Despite all these things - including some of the most well-developed plots ever seen on television - the original Star Trek could never climb to the top of the ratings heap. Thanks to a massive response from viewers who deluged NBC with pleas to keep Star Trek on the air, the show avoided cancellation after its second season. That fate couldn't be avoided at the end of the third season, though, and in 1969 the last episode aired. But you can't keep a great idea down, and in fact it was only after this seemingly fatal blow that Star Trek truly began to go where no show had gone before: from the television screen to computer monitors - or at least to computer printouts, that is ....

The First Steps

Star Trek
In the summer of 1975, I attended a computer-programming camp at Clemson University in South Carolina. My father - who allowed me to stay up way past my bedtime to watch Star Trek with him - was convinced that the key to the future would be computers, and I'm sure he laid out a fairly large chunk of change to ensure I'd be in on the ground floor of this emerging technology.

Sad to say, I squandered almost my entire time at the camp, gleefully inserting a few naughty words into someone else's code or skipping classes entirely to swim or play tennis. The only thing that drew me back to my dumb terminal and printer was a little game called - you guessed it - Star Trek. It's impossible to pinpoint when the game was first created, but apparently by 1975 it had spread to mainframe computers at colleges across the country. For anyone who loved the combat aspects of Star Trek, this game proved incredibly addictive and actually quite advanced for the time it was written.

The basic premise of this very first Star Trek game was short and to the point: For some unspecified reason, the Organian Peace Treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire has collapsed, and the Klingons have sent an armada into Federation territory; the Romulans, eager to exploit the situation, are also in the vicinity. As commander of the USS Enterprise, your assignment is to establish supremacy in an entire sector - and that means tracking down and battling it out with the horde of invading Klingons.

It goes without saying that the interface was text based, and many players who didn't have access to any type of display had to read printouts as the action unfolded. Still, this very first computer incarnation of the original series let players take complete charge of the Enterprise. After using long- and short-range scanners to detect the presence of enemies, you typed in the coordinates where you wanted to travel and then set the warp speed you'd use to get there. Once you detected enemy ships, you could open fire with phasers or photon torpedoes, but at the same time you had to keep an eye on your energy allocation: Every hit from the Klingons or Romulans drained energy from the shields, and directing more energy to keep them at full strength limited how often you could use your weapons. If you found yourself crippled after a battle, you could even try to locate a planet containing dilithium crystals and mine them to replenish your energy supplies.

Next: Trek goes multiplayer, unofficially