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The enduring popularity of the Star Trek science fiction franchise has led to numerous games in many different formats, beginning in 1967 with a board game based on The Original Series and continuing through the present with online and DVD games.
Official game titles include the following:
Starship simulator games create the experience of commanding and operating a starship, and usually allow the player to handle a variety of functions, and to allocate resources such as ship power and systems. Some early Star Trek games in this category have had a huge effect on subsequent games in their genre, often leading to new level of depth and complexity in programming and/or gameplay.
This game category includes both computer games and non-computer board games, since the Star Fleet Battles game series provides a starship simulation, and is wholly a tabletop board wargame. As well as the Star Trek RPG by FASA which allowed players to take charge of specific areas of a ship's functions (such as the engineer allocating power) during combat.[ citation needed ]
Star Fleet Battles is different from most other wargames, which usually indicate unit strengths with simple numerical ratings. SFB players are able to deploy and manage power for a variety of ship weapons and resources. This is done via an elaborate Energy Allocation mechanism where even partial points of energy can be allocated to a number of different systems. Federation Commander is the continued development of this system in a more fast-paced version. Instead of the Energy Allocation system, it uses an innovative tick sheet system, which manages power use for each ship, and also tracks which weapons and systems are in use. The Star Trek: Starfleet Command computer game is based upon Star Fleet Battles.
In Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, produced by FASA, players actually had individual bridge functions during combat. This at one point became a separate game known as Starship Tactical Combat Simulator . The Captain determined the strategy, the Engineer was responsible for power management and allocation to different systems such as weapons and shields, the Helmsman for firing weapons, the Navigator for managing deflector shields, the Communications Officer for damage control and so on.
Starship simulator computer games which are set in the Star Trek universe occupy a large role in the history of computer games. Some of the earliest and more influential space simulator video games were Star Trek simulations designed to run on mainframes.
David H. Ahl played such games in the late 1960s at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley. He stated that they were much less sophisticated than Mike Mayfield's Star Trek text game, [3] which originated as a BASIC program on an SDS Sigma 7 mainframe system in 1971 and ported to many different systems. Ahl published source code for this game in his best selling BASIC Computer Games , and variants of the game spread widely to personal computer systems.
Decwar in 1978 was also a groundbreaking game. Another is Super Star Trek , an early text-based, MS-DOS-based game. This game created an impressive starship experience using only text-based commands and graphics. The game Begin is considered notable for having a convincing model of game dynamics, as it has very few random elements, and is highly mathematical. In 1986, the game Multi-Trek (MTrek) was brought online at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Written in C for a PDP mainframe, and also available via dialup and later TELNET, MTrek was arguably the first ever game to combine a persistent world, online multiplayer environment with a real-time, true 3-dimensional game engine and versions of the game still have an active player base.
Netrek was released in 1988, and was probably the first game to use both the TCP and UDP protocols, the first Internet-aware team game, the first Internet game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have persistent user information.
In later years, fewer games were produced within this genre, and more games were produced in the adventure games genre. The first new recent game was Starfleet Academy , which incorporated many Star Trek elements, but was criticized for depicting starship operation as more akin to fighter planes than capital ships. A sequel, Klingon Academy , was actually quite different, and was one of the first games to depict starship operation with an appropriate amount of complexity.
The Starfleet Command game series released by Interplay was based largely on the tabletop game Star Fleet Battles , and comprised Starfleet Command , Starfleet Command II: Empires at War , and Starfleet Command III . It constitutes one of the most definitive current games, depicting a wide array of ship systems and Star Trek storylines. This series had a more naval flavor, and depicted a number of ship systems. This series spawned a very large multiplayer ladder competition first with the "Starlance" system, and later on the "GamerZone" ladder. The main multiplayer setting is the "Dynaverse," which began as an official server hosted by Taldren, and has continued as a private effort (an earlier, unauthorized adaptation of Star Fleet Battles as a computer game was SSI's The Warp Factor in 1982).
Star Trek: Bridge Commander was another addition to this genre, reflecting the more deliberative, command aspects of this experience.
In late 2006, Bethesda Softworks released several console games which carry on the tradition of classic Star Trek ship simulator/combat games, Star Trek: Legacy for the PC and Xbox 360, Star Trek: Encounters for the PlayStation 2, Star Trek: Tactical Assault for the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable and Star Trek: Conquest for the Wii and PlayStation 2.
