A Retrospective on Star Trek Video Games! Part TWO.

(1986)

The next game in our series is Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy which was released by Simon and Schuster Software in 1986, which coincided with the 20th anniversary of TOS. A text based game in the vein of Zork, the game was created by TRANS Fiction Systems, AKA Ron Martinez and Jim Gasperini who also developed Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge. The game was the second text game released by Simon and Schuster Software in the 80's of a total of three, preceded by Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative, and succeded by Star Trek: The Rebel Universe, with Promethean Prophecy from what I've been able to understand, being the more popular entry. I managed to find a working web version of the Apple II edition of the game here. I will say, it's a bit difficult to understand what the larger cultural commentary on the various games was a good 27 years out, but I've read a lot of great things about this specific game.

Screenshot from the MS-DOS version.

The Promethean Prophecy has a story that may sound familiar: The Enterprise is attacked by Romulans, who are defeated. During the attack however the ships food supplies are contaminated with a MacGuffin. Since the MacGuffin, can't be handwaved away, they need to go down to Prometheus Four, the closest M Class Planet around. Realizing that they are not yet a Warp Capable species, the problem now becomes one of not just survival, but of the Prime Directive. What follows is an interesting look into an alien culture with a lot of not so subtle callbacks to episodes like "Errand of Mercy," "The Cloud Minders," and "A Private Little War." Unfortunately I did not have quite enough time to finish the game, but I intend to sometime later this week.

Operation and Reference Card.

Text games for those who have not played them, are a sublime experience. The closest thing I can describe it to is reading a book in which occasionally you have to figure out what the story is trying to tell you, and then describe that, at which the story continues. You can at times, if you would like to know more about a certain subject, ask more about that subject, and it will be described! On the other hand, sometimes I would like to talk to a character or examine an item that the programmers and writers never thought about in which the game will respond: "I don't recognize the word 'analyse'." or something else to that effect. The game starts off with an attack by a Romulan ship in which a sort of phantom image is being projected, with a vague description of a visual anomaly off the starboard bow. The Ensign at the con fumbles and fails to be able to scan the anomaly and the phantom ship so you must find someone who can: "Kirk to Spock" the command calls Lt. Commander Spock (The game makes reference to the death of a Romulan Captain at the hands of Kirk, which I believe is a nod to Mark Lenard's character in "Balance of Terror." He says it happened very recently, within a few months, so that puts the game somewhere between Season 1 and Season 2, as Chekov is aboard the ship. I bring this up because Spock's rank as the XO is very slippery. It is believed that at some point offscreen between Season 1 and 2, he was promoted from Lt. Commander, to a full Commander. I'm going with Lt. Cmder now arbitrarily.)  The game is not hard, but sometimes, I got lost and needed to check a tutorial. Despite the difficulty and some logically mind twisting bugs of the typical adventure game ideology, it's a fun game. Because of the strong writing and well drawn characters, Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy has aged QUITE WELL. Not having what is now considered graphical features has prevented the game from looking dated, and even just being played in a Chrome App, is a very satisfying experience. Track it down, you'll enjoy it.

A Retrospective on Star Trek Video Games! Part ONE.

Hello fellow Trekkies! After taking a little break, I'm back in the command chair and ready to move ahead! Starting off the next feature article set, will be Star Trek Video Games! Over the next few weeks I will be revisiting select Star Trek computer and video games, covering as far back as 1971 all the way until today, up to the behemoth, Star Trek Online. This will not be comprehensive. I won't be playing every single game, as many are long out of print, and some of them I don't have the technical know how to be able to emulate. (Though I will try.) But I will try to cover all of the major titles from every era. The story of Star Trek Video Games is almost the story of video games themselves, having had iterations on almost every computer and home console available, and covering almost every single genre (thankfully there was never a Star Trek fighting game, which is more than can be said of Star Wars.)

