page_title: Star Trek (1971 video game)
section_title: Gameplay
hierarchical_section_title: Star Trek (1971 video game) / Gameplay
context_page_description: Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series and originally released in 1971. In the game, the player commands the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. The player travels through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy to attack enemy ships with phasers and photon torpedoes in turn-based battles and refuel at starbases in order to eliminate all enemies before running out of time.
  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! 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.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: A version of Star Trek running in a Linux command terminal. The Enterprise, represented by the "-E-", is alone in a quadrant with four stars.
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