#003: Star Trek [sttr1]

Release Date: 1971 / October 1972 / February 1973 (it's complicated)

Platform: Sigma 7

Genre: Strategy

Developer(s): Mike Mayfield

Publisher(s): HP (1972), DECUS (1973)

So, we're now out of the Prehistory era, and back into the main event. 1971, as we've already seen, marked the birth of the arcade industry with Computer Space being the first commercially released arcade video game. However, computer game development would also take huge strides forward in 1971, with one young individual, inspired by the sci-fi TV of the day, boldly going where no one had gone before with video game development...

The inspired individual here is a young Californian named Mike Mayfield. One would think that, for having created such a landmark game, there would be more information about him online. I found plenty of Mike Mayfields - a pastor, a musician, a convicted fraudster and numerous business profiles, but scant information about the Mike Mayfield, creator of the legendary Star Trek game. 

Eventually, I managed to find an article written back in 2013 on a now-defunct blog, Games of Fame, where Mike Mayfield contacted the author and provided a substantial interview. He goes into great detail about the development process of Star Trek. To sum up, the game was conceptualised by him and his friends while he was a senior in high school. Mayfield had also obtained access to a SDS Sigma 7 computer stationed at the University of California, and was learning to code BASIC with it. It's here where he begun development of Star Trek. Mayfield stated that the game went through several revisions after he graduated. 

Eventually, Mayfield also bought a programmable HP-35 calculator, and frequented his local HP sales office for assistance. The office then asked if he could convert his Star Trek game (he doesn't state how those at the sales office knew of his game. I can only assume he was trying to program the game for the calculator) to their computer - a HP 2000C. He goes on to state "the program had gotten pretty messy by then [from the Sigma 7 revisions], I ended up just doing a rewrite."

From the rewrite for the HP 2000C is where the game we all know comes. The rewrite was added HP's program library, and from there is where David Ahl, working for DEC at the time, obtained it. Ahl details his history of the game in The Best of Creative Computing, Volume 1 from 1976, where he claims the HP 2000C version was completed in October 1972, and "became the standard Star Trek in February 1973." The timeline he presents is an interesting one, seeing as I have Star Trek listed as a 1971 game. Mayfield confirms that work on the game began in 1971, and much of the work on the Sigma 7 version took place in the summer after his graduation - meaning between June and September. The HP2000C was a new machine in 1971, and it's plausible that his local sales office had one in by the end of 1971 / beginning of 1972. All this makes Ahl's timeline a reasonably plausible one.

Ahl then took the game from the HP library, converting it into BASIC Plus for DEC systems, with assistance from Mary Cole, and publishing it in 1973's 101 BASIC Computer Games under the title SPACWR (Space War - which Ahl admits was a poor choice of name.) From there on, the game spread and blew up in popularity, with many others modifying and expanding upon the original game. Even something like Atari's Star Raiders (1979) - a first-person space combat game - has its core gameplay loop directly lifted out of Mayfield's Star Trek. 

Ahl also throws a spanner in the works in his short article on the game. Mayfield's Star Trek is commonly credited as the first Star Trek game, however David Ahl claims to have played at least two other now lost Star Trek games on university campuses in the late 60s. I don't find this surprising, as Star Trek the TV show originally aired from 1966 - 1969. Tech heads would have been caught up in the zeitgeist as much as anyone else, and Star Trek computer games would have been a natural outflow. Unfortunately, none of these games have been preserved and are almost certain to be completely lost to us (except for one - more on that at the end of the article). It's a shame, as my curiosity has been piqued. Ahl states that these games were "a far cry from the one written by Mike Mayfield." So maybe we're not missing out on much.

Now, a brief note that Mayfield's game is definitely not the same as the one in the 1978 edition of BASIC Computer Games. That one's called Super Star Trek and, while not credited, is primarily the work of Bob Leedom, who took Mayfield's game and upgraded it in 1974, including features like quadrant names, shorthand commands instead of numbers, and a raft of other features that I'll get in to when I cover that game. I won't be covering SPACEWR from the 73' version of the book, as it's exactly the same as Mayfield's original game, minus some typo fixes.

More astute readers of the blog will know that I already have this game scored on the master list. This was one of the first things I did on the blog while I was still figuring out my process. At the time, the Prehistory series was just going to be a single article (what a fool I was), and I would start the individual chronology from 1971. This is why Galaxy Game and Computer Space have been done. Star Trek was to be the third game I did, but when I realised there was a lot more going on pre-1971, I shelved Star Trek and reworked the Prehistory series into its current form.

What this means is that I've already played and beaten Star Trek before. However, it's been over a year since then, and I never took notes or recorded my playthroughs of it, so there is some sense of coming into the game with more experience under my belt and a fresh set of eyes. I remember the game pretty well, but I also remember that my scores for it were more for practice than being the well considered final scores that they will be after this article. Those scores were also done before I made changes to my scoring system. That's how old they are.

With all that in mind, let's jump into my first playthrough (for this article, anyway)...

