad I only got to go there once or twice a year…
Now of course we have the Internet Archive: Internet Arcade: Star Trek : Sega : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive
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