A Brief History of Star Trek Video Games

[robwright]

Star Trek has been around for 40 years and has produced almost as many computer and video games. Unfortunately, few of them have lived up to the Trek standard. Marc McEntegart and Eoin Hurrell explore the 1701-A and -B sides of Star Trek gaming over the past 30 years.

 

[silentcoercion]

Aw, no mention of the "Star Trek" game that came preloaded on the PC we got in the early nineties. Black-and-white, grid based, ship-to-ship combat that was largely incomprehensible. Anyone else remember this?

 

[The_OGS]

I have "Star Trek - 25th Anniversary" for IBM PC, by Interplay. (Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al.)
256 colour VGA graphics, 10MHz AT or faster with 640KB required.
It's from the early 90's and I remember it played great on my 286, heheh... those were the days!
I have the game right here, it's still in perfect condition.
I got my Box Set of Star Trek movies on Laserdisk autographed around the same time, LoL... no DVDs back then.
Regards

 

[melvz90]

The author forgot to mention STAR TREK: AWAY TEAM... its a squad base tactical game... quite enjoyable like the commandos series...

 

[KellyT]

What an article.
Guys, wow!


I'm a STTNG guy myself and I absolutely love what you said about A Final Unity. If you had said otherwise I would be lambasting you SO hard rightnow.

Anyways,

How, where or even when I came across that gem of a game is far out of my consciousness these days. I DO remember how involving and complex it was.

Hours, days, and even months of my life were spent working on the puzzles, reading FAQs and walkthroughs, getting through this game to see where the adventure would take me next!

The memory is quite nostalgic and those who never played it but loved TNG series missed out on a big one.

After playing a game like this one you will instinctively reach for the save button every time you are about to perform a daring action in any game.
Restarts were common from one little screwup.

Anyways, thanks for bringing back some great memories.

 

[Marsman2k]

As someone who played the text version of Star Trek (on PAPER from an ASR33 Teletype connected to a DEC PDP-10 where the game written in FORTRAN Watt IV was hosted) I wanted to point out that the Enterprise was not represented as -E- but rather ]-O

I realize this is a minor point, but for the countless hours I spent playing the game back then, it was something I picked up on instantly.

In fact, we played it so much, the operators of the PDP-10 removed the program because of the CPU time we consumed playing it. However, crafty devils as we were back then, we had punched out the entire source code on paper tape - all 51K of it (small by todays standard but it made a 7" roll of paper tape!!)

And thus we drove the poor PDP-10 operator nuts reloading the source via paper tape over a teletype connection by standard cradle type phone attached to accoustic couples at a whopping 110 baud - all just to play Star Trek - in text - on paper..LOTS of paper lol.

Just wanted to share that with everyone - something to think about when you get impatient when your 3.8 Ghz dual core machine takes a whole 25 secs to load your 3D color graphics on your 21" flat screen for your favorite game.

 

[infornography42]

Birth of the Federation is hands down my favorite star trek licensed game.

Armada and Armada 2 were fun for a little while, but buggier than an antbed.

I now desperately want that fanmade BoTF 2.

Darn you.