As an aside, I'm playing Star Trek through a browser-based port created by busfahrer. This port is based on a previous iteration into C# done by Michael Birken, who details his process here. Birken aimed to do an exact, line by line port of the source code, meaning the end result is as faithful to the original as it gets, typos and all.

Instructions, please.

First, the game asks if you'd like to read the instructions, as is now the custom for text-based games of the era. I'd highly recommend doing so, as there's a lot of mechanics to digest, and some of them aren't the easiest to understand at first. There is a lot to this game - far more depth and complexity than any other game made up to this point in time (that I'm aware of). I'll try my best to explain them here in a simple manner.

The core premise of the game is as follows: you are the Captain of the USS Enterprise, and you have been tasked by the Federation of ridding the (unnamed) galaxy of Klingon ships. You must direct your ship through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy, seeking and destroying every last Klingon using your Phasers and Photon Torpedoes. There are also Starbases present that you can stop at to repair, refuel and restock your ship. However, you only have a short amount of time to defeat all the Klingons - 30 Stardates - so you must be efficient.

I think that sums up the essence of Star Trek pretty well. Let's break that explanation down a bit more.

The "galaxy" of Star Trek is broken up into an 8x8 grid of 64 "Quadrants," as the game calls them. Each Quadrant itself is an 8x8 grid, with each space of the grid being called a "Sector." Klingons (represented by a +++ on the game map) and Starbases (represented by >!<) are randomly scattered throughout the galaxy upon starting a game (more on that later), as well as stars (represented by an asterisk), which simply act as blockades that you usually have to go around. The Enterprise is represented on the game map by the <*> symbol.

Stardates essentially represent the number of moves you have to complete the game. It's always 30 Stardates, which increment every time you move to a different Quadrant.

Starbases are present for the Enterprise to dock at. This does three things:

1. Restores the Enterprise's energy levels. "Energy" represents the ship's fuel and phaser ammo, and is also used for shields. If the ship's energy falls to zero, it's game over. Energy is always restored to 3000, and shields are also reset to 0 upon docking to prevent you from gaining infinite energy by docking over and over. Smart game design.
2. Restocks the Enterprise with Photon Torpedoes. You start with 10 Torpedoes, and Starbases will always restore your stock to 10, no matter how many or few you have left.
3. Repair any damage sustained by the Enterprise. Yes, this game also has a ship damage mechanic. There are different parts of the ship that can be damaged throughout the course of the game, either through battle, or randomly after travel. I'll go more in-depth here shortly.

Starbases can be used infinitely. I know in certain future versions of this game that Klingons can destroy starbases, but I don't believe they are able to in the original.

Now, let's look at the tools at your disposal in this game. You have 8 basic commands to choose from at any given time, assigned to numbers 0 through 7. Star Trek works on a sort of primitive turn-based system - basically meaning that some commands, like moving or firing weapons, consume a turn and allow the Klingons to retaliate, if there are any in the Quadrant, whereas other commands do not. The commands are laid out as follows:

0 - Warp Engines

Selecting this allows you to move the Enterprise. The way you select direction and distance is a bit funny, so allow me to explain. You first select your direction of travel, which is based on a scale of 1 to 8. 1 is East, and the numbers move counter-clockwise through the cardinal directions, with 8 being South-East. So 3 is North, 5 is West, and 7 is South.

Mayfield drew up a helpful visual reference for selecting directions.

The strange thing with these directions is that you can include decimal points, so you could select 7.5 to so South South-East and the like. It's strange because this is a grid-based game, meaning that it's very hard to judge where exactly you'll end up.

1 - Short Range Scan

This is the screen the game starts on. It provides you with a map of the current sector, as well as some data on the side. Stardate is the current Stardate, Status is Green if there are no Klingons in the Quadrant, Red if there is. Also displayed is the co-ordinates of your current Quadrant and Sector, as well as current energy and shield levels, as well as Photon Torpedo reserves.

The short range scan (apologies for the bottom of the screen being cut off. Didn't set OBS up correctly.)

2 - Long Range Scan

Long Range Scan pulls up a grid of the immediately surrounding Quadrants, and tells you what's in them through a digit code. From left to right, the digits represent Klingons, Starbases and Stars. According to Michael Birken, Klingons will not move into different Quadrants, and the positions of all objects are randomised every time you enter a Quadrant. In later versions of Star Trek, Klingons can and will move Quadrants.

An example of the long range scan. No Klingons or Starbases in sight.

3 - Phasers

The first and inferior of your two combat options. The combat options are balanced in a very rudimentary way - and by "balanced," I mean "not balanced at all," because Phasers are unquestionably worse than Photon Torpedoes in almost every way. I only ever use them as a means of last resort. This is because Phasers require expending your ship's energy - and lots of it. This is because Phaser strength is determined by distance.

I should also mention an odd bit of writing in the instructions here. On warning you about Klingons firing back, Mayfield writes "Keep in mind that when you shoot at him, he gonna do it to you too." It seems like a typo, or maybe a reference to something.

A lot of energy expended for little reward.

