Versions I recommend for people these days: Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary https://emabolo.itch.io/super-star-tr...
personal fav, Star Trek "Making Games By Year" https://makinggamesbyyear.itch.io/sta...

Mayfield's Story I quoted and the best source on how it all kicked off: https://gamesoffame.wordpress.com/sta...

Archived list of other projects from a while ago: https://web.archive.org/web/201503012...

Thumbnail artwork: https://www.behance.net/gallery/89610...

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The 1971 star trek game did what no other star trek game ever could, be a game worth talking about.

Now Let’s head back to the year it was created and discuss that fancy Star Trek TV show that had just done three seasons before being cancelled because captain kirk ran out of hot aliens to smash

All they had were gigantic mainframe computers in their universities and plenty of time on their hands. That was the case for Mike Mayfield, a final year Highschooler who had in his words “managed to "use" (read "steal") an account on a Sigma 7 at University of California, Irvine”.

Any budding developer who has to subterfuge their way into cutting edge tech is cool by me. And he did it on a Sears motorcycle too like some sort of 70s John Connor.

These days when we think of making games compatible for things it generally means making it mobile friendly and removing most of the polygons so it can run on a Nintendo Switch. For Mike it meant coming up with a game that you could also play off a printer because CRT’s weren’t always a given.

What he was working on was Star Trek, and I think you could possibly argue, a roguelike a decade before Rogue came out. It features a randomly generated galaxy map which is navigated turn by turn in ASCII. It has permadeath and even resource management.

Gameplay features the enterprise scanning and hopping around hunting down Klingons and killing em all before the time runs out. Due to the memory and save restrictions Mike kept the game tight. But making the game procedural at the same time gave it solid replay value if you wanted to burn through reams of paper. How many god damn trees were lost playing this game? Imagine a time when your refresh rate was based on how fast your printer was.

Through a series of Boring events he came into contact with HP, who asked if he’d like to work on a version of this game on their own HP 2000C’s. The original version he was working on got ditched like a bag of kittens into a river and the HP version is the one we have record of today.

HP then published it in their public domain software catalogue, which was a physical book of programs and from there people republished it in newsletters and then eventually in a book called “101 Basic Computer games”. The book sold more copies than there were computers to write them on.

There was no copy pasting either, if you wanted to play a game you had to write it all out yourself onto whatever machine you could get your hands on.

Now here’s where the magic happens. When you’re writing out an entire game you’re gonna tweak it. People added new systems and the game became a chinese whisper of a program, morphing over time. Some had to take greater leaps because there were so many different ecosystems that they had to do entire ports.

This little game fragged PC gaming to such a degree that we’ll never truly be able to measure how much of an impact it had.

The sheer number of different versions of this game is mind boggling. The task of finding out how many ports, clones, and spinoffs it's had is a massive task that would require actual effort. I started to chart a timeline myself but it quickly started to look like one of those paranoia murder walls.

Because it was never distributed under the same name or publisher it will never swagger around like Elite saying it's one of the oldest franchises, or like Tetris saying it's the most ported. Elite actually got inspiration for their galaxy generation from Star Raiders which In turn had been inspired by Star Trek.

Personally I came in first contact with this game as a kid via Visual Star Trek on a disk I literally found in someone's trash. I'm a rat ok don't shame the customs of my people. the game looks like a petri-dish simulator but It's actually a lot of fun. Apparently nobody even knows who made this game, like so many of its peers it just seemed to spring out of the ground like a burst sewer main.

Doing a game of the year award for anything predating the 1970s is like holding a miss universe contest for abola victims.

So I'm drawing the line for the big rathole at 1971. That Makes this game the first chronological winner of the golden ratty award. Your impact may never truly be measured. But in my heart your game helped pave the way for all the rest.