Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Although it was the kind of “won” where I wasn’t aware of it until I played a while longer and hit a crash bug.

You can read my part 1 on this game here.

Star Trek book from 1975, with stickers, via Collecting Trek.

In terms of responses to typed input, you can roughly divide the parsers from the 70s-80s era into roughly:

Tier 1: does not respond to anything other than “correct” input, single error message for all failures

Tier 2: will specify if an unknown verb or an unknown noun, but otherwise single error message for all failures

Tier 3: will acknowledge basic hinderances like using GET with too many items in inventory

Tier 4: will include custom reasons why things won’t work (“you can’t stab with anything in your inventory”; “his armor is too thick to stab”), the messages may give hints as to correct action (“stabbing won’t work, you need something blunt instead”)

This is quite rough and not always sequential. A game might even start with helpful messages but have them drop later because the author ran out of space. Tier 3 is the most common, but we’ve had Tier 4 all the way back to the earliest parser games, so it isn’t like any level is uniquely innovative. It’s just a matter of: does the author(s) have the technical chops and game-design insight to include them?

Game-design insight especially is more of an obstacle than you might think; I’ve noticed designers really have trouble having an intuition for how things might go wrong as it requires “being in the head” of a player who doesn’t have the knowledge that you do.

Star Trek Adventure hovers around Tier 2 (“CAN YOU REPEAT THAT” for nearly everything) with the bonus that one part where there’s a different message it becomes actively deceptive for the player! I’m referring to this:

I honestly thought this was a puzzle about speed somehow. Maybe you had a camera that saw ahead of you so you could pre-emptively aim at the Klingons? Or fire at them from a “different room”? Or maybe my joke about drug enhancement was real? (It’d be weird for Original Trek, but keep in mind lately this blog has seen a game where you have to shoot your own mule to get the shovel off their back, so anything’s possible.)

No, this is a spot with a “parser override”: when in danger from a Klingon, anything typed other than the “correct action” will tell the player they’re too slow. The thing is, shooting the Klingon is correct! It just was communicated with words the game didn’t like. You’re supposed to FIRE PHASER:

I want to emphasize FIRE PHASER is a reasonable thing to accept, but having a parser message which suggests that shooting happened but failed makes for one of the worst things a parser can do: an actively deceptive message. Of course, it likely never occurred to Mr. Hawkings that someone might communicate the exact sentiment of FIRE PHASERS and glean a different understanding. That is, he must have thought of the message as “you were too slow and dithered around instead of using weapons” without knowing it could be read as “you tried to use a weapon but were too slow”.

This opens several floors up a little more, but not the big set of Klingons in engineering (we’ll take care of them in a moment).

On the third floor (with a medical bay that has a hypo), you can find the Klingon guarding a library, which contains a TECHNICAL MANUAL. I was first quite confused because it initially talked about “NOTHING OF VALUE IN THIS SITUATION” which I interpreted in a holistic sense (we have Klingons who took over the ship, and the manual is useless in such circumstances). Instead the manual is supposed to be read in particular rooms, where you can get information about what you see.

On the fourth floor (with the supply warehouse, where you can GET ITEM-YOU-NAME and hope it is there) you can find a knocked-out Spock, then use a hypo from the medical bay to revive him. He will start following you around after. I discovered much later that when you type HELP with him around this is directed at Spock (not the invisible helper behind the parser) and this needs to be done at least once for some essential information.

Thanking McCoy is interesting. Even though he doesn’t appear, this implies he left the hypo behind in the sick bay before being captured with the hope it might get used; that is, he was able to scan the situation and prepare. Usually you’re supposed to just accept the helpful items will be left out for solving puzzles, without a reason given.

On the second floor (with the Captain’s Quarters and the Transporter Room) it opens up a Crew Quarters which have a tribble in them. Tribbles are from the episode the Trouble with Tribbles and are small furry balls with voracious hunger that multiply quite quickly. One of the most famous scenes from original Trek has Kirk buried in a pile of them which got into a space station’s food store.

Relevant to the game, tribbles also have a negative reaction to Klingons, enough so that they get used in the episode to unearth a spy. Heading back to Engineering, just outside where the mass of Klingons are:

It’s not clear from the phrasing, but that HELP line is given by Spock.