The further away you are from a Klingon vessel, the weaker Phasers are, and thus more energy is required to do enough damage to destroy one. For reference, Klingons do have hit points, usually around 200. Phasers vary wildly in the amount of damage they do, even at close range. It's best to try and get reasonably close to your target, but not too close, as the same is true of Klingon Phasers - they are more deadly the closer you get. This will also require you to spend more energy on shields, snowballing the effect of already having to dump several hundreds of units of energy into Phasers.

Look at the difference getting closer makes.

The only benefit Phasers have over Photon Torpedoes is that they automatically lock on to a target, whereas Torpedoes must be aimed. However, there is a system in-game that makes that advantage moot anyway, so throw that out the window. Only use Phasers if there's a Starbase nearby or you're desperate and out of Torpedoes, though you might be better off retreating to a Starbase regardless.

4 - Photon Torpedoes

Speaking of, here's the Photon Torpedoes. These, if they make contact with a Klingon ship, will instantly destroy it. They blew up the Death Star, after all. What's a Klingon battle cruiser to one? If is the key word with Torpedoes, as you do need to aim them. This is done in the same way as choosing your direction of travel. As I hinted at, there is a system in-game that tells you the exact direction you need to type in to hit a Klingon, so there's no need for guesstimating. You have a maximum supply of 10 torpedoes, and this supply can be replenished at a Starbase.

I use Torpedoes and Klingons go boom.

5 - Shields

Pretty simple - choose how much of your energy to dedicate to shields. Usually doesn't need to be more than 200 - 400 depending on the situation. Klingons tend to do between 10 - 60 points of damage each time they fire, just for a reference point.

6 - Damage Report

Does what it says on the tin. This command gives you the report on the different parts of the Enterprise that can be damaged. They all correlate to commands, so if Long Range Sensors are damaged, you can't use the Long Range Scan until it's fixed, so on and so forth. Damage happens randomly during travel, and it also fixes itself over time, taking longer depending on what grade of damage it gets, with -3 taking the longest to repair. Of course if you reach a Starbase all damage will be repaired upon docking. Repair numbers can also go randomly above zero, which works as a buffer zone meaning that a part won't be broken if it incurs damage.

Long Range and Shields are cooked, Captain.

7 - Computer

This is the most complicated command, as it's in reality 4 commands in one. The computer has 3 different things it can do at first, with one having an additional option later on. These are marked with the numbers 0 - 2:

0 - Galaxy Record

Brings up the full map of the galaxy. Only explored        Quadrants are filled in. This is seriously helpful to get your bearings in the galaxy and to figure out where any missing Klingons might be hiding.

Much of the galaxy remains unexplored.

1 - Status Report 

Provides mission info - how many Klingons, Starbases and Stardates remain. Also brings up the damage report, making that command slightly redundant. But it takes less steps to bring up the damage report on its own, so I guess that makes up for it a bit.

Status report, Mr. Zulu.

2 - Photon Torpedo Data

This right here is what makes the Photon Torpedoes the weapon of choice in this game. So potent is it that I think it's almost game-breaking and kills a lot of the challenge of combat. The computer here gives you the exact direction and distance of all Klingons in the current Quadrant. You can then type the direction into the Photon Torpedo command, and you'll hit every time. I've read that the Torpedoes can occasionally go off course and miss, but I've yet to see that. Here you're also given the option to pull up a calculator to do manual inputs, but I've never found this useful - that is, if I even understood how to use it.

This is absolutely busted.

If it were me, what I would've done was not have the automatic data, and made you do the manual calculations. But, I suppose it is Star Trek, after all. They would have the tech to automatically do the calculations. It just feels less rewarding from a gameplay perspective to have it handed to you like that.

So that does it for the gameplay mechanics. As you can see, this game is far, far more advanced than any game preceding it. It's kind of jaw-dropping, in all honesty, that in a single year we've basically gone from coin-flip simulator to this.

And that was just the introduction to the game. I haven't even gotten to my first playthrough yet. And, there's still one more thing to discuss: seeds. No, not the plant-in-your-garden kind.

I mentioned before that, at the start of a new game, Klingons and Starbases are scattered randomly throughout the galaxy. This is partly true. I didn't say how exactly the game does this. Like a few games before it, Star Trek determines the starting state of the game through game seeds - and, like those games, you get to pick the seed.

You might think this is a bit naff and nerdy, but it's actually quite important to your experience with Star Trek. Critically, the seed determines the number of Klingons and Starbases on the map - effectively setting the game difficulty. In a sense, you get to choose the difficulty of the game based on the seed you select. 

I was very curious to see what sort of numbers the seed generation would spit out at me, so I went at it for an hour. I wanted to know the highest and lowest amounts of Klingons and Starbases that the game would generate, so I generated the first 250 seeds (and some after that), and recorded the results, hoping to get an idea of what the hardest and easiest seeds are. The results I ended up with from my hour-or-so of seed testing seriously surprised me.

Let's start with Starbases, as there's far less variance in these. From my testing, the game would generate between 1 to 6 Starbases. I never found zero, which I assume means the game will never generate a Starbase-less map.