Star Trek (1971)

The first title, "Star Trek", is from 1971. The series had just started airing in syndication and it was a hit. Picking up new fans left and right, this is really when the era of Star Trek Fandom began, in the 70's. Obviously I was not around to see it, but it was an interesting time in our nation's history: Technology was taking off quickly. Computers, if huge and complex, were finally starting to exist, not just in some Sci-Fi authors thoughts, but on college campuses and in corporations. It was created by Mike Mayfield who has said it was thought up during geeky garage sessions with then-high school friends, and then developed on an SDS Sigma-7 with a friend's computer lab account. The game is text only, as the computer systems it was developed on didn't even have a screen! The game would print out on reams of computer paper! Mayfield than got a chance to port his game to the HP 2000C in exchange for access to the computer. HP then gained access to the game and started distributing it as "STTR1" via the contributed program library. This led to the game being seen by David H. Ahl, who distributed the game in a newsletter that he wrote about DEC BASIC programs, which led to the game being widely distributed through out that community. David later published a book containing many of those programs in 101 Basic Computer Games which saw "Star Trek" widely distributed amongst virtually every major computer platform. Hell, back in the early 90's I found a box with my mom's old Apple II and opened it up. There was a 8 inch floppy that said Star Trek. Being the young inquisitive nerd I was, I set up the computer (thank god I knew how to run DOS games!) loaded up the files, and saw this game, imagine my utter shock when the game was just numbers and letters, I think I got bored and went read comic books... The look of the game is stark, to say the least. With text characters representing a grid, you fly around the galaxy looking to blow up Klingons. There are photon torpedos and phasers. Phasers are weak but plentiful, and torpedos kill with one shot, but are limited. For the time, the complexity is rather impressive, with complex shooting mechanics and different strategies used for play. It almost resembles something like a digital board game, which given the era and the types of games available for reference at the time, seems reasonable. The game was procedurally generated, and had repair stations where you could patch up your wounds. Having different sectors, you would use the warp drive on the Enterprise, represented by -E-, to go to each sector looking for Klingons, +K+, or Starbases <*>, winning when all of the Klingons were defeated. The success of this game led Ahl to create Super Star Trek with Bob Leedom in 1978, at which time he acquired the official rights from Paramount Pictures to use the name and IP of the series, thus making it one of the very first licensed video games.



"Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator" is an arcade cabinet produced by Sega in 1982. From the get go, it is rather impressive. It utilizes digitzed speech and vector graphics, looking and playing sort of like a mashup of Asteroids and Battlezone. The game has a unique 3 panel layout, with the forward viewer providing a first person view on the bottom half,  with the top down sensors display and the supplies readout taking up the top half. The point of the game is to shoot down all of the Klingon K′Tinga class, making a return from Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, and save the Starbases which will in turn provide you with all important shields, after which you will warp to a new sector to protect the next Starbase. Having a fast paced, action approach, the game is rather fun. The fantastic graphics, for the time, make the game really feel like playing a simulation ala The Kobayashi Maru. I actually have played this cabinet before, when I was young lad. Having grown up in the late 80s, Early 90s, there were places like Wunderland that spotted the country that had a paid entry but once you had entered the neon palace, were a mere nickel a piece (some games sat defiantly at 10 cents) and this was a popular addition in the various Wunderland's I attended. Especially as a young Star Trek fan, with a fair amount of Star Trek movies under my belt, (8 years old in 1994, I had seen WoK, SFS, The One With The Whales, UC in the theaters in 91, and Generations, but not Motion Picture or The Shatner Effect.) I was hooked by the look and feel of this retro game that played better than a lot of games from that era (remember graphics and the first person thing were big for an 8 year old.) The digitized voices are really fun, even recreating the accents of the characters.

