Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This is the third time Star Trek has appeared on this blog. First came Trek Adventure (1980) by the oddball company Aardvark, with a parser meant for a system with a tight memory limit; the game itself was one of the best of the Aardvark games, with a clever map trick (where rooms are first accessible only by airduct, but eventually you attain a more natural way of reaching them) and some savvy atmosphere, despite the ship being abandoned and the protagonist being a random crew member who has been left behind.

The second time was the graphic adventure Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992), where I took down a fair chunk of the “episodes” but I got softlocked by a bug (I think). Dubious UI, but voice acting from the original stars still gave a wonderful Original Series vibe. I promise I’ll give it a replay sometime (maybe I’ll try to mop up those missing points). As an aside, I’ll plug the freeware game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary which combines the bridge of the graphic adventure with the gameplay of the original 1971 Mike Mayfield game.

It would have been better had the graphical adventure copied this style for the battles, instead of the slightly janky Wing Commander clone we got.

This game, by Randy Hawkins of Corpus Christi, Texas, first appeared in the August 1982 edition of 80 Micro. It has an internal copyright date of 1981. It was later re-written for the magazine Hot CoCo by Howard Batie under the title Galaxy Trek Adventure, with the odd condition that while the article gave full credit to Hawkins, the source doesn’t, meaning when the source code resurfaced later (as a game for the portable Model 100, for instance) it lists as being by Batie instead of Hawkins.

The problem with making a Star Trek game with 1982 technology (or even, let’s be honest, 2024 technology) is that the ship is supposed to be teeming with people. Even if we limit crew interactions, we’d at least have the main trio in action (Kirk, McCoy, Spock) with support from everyone else (Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, Scotty). While Deadline managed a cast this large, most authors cannot, so rather like Trek Adventure, the game gives a reason to isolate the player, who is playing as Kirk himself. Time to warm up on your Shakespeare!

(In all seriousness, William Shatner’s Shakespeare is better than you might think. He was allegedly quite good in his Ontario Stratford Shakespeare Festival days. I have a theory that the type of acting that works with elevated language can seem overmuch when transferred to everyday dialogue; that is, some of his more “famous” acting moments in Star Trek would have worked had they been Shakespearian poetry instead.)

I had some serious issues getting the program working because the source code does a letter-shift-by-one in order to avoid giving the game away to people typing in the type-in. Randy Hawkings explains:

… I have typed several other Basic adventure games myself, but by the time I had read through the program and, laboriously, typed every line, I knew how to solve the adventure’s riddles before the first execution. Just reading the list of nouns, verbs and descriptions gives too much of the mystery away.

The source code does a POKE in memory to do the decipherment, but this can cause havoc with emulators. I recommend trs80gp in Model 1 mode, where you load BASIC manually, then load the program manually, then start by typing RUN.

Otherwise this can happen.

If that’s too much work, you can play Jim Gerrie’s port of the CoCo version. (He also ported the original Trek Adventure.)

The Enterprise has suffered a boarding party of Klingons; Kirk wakes up seemingly alone, and needs to heroically claim the ship.

I haven’t even come close to being heroic yet, but I can at least give the lay of the land ship. Star Trek is based around turbolift floors. Star Trek First Contact (1988, no relation to the later movie!) lets you visit every single one of the floors. Star Trek ’82 lets you visit five of them.

A zoomed out view of my incomplete map so far.

Let’s linger a moment in the starting room, the captain’s quarters of Floor 2:

Trek Adventure ’80 put multiple objects, with the Saurian Brandy giving a convincing impression of Kirk.

You ARE–
In a CABIN

You Can See-
Saurian BRANDY
PILLOW
MIRROR
VIEWPORT
VENTILATOR
Computer TERMINAL

This game … just puts a 3d chess set. This does not quite give the Captain Kirk aura. Also and more unfortunately, no verbs I could find work.

Mind you, since CAN YOU REPEAT THAT is the error command for every rejected command, no matter what, I can’t tell if it’s a verb misunderstanding, a noun misunderstanding, or the game truly means the chess set as scenery and I’m supposed to leave it alone. My list above assumes the noun is SET, but maybe the game is looking for CHESS, or 3D?

Moving on and staying on the same floor, there’s a transporter in one direction, but again I’m parser hell. Am I messing with the PANEL, the CHAMBER, what?

Rounding off the floor is a confrontation with a Klingon who captures you if you don’t have a phaser. (The game even explicitly says the game over is because you don’t have a phaser.) If you do have a phaser, you manage to — nope, never mind, you get captured anyway.

It’s not a real time thing. I turned the emulator down super slow to test while typing fast and I had the same result.

The Bridge (deck 1) is fortunately empty.

There are STAR CHARTS you can pick up (GET CHARTS, TAKE instead of GET otherwise you get the generic failure) and three stations available. Navigation has a button for impulse control but it doesn’t seem to be working.

PRESS, not PUSH. sigh

Status indicates the Enterprise is in decaying orbit and having the impulses engines broken is very bad. Communications indicates in addition to a humanoid on board (yourself) and many Klingons, there is one Vulcan.

Yes, I accidentally did PUSH first every single time. If the text wasn’t encrypted I’d hack the verb in just out of spite.

Deck 3 (medical) has a hypo antidote in a sick bay, and a Klingon guarding the rest (who I can’t get by). Deck 5 (engineering) has many Klingons in the engine room.

Nope, that’s not going to work. Instead of a hypo antidote Kirk needs a hypo stimulant.

Deck 4 has a corridor one way (with a Klingon hanging out at “Spock’s tricorder”) and a supply room the other way. The supply room is designed like Dog Star Adventure where you’re supposed to just name what you want.

In addition to the phaser (see above) I found a communicator by guessing. I haven’t lucked out with any more items, and I have not been able to find any verb that works with the communicator (I’d love to try contacting Spock, who apparently is still somewhere on the vessel).

I’d certainly be leaning on my verb list about now but a generic error response means I can’t tell if a verb is understood or not. Sometimes in such circumstances I can find a loophole so I’ll keep prodding but this is a game that simply does not want to be communicated with.