Klingons, on the other hand... well, let's just say this got a little crazy. My testing up to seed 250 generated a lowest Klingon count of 10, and a highest of 27. That was a little higher a maximum than I expected, but about as low as I thought it would go. 

However, I decided to keep spot testing seeds beyond 250, and this is where things got more extreme. The lowest Klingon count I found was a measly 7, from seeds 6700 and 6703, while the highest I found was 32. Thirty-two. My mouth sat agape when I saw this number. This was courtesy of seed 3300. A few successive multiples of 3 afterwards also had 31. I never saw the count on any other seeds go above 30, so I was stunned seeing this number. To compound things even more, most of those seeds only had 2 Starbases. Yikes. That's like maximum difficulty on Star Raiders.

As a brief guideline, for beginners at this game, the easiest seeds I found were 6700 and 6703. If you're craving a challenge, 3300 is the seed for you, and you can also try 3303 and 3306 as well. The seed generation really likes multiples of 3, in case you couldn't tell.

For the sake of getting things done, I did my first playthrough here with seed 6700. I've played the game before, so I don't feel I'm doing myself or you a disservice doing this. I'm going to try seed 3300 for the YT video anyway, so you'll get to see the real deal there, regardless (if I can beat it...)

The starting situation - destroy all... Kingons??

And I mentioned typos earlier because there's a very obvious one right at the start of the game. You'll see that it mistakenly calls Klingons "Kingons." Oopsie.

So 6700 plops us down in the middle of the map, with no Klingons in sight. I took some time to refamiliarise myself with the commands before setting a course. I ended up traversing to the top of the map inadvertently while still trying to wrap my head around the directional system. This was quite fortunate, however, as I landed in between two Quadrants housing Klingons.

Well, well, well. Look what we have here.

Time to prepare for battle. I move to the east Quadrant, housing 3 Klingon vessels. Shields up, and arm the Photon Torpedoes. I don't need to use the computer for the first one - fire directly South-West, and he's a goner. I take some retaliatory hits to my shields, but I overprepared, so the damage is negligible.

Nailed one. Two left.

The other two ships are at slightly trickier angles, so I consult the ship's computer for information. It gives me the positions of the other two Klingons, and I fire away and destroy both of them. That only leaves 4 Klingons to go, and I already know where 1 is.

I track back west to the Quadrant with a lone Klingon lurking inside. Apparently my shield control was damaged in the previous skirmish, as I'm notified of its successful repair. The game doesn't always tell you when parts are damaged.

My engineers are doing a lousy job of notifying me of the ship's status.

There's the Klingon. Note that there's a star almost directly in between us. Stars are impassable obstacles, as I've mentioned before, but they can also block Photon Torpedoes. The game notifies you of hitting one with a Torpedo by saying "You can't destroy stars silly." Obviously. I need to summon the Planet Smasher for that.

Fortunately that star doesn't cause any issues, and I take out that Klingon ship easily with a Torpedo. 3 Klingons left. Sometimes the game can devolve into a game of Hide & Seek here, but fortunately I have a lead on the Long Range scan - there's a Klingon South-West of my location. As there was a star in my way diagonally, I have to head West to get around it first before I can go South.

Look at the stars... look how they get in my way...

I'm in a bit of an awkward position with the stars in this Quadrant, so I have to maneuver to a spot where I can get a straight shot South. I undershot by selecting Warp Factor 0.2 - I should have done 0.4. It doesn't cost anything, and I even gain back a bit of extra energy out of the mistake. Also, somewhere along the line my Phaser Controls were damaged. I didn't need them anyway, so that's fine.

So eventually I get down to Quadrant 3,2 (the y co-ordinate goes from top to bottom), and the Klingon is to my West and down one row. I use the computer to calculate the trajectory and easily deal with it. Only 2 Klingons left.

There are no more Klingons in the immediate Quadrants, so time to do some Star Trekking. I spend a couple of minutes exploring the galaxy, and run into a couple of Starbases.

Allies on the horizon!

This is a good opportunity to show docking at a Starbase. It's quite simple - just maneuver your ship to any adjacent tile (diagonals included), and the Enterprise will be automatically docked.

The game automatically prevents you from crashing if you overshoot in your navigation.

This stopover worked out quite well for me, as my Long Range scans picked up the final 2 Klingons in Quadrant 8,7. I saunter on down (my Phasers get damaged again. What a shame.) to face the last 2 Klingons. 

The first one is right in my face as I enter the Quadrant. There's no risk of blowing myself up if I use a Torpedo, so that's an easy one to deal with. I remember first to put my shields back up, and then fire away.

The last stragglers.

I pull up the computer for the final Klingon, fire a Torpedo, and the Klingon fleet meets its end, and the galaxy is saved. Once again the game misspells Klingon as "Kingon," and states that the Federation is saved. Never mind the galaxy and all its potential inhabitants. You are also given an "efficiency rating." Mine was 500. I don't know if that's good or not. According to Birken, this is "a function of the time remaining," which Mayfield calculated in minutes. I'm assuming a higher score is better? A new game is immediately generated also, if you want to have another go.

