Star Trek

The goal is to eliminate all enemies within a random time limit. Mike Mayfield wrote the game in the BASIC programming language for the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer with the goal of creating a game like Spacewar! (1962) that could be played with a teleprinter instead of a graphical display. He then rewrote it for the HP 2000C minicomputer in 1972, and it was included in Hewlett-Packard's public domain software catalog the following year. It was picked up from there by David H. Ahl, who ported it with Mary Cole to BASIC-PLUS and published the source code in the Digital Equipment Corporation Edu newsletter. It was republished with other computer games in his best-selling 101 BASIC Computer Games book. Bob Leedom then expanded the game in 1974 into Super Star Trek. Independently, it was copied from a system at HP in Avondale, PA by high school students in Delaware. To save long-distance dial-up costs, Aron Insinga rewrote it in July, 1973 in BASIC-PLUS for RSTS-11. (They had no idea who originally wrote it or where it came from.) It became the DECUS library submission RSTS-11-20 in October, 1974. Ahl left DEC and started Creative Computing magazine in 1974. He began porting the games from 101 to Microsoft BASIC, with the exception of Star Trek, where he ported Leedom's version rather than Mayfield's original. The result was released in 1978 under the new name BASIC Computer Games, just as the first microcomputers able to run the game were coming to market. BASIC Computer Games went on to become the first million-selling computer book, and versions of the game were available for almost all personal computers of the era. Additionally, dozens of variants and expansions were made for a variety of other systems, based either on Leedom's or the original Mayfield versions.

• Title — Star Trek • Developer — Mike Mayfield, Bob Leedom • Platforms — Mainframe (Sigma 7, HP 2000C, Data General Nova) PC (multiple) • Released — Original 1971 (Sigma 7) Oct 20, 1972 (HP 2000C) Super Star Trek 1974 (Data General Nova) • Genre — Strategy game • Modes — Single-player

Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series in which the player, controlling the USS Enterprise starship, flies through the galaxy and hunts down Klingon warships within a time limit. The game starts with a short text description of the mission before allowing the player to enter commands. Each game starts with a different number of Klingons, friendly starbases, and stars spread throughout the galaxy. The galaxy is depicted as an 8-by-8 grid of "quadrants". Each quadrant is further divided into an 8-by-8 grid of "sectors". The number of stars, Klingons, and starbases in any one quadrant is set at the start of the game, but their exact position changes each time the player enters that quadrant. The player can view a text-based map of the current quadrant by issuing the short-range scan command. Stars, Klingon ships, starbases, and the Enterprise itself are shown as text-based figures in a square grid; the Enterprise, for example, is represented with -E-. The player can also use the long-range scan to print out a map of the quadrants lying directly around the Enterprise, with a list of the number of stars, Klingons, and starbases in each quadrant. The player moves between and within quadrants with the warp drive. Klingon ships can be attacked with either phasers or photon torpedoes. Phasers do not have to be aimed, but their power and therefore damage amount falls off with distance, and the player must select how much power to put into each shot. Torpedoes do not suffer this drop in power and will destroy a Klingon ship with a single hit, but have to be aimed using polar coordinates. Later versions of the game expanded on this combat system by adding features such as Klingon ships moving after each shot if not destroyed, enemy attacks damaging systems such as scanners or shields, stars absorbing torpedoes that hit them, and a calculator to help in determining the proper angle to fire the torpedoes. Combat is turn-based, and Klingon ships will fire back at the player in their turn. Movement, combat, and shields all drain the energy supply of the Enterprise, which can be restored by flying to a starbase. In some versions of the game, there are additional options for emergency situations, such as calling for help from a starbase, using the experimental Death Ray, loading raw dilithium crystals into the warp drive, or abandoning ship. Movement commands take up time depending on how far the player is moving. The game ends when the Enterprise is destroyed, all Klingons are destroyed, or the time limit runs out. A score in the form of a ranking is presented at the end of the game based on energy usage, damage taken and inflicted, and any remaining time.

