Super Star Trek — a classic computer game

Save the Federation from the invading Klingons! Visit exotic planets and strip-mine them for dilithium! Encounter mysterious space thingies! This is the home page of the classic Super Star Trek game from the days of slow teletypes, reloaded.

SST2K is a modern Unix port of the University of Texas "Super Star Trek" game originally written in FORTRAN in the mid-1970s. It has options to restrict its feature set to what was in earlier versions.

SST2K is a kind of time machine back to what interactive programs were like in the days of hardcopy terminals, before graphics and before even video displays. Despite this archaism and decades after it was written, SST2K retains significant play value. We think it's both fun and instructive to see how good a game could be written under those conditions.

Presently the code is available only via git at the SST Project Page on berlios.de. It builds and runs. We expect to do an actual release Real Soon Now.

In the meantime, you can at least browse the game documentation.

You can read the project's to-do list. If you want to help with these things, here are the project mailing lists:

Tom Almy, one of the SST project founders, has an SST page of his own.

There is a Wikipedia entry.

SST is fairly closely related to Eric Allman's BSD Trek, which also started life as a C translation of UT Super Star Trek. BSD Trek is missing most of the post-1978 features of SST2K, but does add a cloaking device for the Romulans.

The only other really current Star Trek port we know of is OpenTrek, which appears to be set in the ST:TNG universe (featuring the Borg Collective as the villains) and has a fancy graphical interface.

(There are also some multi-player Trek variants out there, notably XTrek and NetTrek, that have a very different feel from any of the Trek solitaires.)

For a truly retro-Trek experience, see the Star Trek ASCII Art Archive.

If this game interested you, you may want to check out some of the other ancient games at the Retrocomputing Museum.