The trick here is to THROW TRIBBLE. I can’t swear there’s no hint anywhere (I haven’t bothered to de-rotate the encryption of the entire source code), but I think this is a rely-on-outside knowledge puzzle. These are general considered bad design, but I admit if you’re going to include such a puzzle, a Star Trek game is a reasonable place: you’d generally expect players to be fans. (Except some people in ’82 would have just typed the game in because it was there.)

The opens two rooms. One is a room for dilithium crystals where we find out the crystals are depleted. The other is auxilary control.

If you ask Spock for HELP at the commander, he’ll tell you the Klingon word for surrender, and you can SAY it to him and he will give you coordinates where your crew are on the planet. (At least in this version of the game, that’s all you need to “rescue them” — it gets assumed this happens off-screen. Remember what I said about not realizing the game was over?) You can instead shoot the commander, and Spock will comment that shooting an unarmed person was a poor choice. But the game lets you do it, so you get softlocked!

Oddly enough, I’m in favor of this scene. It reminds me of the baton taken up by Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (and later games like A Final Unity) where there are multiple approaches to dilemmas, and it is possible to be aggressive and get through but still be “less Federation-like”. Here, it’s clearly just one answer to the dilemma, but the fact Hawkins spent the work including this possibility (given how many times I saw CAN YOU REPEAT THAT) in this game means he was actively thinking about the peace-or-war dichotomy that arises naturally with Star Trek as a whole.

Put another way, you might argue that the format for Star Trek itself — being explorers and scientists who sometimes act as soldiers — is part of what spawned the gaming innovation in the first place.

Let’s get back to the other issue in the room, the broken Aux Control. The technical manual works here (and to the game’s credit, even I though I didn’t understand the manual’s purpose up to this moment, it immediately occurred to me as a solution).

Heading back to supplies, I tried GET SHUNT and it worked.

OK, I’m almost accepting of this room (with the wide-open GET WHATEVER format).

To be clear, this screen was before I realized the Spock HELP command so I hadn’t reckoned with the Commander yet.

The other thing the ship needs to move is dilithium crystals. I checked the “ship status” from the bridge and it mentions that there’s dilithium crystals on the surface of the planet we’re orbiting. Great, I just needed to beam down! Too bad it is so hard to communicate:

This is the moment I figured out HELP referred to Spock. He tells you that you need to SAY ENERGIZE. Unggh. At least I wasn’t alone here, as there was one player who experienced this in the 80s but couldn’t beat it, even with a walkthrough.

I was never able to beat it, because I couldn’t figure out how to operate the transporter. Years later I found a walkthrough I think on Compuserve, and it said to beam down to the planet, but not exactly what to type, so I remember trying USE TRANSPORTER, BEAM DOWN, ENERGIZE, ENERGIZE TRANSPORTER, etc., but I never figured it out. I guess I didn’t try SAY ENERGIZE. :(

An uneventful away mission follows. This is the last time you need your phaser.

With the crystals in hand you can replace them. This starts an immediate countdown as your ship’s orbit starts decaying. (It is possible to fix the crystals first and shunt second — this will cause the same result.) You need to rush to the bridge with engine control — no mistakes — and PRESS BUTTON (not PUSH! you monster).

We win! Yes, that’s the end of the game. What, you expected some sort of end message? I tried checking if maybe I could look for the crew on the planet but found that typing HELP made the game think I didn’t have a communicator (which was clearly in my inventory) and crash at the same time.

Worried, I ended up pulling up the walkthrough from the original magazine. This is quite unusual to print a walkthrough with the game, but the author wanted to show off the utility of the letter-munging aspect and so included one with the encryption, and a program to decrypt a walkthrough line by line (it says for you to BREAK when you’re done).

