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.
Board games
Star Trek Game, the only game based on the original series to be released during the show's run, produced by Ideal Toys (1967)
Monopoly, produced by Hasbro licensee USAopoly in three versions; one representing the original Star Trek series (2000), another featuring Star Trek: The Next Generation (1998), and Star Trek: Continuum Edition Monopoly, covering all five series (2009)
Star Trek: Fleet Captains, developed by WizKids, a tactical game where players create fleets out of a selection of Federation and Klingon ships and battle to control hex based sectors (2011)
Star Trek Battle Manual, designed and published by Lou Zocchi in 1972. Unlike most other games in this category, it was played without a board. Ships maneuvered on the tabletop using rulers to determine range and protractor-like angle measures on the large counters to determine facing. The game was produced without authorization from Paramount Pictures, leading to its reissue in 1973 as the Alien Space Battle Manual with all Star Trek references removed, followed by a further release in 1977 as the Star Fleet Battle Manual after Zochi obtained a license from Franz Joseph Designs for material in the Star Fleet Technical Manual.
A Call To Arms: Star Fleet is another hexless game (using miniatures) set in the Star Fleet Universe. Published in 2011, it is a collaboration between Amarillo Design Bureau and Mongoose Publishing, using a variant of the system seen in Babylon 5: A Call To Arms.
Federation Space, a strategic companion to Star Fleet Battles produced by Task Force Games in 1981.
Federation and Empire, the second and more elaborate strategic game set in the Star Fleet Universe, first published by Task Force Games in 1986 and presently by Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.
Star Trek: Deck Building Game, produced by Bandai. It consists of three stand-alone, integrable editions: Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Next Generation (2011), Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Next Generation – Next Phase (2012) and Star Trek Deck Building Game: The Original Series (2012)
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.
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.
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]
Pinball games
Four pinball games have been based on the Star Trek series:
Star Trek, released by Bally in 1979, designed by Gary Gayton with artwork by Kevin O'Connor.
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]
^Ahl, David H., ed. (1976). "Super Star Trek". The Best of Creative Computing. Creative Computing Press. pp. 275–281. ISBN0-916688-01-1. Archived from the original on 2016-11-28. Retrieved 2016-09-22.
