Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

I remember a rather similar DOS game with an ASCII display (and probably a decade younger in coding) that was a turn-based fleet battle between whichever two sides (of Federation, Klingon, Romulan, or Orion) and relative ship numbers per side you liked. For some reason, the executable was called "begin.exe".

Pity I lost track of the disk.

I have played ATS a Trek MUSH: telnet ats.trekmush.org 1701

Looking at this source code brings back memories. Star Trek was ported everywhere there was a BASIC.

When I was 16, in 1981, our school got it's first computer, a Commodore Pet. 4K of RAM! Basic! Hi-tech graphics on the keys!

We only had one, it was in the library, and you had to 1) sign up for it, and 2) get a pass to leave study hall to come to the library.

My math teacher was an easy touch, so I scored a pass every day to go to the library. Unfortunately, other students also wanted to use the computer, and there was quite a bit of hijinks involved with actually making it happen (Hint: never sign up in pencil).

I learned how to code going through the Star Trek game and figuring out how it worked.

As a side note, my nemesis at the time was Roland. So I spent the formative years of my programming life creating a game called "Kill Roland" in Pet Basic. It was mostly Space Invaders, with a little bit of Star Trek thrown in. Little Rolands ("R"s) would come down from the top of the screen, you would use the arrow keys to move your guy around at the bottom, and the space bar launched missiles. There were smart missiles, that you could control after firing, heat seekers, and so on. Of course, the Rolands just kept coming, more and more of them (at times splitting in 2)

All the other kids at the library loved that game. Roland, not so much.

Fun times. I'd love to play Star Trek in BASIC again. (Zork would be a close second)

If you want to try a version of Star Trek in your browser (ztrek) - http://z-machine.lilawelt.de/game/ztrek/play/

This is the first computer game I ever played. My mom was a secretary at a local university, and there was a computer lab across the hall from her office. I'd go there after school to wait for a ride home, and someone logged me in and set me on my way. This was all on paper-feed terminals and I'd take the stack of printout homes and read through each game over and over. This is when I fell in love with computers.

In the early nineties I decided to learn about unix, and this was the first game I played after setting my first BSD box up. This is when I fell in love with unix.

Thanks for the game, to the original programmer(s) to all the people who have kept it alive. This program is special to me.