All the Kingons were defeated, but what about the Klingons?

I had another go after this on the 6703 seed, as I realised I hadn't got any footage of using Phasers (some of the earlier gameplay photos are from that run.) There was nothing of note to take from that run, other than it being really easy.

At this point I decided to do the nightmare seed (3300) for the video. And, would you believe - I beat it first try! It was not easy, however. I defeated the last Klingon on the very last Stardate. I had to get clever with the directions, using diagonal movement to get to the Quadrants I needed to be in without wasting Stardates (I made a few mistakes). Also had to use Phasers once after running out of Torpedoes. It was almost like a puzzle, and forced me to use of most of the mechanics, which was good fun, and a good challenge.

This was as close as you can get to running out of time.

Now, it's finally time to do the scores. There was a lot to talk about with this game, which was a nice change of pace from the games I've had where there was nothing to talk about. This might actually be my longest article to date.

I'm not going to leave you in suspense here, either. This is by far and away the best game I've played for the blog. How good is it? Let's find out.

Time Played: 2 hours - if I don't include the hour of seed testing and include my older playthroughs.

Difficulty: 5/10 (Medium)

The most challenging part of the game is learning the mechanics. Once you get your head around them, it's not too hard to beat. Difficulty is also somewhat variable based on seed generation.

Gameplay: 14/20

Man, this is a huge step up from every game that's come before it. For reference, the highest gameplay score I gave out before this was for Hamurabi, which was 10. Star Trek blows that game out of the water with its depth. It's so well though out - from movement around the map, to resource management with your energy reserves and Photon Torpedoes. Bonus points for manual seed generation, allowing you to customise the difficulty to a degree. Harder seeds really force you to use everything at your disposal, and to learn to be efficient with your movement around the map. Random part damage also adds to the depth by adding a layer of reactive strategy to the game.

I will criticise the weapon balance though as the one area that needed some more thought. It's far too much in the favour of Photon Torpedoes. The computer's auto-calculations make combat a non-factor 99% of the time, and make the manual calculator completely redundant. Phasers are really only here as a last resort, and are wildly inconsistent in the damage they deal, even at close range.

Controls: 5/10

While the gameplay is innovative for its time, Star Trek's controls are not. It's as standard as it gets for its time - every input is arbitrarily set to an integer or decimal. Granted, this could have been a whole lot worse with a game of such uncharted complexity. However, it could have been better, for the sake of aiding command memorisation. Later renditions of the game do think about this, using shorthand codes for commands instead.

Visuals: 8/10

I actually feel like I'm playing a video game when I look at Star Trek. There's actual graphics. The Quadrant map is the real star of the game's visuals, with every object clearly defined, the game data on the side being formatted clearly, and the border around the top and bottom of the Quadrant map is a wonderful little detail. The Long Range and galaxy maps are also appreciated for being able to provide information in a simple, visual manner.

I'm not giving the game a story score. It really doesn't have a story besides "kill Klingons." That doesn't constitute a story to me.

Functionality: 5/5

Despite the "Kingon" typo, and some minor syntactical errors in the instructions, this game deserves full marks here. For a game of this size, I'm very impressed that everything works as intended, with no noticeable glitches or broken mechanics noticed during my play time.

Accessibility: 2/5

Most text-based games already get marked down for accessibility, and Star Trek is no exception. It's even harder to get into due to the immediately perceived complexity of the game - intimidating for players new to text-based games. The game's instructions are a bit long-winded, and don't do the best job of explaining everything, either. 

All this gives Mike Mayfield's Star Trek a final score of 47. Hah, that's my favourite number. Percentage wise, that's 67.14%, resulting in a high (and so far, the only) C-tier placement. It's almost 15 percentage points higher than High Noon! Just shows how much of a leap forward Star Trek is in game development.

It's quite staggering to consider the leap in development from the glorified coin-flip simulators of the year prior to Star Trek (I know this game was technically completed in '72/'73 if Ahl is right, but my point still stands.) And this was made by one guy! Granted, most games were at this time, but nobody was making games even close to this level of complexity in 1971 (maybe only the Oregon Trail team come close, but that was a team of 3, and the original version of that game is a special case that I'll deal with when the first public version of that game comes up in the list.) 

I'd dare say that Star Trek is revolutionary, and much of game development on the computer side of things from now on builds on the foundation Mike Mayfield laid with this game. Star Trek is an absolutely foundational strategy video game, and a must play if you have any interest in gaming history, strategy games, text-based games, or all of the above.

Before finishing up, I briefly want to mention the other Star Trek game from 1971. This one is known as SCTREK, and was (maybe) developed by Don Daglow, a now veteran of the industry who we'll get to know better as time goes on. This is a very different game to Mayfield's, more like an early antecedent of text-based adventure games like Wander or Zork. It was thought lost for a long time, but was recovered in 2022 by Bob Alexander at Galactic Studios. He ported the source code to a couple of platforms, but I don't know how to get the DEC BASIC-plus port working, so I can't play it. Yet. He also ported it to the TRS-80, so maybe I'll give it a go when we get to 1978...