• Illustration — ASR-33 teleprinter computer terminal In 1971, Mike Mayfield, then in his final year of high school, frequented a computer lab at the University of California, Irvine, while teaching himself how to program. The lab operated both a SDS Sigma 7 and a DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer. The PDP-10 hosted a copy of Spacewar!, a multiplayer space combat video game developed in 1962 in the early history of video games. Mayfield had gained illicit access to the Sigma 7 at the lab and wanted to create his own version of the game for the system. Spacewar! required a vector graphics display, however, and the Sigma 7 only had access to a non-graphical Teletype Model 33 ASR teleprinter. Mayfield decided to create a game in the vein of Spacewar! that could be played on a teleprinter and brainstormed several ideas with his friends. As none of the group had much experience with computers, most of the ideas were infeasible, but one concept he liked and thought was possible was a game based on Star Trek, then in syndication on television. The concept included the game printing a map of the galaxy and a map of the local star system, and phaser weapons whose attack power declined over distance. Mayfield began to program the game, creating a punched tape of the game at the end of each programming session and loading it back into the computer the next day. He worked on the game through the rest of the school year and into the summer after graduating.

Later that summer, Mayfield purchased an HP-35 calculator and often visited the local Hewlett-Packard sales office. The staff there offered to let him use the HP 2000C minicomputer at the office if he would create a version of his Star Trek game for it. The HP Time-Shared BASIC dialect these machines ran was different enough from Sigma 7 BASIC that he elected to abandon the Sigma 7 version and rewrite the program from scratch. He completed it on October 20, 1972, and the game was added to the HP public domain Contributed Program library of software as STTR1 in February 1973, with Mayfield attributing the game to Centerline Engineering, a company he was considering starting. It was later published in the People's Computer Company newsletter, and republished in their book What to Do After You Hit Return (1975), a collection of HP BASIC programs.

David H. Ahl was an employee in the education department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He had begun the Edu newsletter where user-submitted games became a major draw. He and fellow employee Mary Cole ported STTR1 to DEC BASIC in the summer of 1973, with some additions, and published this version in the newsletter. Ahl attributed the game to "Mike Mayfield of Centerline Engineering and/or Custom Data". In late 1973, Ahl collected many of the game submissions in the book 101 BASIC Computer Games, containing descriptions and the source code for many early mainframe games. 101 BASIC Computer Games was a landmark title in computer games programming, and was a best-selling title with more than 10,000 copies sold. As such, the BASIC ports of mainframe computer games included in the book were often more long-lived than their original versions or other mainframe computer games. He included Star Trek in the book under the name SPACWR, i.e. Space War.

In early 1974, Bob Leedom saw Ahl's version of the game in 101 BASIC Computer Games while working with a Data General Nova 800 minicomputer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and, having never seen a Star Trek game before, started porting it to the system. After he got the game running, he began to expand it with suggestions from his friends. He changed the user interface, replacing the original game's numeric codes with three-letter commands and adding status reports from show characters and names for the galaxy quadrants, and overhauled the gameplay, adding moving Klingon ships, navigation and fire control options, and an expanded library computer. Once it was completed, he wrote a letter to the People's Computer Company newsletter describing the game. Ahl, who by then had left DEC to start Creative Computing magazine, saw Leedom's description in the newsletter and contacted him to publish the game in his magazine. Ahl ported it to Microsoft BASIC and published the source code of the game as Super Star Trek to distinguish it from the original Star Trek game, calling it "by far the best" version. He later included it under that name in the 1976 anthology The Best of Creative Computing as well as the 1978 edition of 101 BASIC Computer Games, retitled BASIC Computer Games. He added a note that he had permission from the rights holders to use the show's name in the title alongside a longer note written by Leedom explaining why the galaxy had 64 quadrants even though the term suggested there should only be four. BASIC Computer Games was the first million-selling computer book, giving Leedom's version a much wider audience than Mayfield and Ahl's original versions.