Recreation
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By Tim Schmelter
Austin360
No. 10: Star Trek (Text)
(Mainframe, 1970s)
The Game: A rousing space battle full of all the typing, trigonometry and arcane commands you could possibly want.
 You can run, but you can't hide, you Klingon scum. |
The game was completely text-driven, so much so that it didn't even assume a CRT-type terminal: you could happily play the game on a teletype loaded with a sufficient amount of paper. Nonetheless, it captured the mental flavor of controlling the Starship Enterprise in the midst of a heated battle against the encroaching Klingon menace.
There wasn't a heck of a lot of variety to the gameplay. At its heart, 'Star Trek' was a turn-based strategy game where you slugged it out with the computer-controlled Klingon warships. They had numbers on their side, but you had photon torpedoes, starbases and the stalwart crew of the Enterprise on yours.
Was there ever really any doubt who would prevail?
What Was So Great About It: For me, this is where it all began. Yeah, I'd done the 'Pong' thing for a while, but as cool as it was to lob a white dot back and forth against Mom, there was something enormously more satisfying about sending a spread of proton torpedoes into a Klingon warship. And you could mine dilythium crystals. Take that, 'Pong.'
The game eschewed fancy interfaces in favor of a hardcore geek-centric view of the universe: The world could be expressed and controlled by lines of teletype text, with emotionally satisfying results. For folks that already spent an inordinate amount of time pecking away at a keyboard attached to a glowing tube, that was an immensely validating experience.
In addition, the game is the first example I can think of — certainly the first example to which I was exposed — of a traditional media property being converted to a computer-based medium. It could be argued that this 'Star Trek' game paved the way for the videogames of 'Tron,' 'Star Wars,' and 'Charlie's Angels.' And on behalf of technology geeks everywhere, I'd like to apologize for that last one.
Impact On The Rest Of Humanity: That's hard to say. It wasn't the first widely-known text-based computer game; that distinction belongs to "advent", which begat 'Zork,' which begat an entire industry of PC-based gaming. And the fact that it was originally only available to users of university or large corporate mainframes limited its exposure somewhat.
But by the time I finally discovered the game in the early 1980s, it had already gained a solid following among the mainframe crowd. Ports of the game to other platforms, including Unix server environments, DOS, Windows, heck, anything with a command-line, helped ensure that it stayed alive in geek consciousness.
In the end, it probably did more to underscore the relationship between geeks and 'Star Trek' than it did to advance the video gaming industry, but that's just fine with me.
Live long, and prosper.