And with that, my look at 1971 has already come to an end. It's surprising how much smaller the list of games is for 1971, compared to 1970 and especially 1972. But, that's the way it is. All of my databases correlate on this point. It is indeed a strange oddity.

From this point onward, as we move through the 1970s, with the fledgling arcade industry having begun, take note of the vastly differing trajectories arcade and computer game development will take over the 1970s. The arcade ends up focusing on simple, reflexive, skill based action games. Whereas, the computer scene will turn into an entirely different, experimental, way-ahead-of-its-time monster that I am extremely excited to sink my teeth into.

Prehistory Score Revisions

With the close of the Prehistory of Video Game series, I wanted to take some time to review my process - specifically my game scores. I've felt a little dissatisfied with the scores for text-based games (of which there are a lot in this period), and their resulting positions. I don't believe they accurately reflect my opinions on the games in some cases.

In this post, I'll give an overview of the changes I've made in my scoring philosophy, and will then give a list of all the resulting score changes. Prepare for a short essay on video game review philosophy.

The main place of discontent in my scores for text-based games is the controls metric. This is a difficult metric to grade for text-based games. All inputs are made through the computer keyboard, which is an essential part of everyday computer usage, so how do I judge how good or bad the controls are for a text-based game? There aren't really any ergonomic issues with regards to controller feel, input responsiveness and whatnot, so other factors have to come to the forefront.

I think, for text games, that simplicity is the key factor to consider when it comes to controls. Inputs should be both simple in and of themselves, and simple to remember. For example, if I have to keep referring back to the manual or opening instructions because I can't remember the inputs, that's a problem. However, simplicity can be contextual. For a more advanced command, it's logical to expect the inputs required to be more advanced (and thus also harder to remember.) The inverse is also true - simple inputs for simple commands. If I need to input some long string of numbers, letters or words to do something as simple as "move north," then that is a massive problem.

Inputs for text games should also just make sense. As an extreme example, it would be like a Switch game having the jump command mapped to left on the analog stick. If it doesn't make sense for the game, it's a poor design choice. A text game example I keep going back to is PDP Basketball. The game has two sets of commands - offensive and defensive. The four offensive commands are mapped to numbers 1 - 4. Makes sense, and is simple. The defensive commands, on the other hand, are mapped to 6, 6.5, 7 and 7.5. This does not make sense. There's no need to have decimals here, those commands could be easily mapped to 5 - 8, or 6 - 9. That makes an awful lot more sense and is consistent with the offensive commands. It's also easier to input and remember, so also a good simplicity example.

All of this is to try and make the grading process as objective as possible. However, that also requires a standard by which to judge every game against. Figuring out that standard is the difficult part. What does an average 5/10 game look like? What's a 10? What's a 0? The only way to know these things is through data. I need to obtain more data by playing and reviewing more games, assessing what my current scoring patterns are, and then apply my revised philosophy to adjust scores properly.

Typically I default to giving a text-game a 10 on controls. In most instances, this is because the game requires commands of only one or two inputs (usually numbers.) They make perfect sense and can't possibly be simpler. My problem is, I don't find this particularly satisfying. Yes, those controls are sensible and simple, but they're not enjoyable to input. Perhaps that's another key factor - how fun are the commands to input? Do they have some charm to them? Or do they creatively integrate the inputs into the game's story and lore? Or is it just like inputting data on a spreadsheet?

And so that's where the standard for text-games will begin. From now on, those games that have perfectly sensible and simple, but entirely plain inputs will receive a 5/10 score. With this in mind, here's what the score changes for controls are:

• Starting from the bottom of the tier list, Batnum (1967) is dropping to a 5, which perfectly reflects the new adjustments. It's sensible and simple, but is merely inputting numbers.
• Likewise, Batnum (1970) also drops to a 5. I gave that a 9 originally, but it still runs in line enough with the new standard to not be lower than 5.
• Qubic was initially a 6, which, looking back, I think was quite harsh. Its inputs are very standard and logical, I just kept mixing up the x and y-axis inputs. This'll go to a 5 as well.
• War drops to a standard 5.
• Digits is the first game that diverges from the standard score. I gave it a 7 initially because it's a bit of pain inputting all 10 numbers with commas separating each one. This gets a 4.
• Horserace is now also a 5.
• PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball drops to a 4 for the reasons I stated above when I used it as an example of inputs being inconsistent and not making sense. It doesn't negatively affect the gameplay too badly, but is still a flaw.
• Roulette, Gamnim, 1Queen, Civil War, Lunar, Battle, High Noon and Hamurabi all drop to 5. These games all represent the new standard pretty well.

And that's all the text-based games I've done to this point. However, I'm not done yet.

