Click to viewYesterday, we told you about the rebirth of the Star Trek Online game, but that's by no means that only time technology has enabled you - yes, you - to fight the Klingon menace. In fact, back in the 1970s, one Enterprising fan (Sorry) created his very own Star Trek computer game - and now you can do the same.
Created by proto-programmer and ubernerd Mike Mayfield in 1971 by feeding punch-card programs into the Sigma-7 computer, the original Star Trek game - later revised and retitled Super Star Trek, which really should be the name of JJ Abrams' reboot movie - may have been embarrassingly basic by today's standards, but was amazing back in the day; amazing enough to have stayed alive for decades in the public domain, with other programmers adding and editing as they saw fit.
Michael Birkin of The Code Project website (An online community for developers and coders) wanted to relive the magic of those old days, and recreated the game, as well as making the source code available to anyone else who wanted to play along. The result is... well, not exactly The Force Unleashed:
I have to destroy 17 Klingon (note the game misspells it here) ships in 30 units of time with 3 starbases. Then it runs the short range scanner. The short range scanner displays the current quadrant. The game takes place in an 8×8 quadrant grid. Each row and column is numbered 1 to 8. The text on the right indicates that I am in quadrant (5,2). Each quadrant is partitioned into an 8×8 sector grid. The Enterprise is located at sector (5,4). On the quadrant display, <*> is the Enterprise. The remaining *'s are stars. Each = mark on the top and bottom horizontal-line dividers indicates a column. If you count, you'll find that the Enterprise is in column 5. If you count the rows, you'll find it's in row 4. Hence, within this quadrant, the Enterprise is in sector (5,4) as specified.
The goal is seek out quadrants containing Klingon ships and destroy them.
Okay, I admit it; I'm kind of lost already. It's like all those adventure games you had when you were a kid that I hated: "Do you want to say hello? Y/N" But nonetheless, there's something awesome about this mashup of Star Trek, gaming and general nerditry making a comeback for another generation.
Star Trek 1971 Text Game [The Code Project]