The Classic BASIC Star Trek Game Got a Classic Update

Old School Isn't Just for Table Top Games

I’ve worked a lot of interesting jobs in my life ranging from a 21/Craps dealer to a construction supply delivery driver, from movie theater Assistant Manager to Non-Profit Program Director. One of my favorite memories comes from when I was working as an undergraduate in the university’s IT department. I wasn’t studying computer science. I was a Political Science and English dual major. That didn’t stop me from applying for a job in the IT department. As is true of a lot of people my age, I grew up programming in BASIC and eventually C++. It’s a background that made the transition to doing data analysis in R pretty smooth and that has inspired me to build a SmartyKit with my daughters this summer. We will also probably try to add memory and upload BASIC to have some fun as well.

I remember chatting about Asimov’s Foundation books, Iain Banks’ Culture series, Tolkien, D&D, and more with the staff there. It was almost enough to get me to change my major and had things gone a little differently in those early undergraduate days I might have. In one of these conversations, I talked about how much I absolutely loved Interplay’s Star Trek 25th Anniversary game. I first played the game on the copy of Interplay’s 10th Anniversary I owned. I bought it for Bard’s Tale and kept playing it for Star Trek 25th Anniversary because it was such a great adventure game that capture the best of the adventure game genre with the feel of Original Series Star Trek.

During that conversation, one of the staff said, “You know, we have an ancient Star Trek game on the server. You’ve likely never played it before.” I was intrigued, so I asked how to access it and loaded it up to play. It was a completely text based game, but one were the text represented graphics.

Image from Aaron Reed’s Code Archeology

While the interface was primitive, it was also functional and fun. It created a kind of “theatre of the mind” presentation of the Star Trek universe and I was an instant addict. I played the game during almost every moment of downtime I had. I also probably played it when I should have been doing other things. Super Star Trek, or as I knew it at the time Star Trek, was a 1975 and 1978 game by David H. Ahl and Mary Cole that was eventually published in the book Basic Computer Games.

Ahl and Cole based that game on an earlier 1971 game written by Mike Mayfield for the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer. Ahl and Cole’s initial updating of Mayfield’s game is very similar to the original, but they do add a significant change in the 1978 version for which Ahl secured the rights to use the Star Trek brand name.

You can find a text copy of the game in David H. Ahl’s 1978 book BASIC Computer Games and you can find the original BASIC code here. I plan on programming this, or at least copying it onto our “The C64,” with my daughters this summer using the code in Ahl’s book. If you don’t want to spend all that time typing into an emulator or onto a retromachine you can play a Commodore 64 version of the game right now on Internet Archive. The old game is tons of fun, but it recently got an update.

Emanuele Bolognesi, an amateur game designer and programmer from Florence, Italy, recently programmed an updated version of Super Star Trek which he then further refined by merging the classic BASIC game with the Interplay adventure game’s aesthetics. He calls his second game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary. It’s free to play and absolutely fantastic. The image below was taken from his Super Star Trek and you can see how faithfully he merged the two games using the 25th Anniversary edition’s view screen as the playing area.

I’ve already spent more than a few hours playing this excellent adaptation of Super Star Trek and it’s a great demonstration of how Old School Gaming/Retrogaming is active, and creating great content, in the video game community as well as in the table top role playing game community.