Several online games have appeared on the Internet. Vega Trek is a game mod which is planned to eventually become active as a multiplayer game. [4] Flashtrek: Broken Mirror, first created by Vex Xiang, is one of the online Star Trek games, and is entirely browser-based. It has spawned several sequels. One sequel was created by Vex Xiang, and multiple others were created by fans. A newer game titled Star Trek: Broken Mirror was being developed by a man named Darkwing for several years, but was apparently abandoned in 2014.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is one of the newest additions to this genre, and continues the historical pattern of Star Trek-themed simulator breaking new ground. This cross platform game is in a virtual reality environment in which four players actually occupy the bridge of the USS Aegis, Enterprise-D (Through Downloadable Content) or the Original Enterprise. Players get to see each other in real-time, and interact during the game to operate the ship and work together to handle various game scenarios. [5] [6]
Four pinball games have been based on the Star Trek series:
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1983 | Star Trek - Strategic Operations Simulator |
| 2000 | Star Trek: Borg Contact |
| 2002 | Star Trek: Voyager – The Arcade Game |
The history of the Star Trek personal computer game franchise began as early as 1971, with a Star Trek text-only computer game written in BASIC. Many PC titles have since been published, and the franchise was one of the first based on a TV program to break into the young PC gamer market in the 1990s. Activision and Viacom signed an agreement to develop games based on the Star Trek property in September 1998. [7]
Interplay, Simon & Schuster, MicroProse and Activision released most of the best-known Star Trek games between 2000 and 2003. Titles like Star Trek: Armada, Star Trek: Elite Force and Star Trek: Bridge Commander were all published during this period, as were over half of all the other major Star Trek PC games. The absence of new titles after 2003 was due in large measure to a split and subsequent lawsuit between Activision and Viacom which ended in 2004.
With the departure of Activision in 2003, the franchise under the tenure of Paramount effectively came to a close. Since the end of 2005, CBS has assumed most franchise management, including games and other products. Even with no new licensed titles released during 2003-2006, the older games like Armada and Elite Force still have an avid fan base which keeps the small community going. Development of the new Star Trek: Online title is complete and the game was made available for sale on February 2, 2010. [8]
Star Trek: Alien Domain is a 2015 flash-based Star Trek multiplayer strategy game developed by GameSamba in conjunction with CBS Interactive. [9]
| Year | Title | Platform | Developer, Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Star Trek: The Mobile Game | iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch) | Electronic Arts |
| 2014 | Star Trek Trexels | Discontinued, iOS, Android | Xcube Games, YesGnome, LLC |
| 2016 | Star Trek Timelines | iOS, Android | Disruptor Beam |
| 2018 | Star Trek Trexels II | Discontinued, Android | Kongregate |
| 2018 | Star Trek Fleet Command | iOS, Android | Scopely |
| 2021 | Star Trek: Legends | iOS | Tilting Point |
Numerous stand-alone electronic handheld and tabletop games have been produced by manufacturers like Bandai, Coleco, Konami, and others.
Star Trek: Bridge Commander is a space combat simulation video game for Microsoft Windows, developed by Totally Games and published by Activision in 2002, based in the Star Trek universe.
Star Trek: Starfleet Command is a computer game based on the table-top wargame Star Fleet Battles. It was developed by 14° East and Quicksilver Software and published by Interplay Entertainment. It was released in 1999 for Microsoft Windows. It simulates starship operations, ship-to-ship combat, and fleet warfare in the Star Trek universe. An expanded version was released in 2000 titled Star Trek: Starfleet Command - Gold Edition. It includes the latest patch and all the missions that were downloadable from the official website.
Star Fleet Battles (SFB) is a tactical board wargame set in an offshoot of the Star Trek setting called the Star Fleet Universe. Originally created in 1979 by Stephen V. Cole, it has had four major editions. The current edition is published by Amarillo Design Bureau as Star Fleet Battles, Captain's Edition.
The Gorn are a fictional extraterrestrial humanoid reptilian species in the American science fiction franchise Star Trek. They first appeared in a 1967 episode of the original series, "Arena", in which Captain Kirk fights an unnamed Gorn on a rocky planet. The fight scene has become one of the best-remembered scenes of the original series, in part due to the slow and lumbering movement of the Gorn, which some viewers have considered unintentionally comical.
The Star Trek franchise has produced a large number of novels, comic books, video games, and other materials, which are generally considered non-canon.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars is a 2001 space combat/real-time tactics video game for Microsoft Windows developed by Gizmo Industries and published by Simon & Schuster. The game is based on the Star Trek TV show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Star Trek: The Role Playing Game is a role-playing game set in the fictional Star Trek universe published by FASA Corporation from 1982 to 1989.