Visuals is another area that needs refining for text games. I have figured out while playing what I value in text-based games in terms of visuals, so this'll be a much shorter discussion. The key thing I look for is formatting. What I mean when I say formatting is the spacing and layout of the game text. As text-based games require a lot of reading compared to most other styles of game, whatever can be done to improve the ease of reading is going to reflect well on a game. Too much text on one line when it could've been easily spaced out, or large blocks of text make a game feel cluttered, and thus harder to read.

I also consider the writing of the text itself. This will have some crossover with the story metric later on, but I still think is valid to consider in visuals for text-based games. There's two components to this: clarity and creativity. Obviously what I'm reading needs to be clear and understandable. If there's numerous typographical errors, points will be docked, even if what's written still makes sense. It's a presentation issue. 

Creativity concerns if the text has been written with some charm or personality. I appreciate when effort goes into making the writing match the theme of the game, instead of keeping it plain-Jane. Of course, there can be negative creativity when dialogue isn't written well or is needlessly abrasive (many early text games like to insult the player.)

Finding a standard is once again an issue, but dealing with the controls metric helps streamline the process. For lack of a better term, "plain-ness" is probably the best way to define a 5/10 in visuals. If there's not much to comment on, either positive or negative, then it's getting a 5.

With that, let's have a look at the score changes for Visuals. Some games that lost a lot from controls are going to gain back some points here:

• All the plain games that are getting a 5 are both versions of Batnum, War, Horserace, PDP Basketball, Roulette and Gamnim. 
• Qubic is a tricky one. The graphic of the board, while helpful, isn't in the original game, but I considered in in my original score. For consistency, I'll still factor it in to my score, which'll be a 6.
• Digits also gets boosted to a 6. The number guessing table is good and clear, and the game has a little bit of creativity in the writing.
• LEM remains unchanged.
• 1Queen moves up to a 4. I still don't like how the game board goes out of alignment from adding 3-digit numbers in. I think that could've been managed better.
• Civil War remains unchanged, its formatting is excellent.
• Lunar is getting boosted to 5. Its table is actually pretty good, but the instructions are cluttered.
• Battle also goes up to 5. I think I was a little harsh on it.
• Hamurabi also gets up to a 5 for the same reason as Battle.

The last metrics I want to deal with are gameplay and fun factor. These two are usually closely connected, so it makes sense to tackle them together.

I manage gameplay a bit differently to the other metrics I've discussed. For one, I already have one clear standard that I've been consistently applying. That is I assign a zero score to any game that is either completely broken, or completely luck based. Player agency and meaningful choices have become quite valuable to me as design choices, so anything game that invalidates all forms of player choice and influence automatically get a zero. Examples of this from games I've already played are War, which is basically a coin flip simulator masquerading as a card game. You have absolutely no input or influence on the game, which to me totals an absence of gameplay. Those games are the easiest to deal with.

For everything else, it's often much harder. There's a lot more to consider with gameplay - the base gameplay loop, how the mechanics complement and synergise with everything else in the game; difficulty, balance, progression, depth, complexity vs. simplicity, replayability and general enjoyment of everything aforementioned. In a way, it's good that I started with simple text-based games, as there's far less to review and assess with these games.

The process I've decided on is to start every game off at a middle 10/20 score. From there, I'll analyse the gameplay, and consider all the good and bad elements of the game, and try to produce a score that I'm satisfied represents accurately my opinion of the gameplay. To assist in this process, I began taking notes on each game, analysing the gameplay, writing down all the good and bad points of the game so that I have all the data written down in front of me. I did this for most of the games I've already scored (the ones that weren't instant zeros.)

I usually use the gameplay score as the basis for fun factor, and then adjust from there. This is the most subjective metric, and relies simply on how much I enjoyed the game, or how much of the game I enjoyed, and how much I want to return to it. Those games that get a zero score in gameplay often get the same for fun factor. I often become quite hesitant to play games I don't enjoy, which is a helpful emotion for knowing that a game is not fun for me. On the flipside, I tend to get obsessive over games I really enjoy.

Now, here's the score changes for gameplay and fun factor

• Batnum (1967) is going up to a 1 in gameplay. It doesn't have a complete absence of player agency, so it doesn't deserve a zero. There's barely any game, but it is at least a game. Fun Factor remains unchanged.
• Likewise, Batnum (1970) is also getting a score increase. I'm giving this one a 2, because of it allowing you to customise the game setup a fair amount. Fun Factor remains at zero.
• My gameplay score for Qubic was quite harsh, in retrospect. I'm quite biased as I don't like 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. Qubic actually isn't the worst thing in the world to play - the computer is quite competent, but beatable. It's still not a good game, or recommended, so its only getting boosted to a 4 in gameplay. Fun Factor remains unchanged.
• War is unchanged.
• Digits also doesn't have a complete absence of gameplay, so it gets 1 for gameplay. Silly game.
• I'm going to be nice to LEM and boost the gameplay score to a 6. It has stacks more depth than any other game in Prehistory, even if it's exceptionally difficult and not fun.
• Gamnim reduces gameplay to a 2, and fun factor to a 1. It's functionally the same game as Batnum (1970), but you can get really silly with game customisation.
• 1Queen is a dopey little puzzle game, but lacks replayability and isn't a terribly challenging or interesting puzzle to solve. Its gameplay score drops to 3, and so does Fun Factor.
• Civil War goes up to a 7 in gameplay for its resource management and replayability with being able to try different strategies. Fun Factor goes up to 6.
• Lunar is getting upgraded to an 8 for both gameplay and fun factor. It was enjoyable, if quite frustrating and repetitive. I did get moderately obsessed before just giving up because it was too hard.
• Battle gets notable boosts. Gameplay goes up to 9, and fun factor up to 10. It's quite clever, although requires some luck to figure out the patterns. The code being randomised each game is a big plus for replayability.
• High Noon also gets increases, both gameplay and fun factor go up to 7. Probably similar to Rocket in that it doesn't have as much depth as you'd think, but the fun gets boosted from the writing and presentation.

