UNLICENSED GAME
This game represents an unlicensed use of elements of the Star Trek franchise.
Star Trek was a text-based mainframe computer game written by Don Daglow on a PDP-10 timesharing computer at Pomona College in 1972, and upgraded periodically through 1974, including contributions by Jonathan Osser. The game was picked up by the DECUS user group in 1972 and distributed to many universities and other PDP-10 installations around the world, often appearing alongside the ASCII text game Star Trek.
The two Star Trek games were among the most popular mainframe computer games of the 1970s and could be played for free on college computer systems. The script game did not use a graphic sector/quadrant display as was used in the other popular Star Trek game. Instead, it described the action by generating a "script" of dialogue in traditional dramatic format using the names of Enterprise crew members from the popular television series.
Play begins with the player entering a name for the ship's captain. Spock then declares that a Klingon, Romulan or Tholian vessel has appeared on the Enterprise's sensors, and announce its position. On each turn, Sulu or Chekov provide updates on the enemy's position and Uhura asks for the player's orders.
The player issues orders by entering a number (initially from 1 to 10, later as high as 19 as additional orders were added to the code) to tell the crew of the Enterprise what to do. Additional data might need to be entered depending on the particular order. Options include moving closer or farther away from the enemy vessel, and firing phasers or photon torpedoes. The different weapons each have optimal ranges.
After each player turn the results are announced by Spock and then the enemy moves, fires or takes other action. Damage to shields, weapons and engines is reported, as well as the rising count of Enterprise casualties.
Source: Wikipedia, "Star Trek (script game)", available under the CC-BY-SA License.