Federation Commander is a tactical starship combat board wargame system, produced and developed by Amarillo Design Bureau Inc. (ADB) It is designed to represent combat between vessels of various factions in the Star Fleet Universe, such as the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. The Star Fleet Universe is based upon a licence to use properties in the fictional Star Trek universe as it stood in 1979. Thus it includes the original series and the animated series as well as fan contributions but diverges from then and does not include anything from the movies or any subsequent television series. Much of the combat in Federation Commander is said to take place around the time of the fictional "General War", a large scale conflict in the Milky Way that involved prolonged conflict between a multitude of star-faring cultures.
Amarillo Design Bureau is a company which specializes in tactical and strategic board wargames. The company is a successor to Task Force Games, and is owned and operated by Steve and Leanna Cole, with partner Steve Petrick, and based in Amarillo, Texas. The company created and developed the series of games set in the Star Trek-based Star Fleet Universe, under license from Paramount Pictures, which includes the tactical combat games Star Fleet Battles and Federation Commander, the strategic-level game Federation and Empire, the card-based tactical game Star Fleet Battle Force and the role-playing game Prime Directive. They also produce a large series of miniatures under the Starline 2400 and Starline 2500 label, as well as the biannual Captain's Log magazine.
Star Fleet Battle Force is a card-based starship combat game system, produced and developed by Amarillo Design Bureau Inc. It allows fast-paced multiplayer combat between vessels of various factions in the Star Fleet Universe, such as the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, the Gorn Confederation, Kzinti Hegemony, Tholian Holdfast and Orion Pirates. The game is based on the races that appear in the original Star Trek television series.
[Star Fleet Battle Force] is a very intrigu[ing] mix of rules that simplify miniature space based games while maintaining a level of detail that preserves the flavor and excitement of the Star Fleet universe.
Star Trek: Legacy is a 2006 real-time tactics space combat video game for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 developed by Mad Doc Software and published by Bethesda Softworks in association with CBS Paramount Television and CBS Consumer Products. Originally slated for release in the fall of 2006 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, the Windows version was not released in North America until December 5, 2006, and the Xbox 360 version until December 15. In Europe, both the PC version and the Xbox 360 version were released on December 22, 2006.
Starfleet Voyages is a science-fiction adventure role-playing game of planetary exploration based on the Star Trek television series.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is a Star Trek PC simulation game developed and published by Interplay in 1997. The game simulates the life of a typical Starfleet cadet, with the player learning the basics of flying a starship and engaging in roleplaying with a crew of cadets, with the eventual goal of becoming captain of their own ship. The game included full motion video featuring William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and George Takei reprising their roles from the original television series and movies, and a multiplayer simulation mode allowing for up to 32 players.
The Final Reflection is a 1984 science fiction novel by American writer John M. Ford, part of the Star Trek franchise. The novel provided the foundation for the FASA Star Trek role-playing game sourcebooks dealing with the Klingon elements of the game. Although not considered canon because of later developments in the Star Trek movies and TV series, the presentation of Klingon culture in this novel and Ford's 1987 follow-on, How Much for Just the Planet? is highly popular in fanon alternate depictions of Klingon society and culture. In particular, the fictional Klingon language klingonaase is introduced here, in advance of the creation of the canon version of the Klingon language, tlhIngan Hol.
Star Trek: Klingon Academy is a space flight simulator video game developed by 14 Degrees East, an internal development house of publisher Interplay Entertainment. The game follows a young Klingon warrior named Torlek as he attends the Elite Command Academy, a war college created by General Chang to prepare warriors for a future conflict with the United Federation of Planets. Christopher Plummer and David Warner reprised their respective roles as Chang and Gorkon for the production of Klingon Academy.
Star Trek: Starfleet Command III is a Star Trek video game published in 2002. It was the fourth entry in the Starfleet Command series, and one of the last Star Trek games to be released by Activision. The game involves the a story-driven series of missions for three factions, that is conducted by controlling starships that are developed with RPG elements. The game was released for Windows operating system, and received generally positive reviews.
Begin, A Tactical Starship Simulation is a video game released for MS-DOS in 1984 and consists of combat between spaceships.
Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator is a game published by FASA Corporation in 1984 as the Star Trek II Starship Combat Simulator. It is a board wargame, set in the Star Trek universe, utilizing ten-sided dice and counters to simulate tactical combat. It came into being as the combat system in Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, published by FASA, as the space combat portion of the game. Later, it was published as a separate game, still usable by players within the RPG game.
Federation Space is a Star Trek-based space naval combat board game published by Task Force Games in 1981.
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