If you’ve used computers from the 70s and early 80s, you’re probably familiar with the classic Star Trek game. What very few people know, is that there was another, very different Star Trek game at the same time. It was script-based, and it gave you a feeling of actually being in an episode of Star Trek. I’ve been looking for this game for over 40 years, and it appeared as if had ceased to exist. Until now. A copy – possibly the only one in the world – has been found. So let’s take a look … at the other Star Trek game!
Here’s the well-known game. It was written in BASIC, in 1971 by Mike Mayfield. It was released to the public domain, ported to probably every computer that ran BASIC, and was published in David Ahl’s iconic collection of computer games. It inspired the game Star Raiders, which was the killer app for the Atari 400 and 800 computers. And despite being text-based, its influence is arguably still felt today in graphical space combat games.
Here’s the script-based game. I played it back in the 1970s at the Boston Museum of Science. They had an ASR-33 terminal that called into a PDP-10. I haven’t seen it anywhere else. Occasionally I would try to find its source code, but with no luck.
Its origins are murky. Wikipedia only mentions it in one paragraph in an article about game designer Don Daglow. 
But Don didn’t write it. He thinks it originally came from a student at Cal Tech. Don just modified it, and then Don’s version got distributed by DECUS, the Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society. In my efforts to find this game, I saw it listed in an index of DECUS tapes, but I never found an image of that tape. Since I played the game on a PDP-10, the DECUS distribution is almost certainly the version I used.
Don Daglow, unfortunately, doesn’t have a copy of the game.
Then, in 2022, I was hanging out in a Facebook group devoted to BASIC programming. A guy named Gary Boyer said that he had a stack of printouts from Lehigh University in the 1970s. It included listings of 5 Star Trek games. I told him about the script-based game and asked him to look for it. And he found it! He might have the only copy in the world! He scanned the listing and posted all 13 pages to Facebook.
In the 1970s, Lehigh had a Control Data 6000 series computer. So this version of the game is probably unrelated to the DECUS version and to Don Daglow’s mods. The header comment mentions Tufts University, a person at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and another person in an unspecified location. There’s no mention of Don or anyone at Cal Tech.
So … who wrote this game? I don’t know. And by the way, Wikipedia says the game was written in 1972, the year after Mike Mayfield’s game. But there’s no citation for that. Given that we don’t know who wrote it, we can’t say with confidence when it was written. Is it the second Star Trek computer game, or is it the first?
I made a few minor changes to the Control Data dialect of BASIC to make it run on DEC BASIC-PLUS, and also fixed a couple of bugs. You can see a demo of the game in this video:
So, would you like to play it yourself? I’ve created a repository on Github with Gary’s scans of the Control Data version, my transcription of that listing, and ports to other platforms.
Also, check out my article about rewriting the classic Star Trek game in the 21st century, and take a tour of my retro computing office. I promise you, I have some things you have not seen anywhere else.
