The World of Star Trek by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books

Since the early seventies, STAR TREK fandom has been a phenomenon—and many people in the film industry have been baffled by the intensity of the fans’ involvement with the show. It’s beyond their experience to see an audience care this much about the stories, the actors, the characters, and all the myriad details of production.

It is clear that STAR TREK has become a cultural artifact. There are references to it everywhere. The series has been parodied on “Saturday Night Live” (with Chevy Chase playing Spock), on “Fridays” (with William Shatner playing William Shatner), and even on “Mork and Mindy”—with a surprise beam-in by a very surprised Captain Kirk. There have been references to it in E.T. (“Can’t he just beam up?” “Hey—this is reality.”) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (An Enterprise model can be seen in Roy Neary’s hobby room.)

On “Bosom Buddies,” Kip Niven once flipped open a stapler as if it were a communicator and said to it, “Scotty, beam me up.” References to the series have shown up in various comic strips such as “Peanuts” and “B.C.” and “Doonesbury.” In “Funky Winkerbean” the computer plays STAR TREK games as a running gag and in “DRABBLE” the mother goes off to STAR TREK conventions on a regular basis, and the characters in “Bloom County” love to play STAR TREK.

A murder mystery titled Two Plus Two starred a detective with a cat named “Tribble.” (If his date didn’t recognize the reference, he didn’t ask her out again.) Puzzle magazines routinely include trivia questions on STAR TREK. The New Limerick, edited by G. Legman, includes a whole cycle of STAR TREK limericks.* And STAR TREK bumper stickers can be seen everywhere. The most common one says, “Beam me up, Scotty!”

STAR TREK is not only an arcade video game, there seem to be several hundred different versions of it available for home computers. The first STAR TREK game was written sometime in 1966 or ’67 by a long forgotten amateur computer hacker; but the classic version was the one written by Mike Mayfield in October 1972. This became the “standard” STAR TREK game when it was put into the Hewlett Packard program library and distributed onto a number of HP Data Center machines. In the summer of 1973, David Ahl (now the publisher of Creative Computing magazine), translated the HP version into Basic-Plus for a Digital Equipment computer and added some improvements of his own to the program. Since then, the game has been copied, adapted, upgraded, and published in so many different places that it’s impossible to keep count. There are versions of STAR TREK available for just about every computer on the market. (Most of them are in public domain and can be obtained from local users groups.)

Most of the games put the player at the controls of the Enterprise—his mission to patrol the galaxy and shoot Klingons wherever he finds them. The game is generally played on a two-dimensional grid, and most of the STAR TREK computer games are fairly simplistic.

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