PROCEED NORTH FROM YOUR CABIN INTO THE HALLWAY. HEAD WEST UNTIL
YOU COME TO THE TURBOLIFT ENTRANCE. ENTER BY HEADING NORTH
AND GO UP. EXIT THE LIFT TO THE EAST AND EXPLORE THE BRIDGE.
FEEL FREE TO PRESS BUTTONS AND RECEIVE THE VARIOUS REPORTS.
GO BACK TO THE LIFT AND GO DOWN TWO LEVELS. EXIT THE TURBOLIFT
AND HEAD EAST UNTIL YOU COME TO THE SICK BAY. TAKE THE HYPO
AND RETURN TO THE TURBOLIFT. GO DOWN ONE MORE LEVEL AND TURN
WEST AFTER EXITING THE LIFT. GO NORTH & WEST UNTIL YOU FIND A
WAREHOUSE. YOU WILL NEED A PHASER AND COMMUNICATOR IMMEDIATELY
GO NORTH OUT OF THE WAREHOUSE AND THEN CONTINUE EAST. YOU WILL
ENCOUNTER A KLINGON GUARD BUT FIRING YOUR PHASER WILL DISPOSE
OF HIM. SPOCK’S TRICORDER INDICATES HE IS CLOSE BY AND ONE MORE
STEP EAST FINDS HIM UNCONSCIOUS IN THE BRIG. INJECT THE HYPO
AND HE WILL BE REVIVED AND HELP YOU. RETURN TO THE ENTRANCE
TO THE TURBOLIFT AND GO UP. EXIT ON DECK 3 AND HEAD EAST THEN
NORTH. PHASER THE KLINGON AND HEAD EAST AND GET THE MANUAL. GO
BACK TO THE LIFT — GO UP — AND HEAD EAST. TRANSPORT DOWN TO
THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET AND GET THE DILITHIUM CRYSTALS. RE-
TURN TO THE SHIP. GO WEST TO THE CREW’S QUARTERS AND TAKE THE
TRIBBLE. GO BACK TO THE TURBOLIFT AND GO DOWN TO THE BOTTOM
LEVEL — ENGINEERING DECK 5. FACE THE SQUADRON OF KLINGONS IN
ENGINEERING AND THROW THE TRIBBLE AT THEM. REMEMBER — KLINGONS
ARE EXTREMELY FRIGHTENED OF TRIBBLES. GO SOUTH AND REPLACE THE
DILITHIUM CRYSTALS. GO NORTH THEN EAST TO AUXILIARY CONTROL.
SPOCK WILL HELP YOU WITH THE KLINGON COMMANDER … THEN INSERT
THE SHUNT (IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT IT IS IN THE WAREHOUSE).
YOU ONLY HAVE A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME SO HURRY BACK TO THE
BRIDGE AND PRESS THE BUTTON TO FIRE THE ENGINES. WHEN STABLE
ORBIT IS ACHIEVED … YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED YOUR
S T A R T R E K A D V E N T U R E !

With this I was able to confirm I was done. If that seems odd to you, you’re in company, as Howard Batie (who did the Tandy CoCo port called Galaxy Trek Adventure) must have felt the same way. In that version, the game keeps going! Quoting Dave Dobson, who played the game on a portable Model 100 with its own unique bugs:

Now how do we beam everyone back aboard the Enterprise? The Tribble is still available, so maybe we can shoot one Klingon and scare the other to get into the Klingon camp. THROW TRIBBLE at the south edge of the camp on Tieras-80 works, but we get a syntax error in line 101, another semicolon/colon mixup (fortunately the Model 100’s EDIT command is pretty easy to work with.)

The tribble runs off again after scaring the Klingon guard away, but we can still FIRE PHASER to eliminate the sentry outside the camp. And now we can enter the camp and find the crew! YOU MUST LEAD THEM BACK TO WHERE YOU BEAMED DOWN, we learn, which is easy enough to do if we’ve drawn a map so we don’t wander into the surrounding dangers. We return to our landing point, SAY ENERGIZE one last time to beam back aboard with the crew, and victory is ours!

I recommend that version over the original. (The Jim Gerrie port is fine.) Not only does ending at a rescue feel more satisfying, but Batie thought to take out the “loops” in the corridors which don’t do anything other than make the ship feel bigger. I’m sure they’re there for “atmosphere”; they copy the technique that goes back to Crowther (which wanted his outside Forest to seem like it was outside) but the ship is clearly simplified even with the trick, so it’s better to just acknowledge the tiny map and move on.

Deck 4 as an example. Those “loops” in the corridor are gone in Galaxy Trek.

Coming up: a haunted house as we aren’t in any danger of running out of those, followed by Starcross, followed by two recently-unearthed games for the North Star Horizon.

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.