Captain's Chair Variant of Star Trek: Starship Operations Simulator (1982)

Pictured above is the "Captain's Chair Variant" which had I seen at 8 would have blown my head wide open, it even has the controls in the arm chair (though it seems that would make it more difficult than less.) The gameplay was impressive. The faster Battlezone-esque action had surprising tactical depth, with my personal favorite move being to warp past the enemy and turn around quickly before they set their sights on you. It was hard, but not impossible to save the Starbases to get the shields for the next round. If you are killed once, you are dead, but before you go the shields, photons, and warp will go down, which is actually fairly canonical, if even by accident. All in all it was a pretty fun game, and I remember sinking quite a few nickels into it back in the day. Now I know some people might have played something similar to this game, with less than stellar memories as it was ported to 9 different consoles throughout the 80's with some less than stellar results. Yikes. Along with this and the fantastic Star Wars cabinets of the early 80′s, I have many fond memories of arcades and older arcade cabinets as a young sci-fi nerd. I actually think gameplay wise this was a golden era as newer late 80′s and early 90′s cabinets relied more on cheap gimmicks and beat em ups with better graphics (I′m looking at you Konami and X-Men arcade!) 

Well, thats it for now folks, come on back on Friday for my first post in the Chronological Rewatch Project starting with Enterprise Season 1 Episode 1: Broken Bow, and then next Tuesday for my second entry in the Retrospective on Star Trek Games, covering the famous Simon And Schuster produced text game  "Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy," and then the rest of the best of Star Trek games from the 1980's.

Announcing Two New Feature Article Series

Welcome back folks! My first feature series about Fan Films and series is over and it went very well. I learned a lot about how much work goes into a large project like that and how much time I will need to devote to each post going forward. With that said I think I did a pretty good job for having just rebooted. Moving on.

I know I want to have regular features that bring people back, so they know that I am consistent, and until I have another writer providing an extra voice I'm going to need to be as realistic as possible towards my release schedule, so for the time being I will be sticking two feature articles a week. I'm not entirely sure know but most likely that schedule will be Tuesday, and Friday with some little posts to pepper through the week as well as some activity on the @TrekINADW twitter.

The first project, the smaller month long feature, will be a four part series on Star Trek Video Games through-out time. Now, as I learned with my last feature, this series will not be comprehensive. I will be focusing on major releases and fan favorites, with some examinations of projects that may have been well regarded failures. For this I will be going back to talk about classics of the 1970's but mostly as curiosities. I will devote most of my time playing games that defined the era for games. So for example, 25th Anniversary, Bridge Commander, The Fallen, Star Trek Armada. If the project gets too big I may expand it to a two month long series, but I'll cross that road when I come to it. If any one has so!e suggestions or other ideas feel free to send them my way.

The second, but no less important project is my long running feature set, The Chronological Rewatch and Review. This rewatch method has gained some popularity over the years, though not quite as popular as the Production Order Rewatch which I still respect. I will be watching every episode in chronological order of the in-universe timeline according to this guide: The Star Trek Chronology Project. This method achieves two things for my own purposes: Firstly it allows me to revisit the two series I have spent the least time with first, Enterprise and TOS, in a way that both contextualizes both and informs the other. Second, it allows me to combine this rewatch with the IRL airing of all of Star Trek. The shows in the 90's did not air in a vacuum, and to best recall the true nature of the series, especially the last two seasons of TNG and the first two of DS9, they must be be contextualized with each other. It will also give me a chance to revisit the end of Voyager the same way I did as a teenager, with it as the last bastion of the 24th century. I plan to watch between one and two episodes a week with a corresponding article each week. I will admit there is also a practical element to this: my budget. I want to watch all these shows in the absolute highest quality possible. Currently there are streaming HD seasons of ENT and TOS. With TNG almost done with the blu-ray sets and I hope to god DS9 coming soon with VOY finishing out the run this project will literally give the blurays years to catch up. With 705 different titles not including the animated series, at two titles a week this project won't be done for 7 years... Woah. I know it's quite a bit, and I plan to do quite a bit of research on the tidbits and ideas and between the lines, looking for trivia and other interesting anecdotes to add to the discussion. I'm doing this for my own sanity as I've always wanted to revisit the magic of the 90's when these episodes were waiting constantly. And week by week will give me a nice way to have a regular writing schedule. 

Well, that's it folks, my totally insane and completely nutty plan to start a 7 year project on a whim... Though, if there's one constant in my life, Star Trek is it.