Star Trek 1971 Text Adventure Gives Gamers New View on Next-gen Games

I you ever wanted a true appreciation for just for how far videogames have come, check out the first Star Trek text adventure for the Sigma 7 micro computer. It’s important to keep in mind that in that day a micro computer could take up an office by itself, ran on vacuum tubes and was programed with punch cards.

On The Code Project, Michael Berkin talks about getting hooked on the game and his subsequent crusade to convert it to C+ and play it.

Two years after the original series was canceled in 1969, high school senior Mike Mayfield was busy keeping the Star Trek universe alive by feeding punched paper tape into a Sigma 7 in an effort to bring the crew of the Enterprise and the Klingon Empire to life on a 10 character-per-second teletype terminal. Soon after Mike ported his game to HP BASIC, it entered the public domain. From there, early computer enthusiasts enhanced and rewrote the game for every flavor of mini and microcomputer BASIC imaginable and beyond.

After a bit of web surfing, I came across Mike Mayfield’s original port to HP BASIC. With code in hand, I really wanted to play the game. I’m sure that there are HP BASIC interpreters out there for modern machines, but what fun would that be. Before I played it, I wanted do my own port. This game was born in the hobbyist era. It was made to be reinterpreted and enhanced as it traded handed. I wanted to bring back part of those long-lost magical days of type-in programs.

The Starfleet series was a knock off of the Star Trek text adventures with graphics. It’s almost as cheesy as the text adventure games it was based on but Trekkers won’t care. Here’s a video to give you an idea of what the text games were like.

This article, and the video for that matter, demonstrate how hard people used to have to work to play videogames. It makes you grateful for modern technology. It also leads me to wonder how today’s games will be viewed forty years down the road.