Before Angband, before Trade Wars, and before Nethack, there was Star Trek. Before Pong, even. In fact, the original series had only been off the air for two years when Mike Mayfield, a high school student, made his Star Trek game in 1971 for a computer that didn't even have a monitor. Instead, it output data by printing it on a teletype at a rate of 10 characters per second, reporting the results of your latest move as you commanded the Enterprise on a mission to hunt down Klingon ships.

Over the years, there have been many variations, the most recent from a fellow named Michael Birken, who talks a bit about the original game and how he approached it (warning: serious programmer talk). He's also made it available for download. This isn't just retrogaming. It's "retroest" gaming.

There are many subtle nuances in the original game. How often do different parts of the Enterprise malfunction? How and when do photon torpedoes randomly deviate from their specified targets? And so on…this is the kind of game that deserves to be reinvented everytime it trades hands. The exact parameters of the Star Trek universe are up to the coder. For example, in my version, different parts of the Enterprise malfunction depending on how often you use them. If you rely on the computer for targeting Klingon ships too much, the computer will start to fail.

The best part of Birken's page, and the BoingBoing entry that led me there, are some of the user comments from "old timers" detailing what it was like to play videogames before there was any such thing.

Read some of the choice quotes after the jump.

Enochrewt:

These were the times of Elevator Action, Lode Runner, and Karate Champ. Text-based graphics were on their way out.

Caseyd:

I used to hitch-hike from nowhere to Geneseo NY to sneak into the computer labs and play the APL version of this. (APL! on Selectrics!)

Estnyc:

I remember playing this in the early Seventies on a teletype at Skidmore College hooked into the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. Those were the days. You spoiled kids with your "monitors." You'd make a move, wait, wait, and then the teletype would slowly print out the results of your move, and the new position. I once played until I was one damn move away from winning, with yards and yards of yellow teletype paper strewn about me, when the game went into an infinite loop and was killed. I think that was the last time I ever played it, so great was my disappointment.

Technogeek:

In the mid-70's, when we were lucky to get an ASR33 and a 300-baud modem, it was pretty cool. I seem to remember figuring out how to program a bulky (and balky) desktop calculator specifically so we could use it as a "weapons computer" to assist with calculating angles and energy levels.

Dave Truckenmiller:

I remember playing this game on the teletype machines.. There was a nice pattern to the sound [of the print head chattering away], kinda made you think of the engine room humming while you where doing the long-range scans...

Marc Clifton:

I was taking this summer course at Stanford in Pascal. The teacher was terrible. I was coming from a BASIC programming background and did not understand the concept of a stack and local variables, and the homework was to write a Quicksort algorithm. You can imagine the mess I made of that not understanding recursion. Nor did the instructor explain how in "real" languages there is such a thing as local variables, and you can recurse into the same function and not destroy the caller's values.

Anyways, I was frustrated and discovered this game on the servers. I played for hours, failed the class, and decided the problem wasn't me, it was the teacher.