Other miscellaneous changes:

• Increased the difficulty of Qubic to 6. 3D Tic-Tac-Toe is hard, and I got very lucky in finding a winning strategy.

Righto, that's everything. It feels like a lot of work for what's ended up being a rather short article. There's still a bit to go, however, as I need to now summarise the changes to the tier list. I'll start with the earliest game I scored, and move up from there:

• PDP-10 Timesharing Basketball - well, this one was interesting. I realised that I made an error with the initial score, I calculated the percentage incorrectly. The correct percentage was meant to be 32.85%. Upon rescoring, its score has decreased from 23/70 to 21/70 - a percentage of 30.00%, which doesn't change tier. This has it tie with one other game, but this one comes out on top due to earning a 3 for Fun Factor.
• Civil War also has a scoring error - it was listed as out of 80 when it should have been 70. I'll blame my green-ness at blogging for these. Still, the game has seen an increase of 1 point, up to 32/70 (45.71%). It doesn't shift the tier placings - aside from it being placed correctly.
• Hamurabi takes a hit to its score - it has dropped from a 40/70 to a 36/70 (51.42%). This has resulted in it losing its C-tier placement, dropping to the D-tier, and it has also lost its title as the highest rated game to date on the blog. It's not even second. A great shame, indeed, but it would have lost its crown even if its score remained the same.
• Qubic improved a little: up from 19/70 to 22/70 (31.42%), tied with two other games I have yet to get to. It sits in the middle of those games due to its Fun Factor score.
• Lunar gains an extra point, boosting it to 32/70. Doesn't change much for it.
• 1Queen dropped off quite a bit, losing five points down to 22/70 (31.42%). This ties it with Qubic. 1Queen sits above it due to the higher Fun Factor score.
• Digits managed to get even worse, losing a point down to 19/70 (27.14%). What a silly game.
• Gamnim took a hit to its score - losing 4 points down to 21/70 (30.00%). This ties it with PDP Basketball, but that game wins the Fun Factor tiebreaker.
• Horserace is garbage, and that is rightly reflected in it dropping 5 points down to a miserable 17/70 (24.28%). This score disgracefully relegates this game to the depths of the F-tier. It deserves it. It's also tied with a later game, and lost the tiebreaker on Gameplay.
• Roulette lost 4 points down to a 20/70 (28.57%). This ties it with a later game, but Roulette wins the tiebreaker.
• Batnum (1967)'s numbers got shuffled around, but its overall score didn't change. It's tied now with Horserace, but wins that tiebreaker (Gameplay).
• Batnum (1970) bucks the trend, actually gaining a few points! 2, to be precise, up to 20/70 (28.57%), tied with Roulette, but losing the tiebreaker.
• War, which is trash, loses 2 points, down to 18/70 (25.71%), just baaaarely keeping it out of the F-tier.
• Battle only got its numbers reshuffled, its score didn't change. It makes it a winner, however, as it's now currently 2nd on the tier list after Hamurabi dropped.
• High Noon - Are you ready to crown the new king? Despite losing a point from the rescore, down to 42/80 (52.50%), it now sits on top of the D-tier, and the top of the current leaderboard.
• LEM - The scariest, most complex game of this period gained 2 points up to 22/70 (31.42%). This ties it with 1Queen and Qubic, but LEM loses the tiebreaker for being a miserable game to play.
• Rocket - Somehow, this game has managed to avoid all the carnage and come out completely unchanged.

[Add. I actually made a mistake. Battle was actually the highest rated game after the rescore, with a score of 52.85%, just above High Noon's 52.50% My apologies. It's still true that Battle is 2nd on the list now, as I'm seeing this after completing Star Trek [sttr1], which is far superior to all these games.]

And so, this mammoth project comes to an end. At least it felt that way, even if the result is not that long a post. Yet, this project is only a speck in this whole blog's premise. This was only 17 games. Today there'd be at least 17 games coming out every day. Madness. 

I feel like this was a good way to bookend the Prehistory series; looking back at all the games I played, even replaying some, to see how my thinking about games has changed over the period of making this series. I think both my writing and critical thinking have been refined - writing at least is clearly reflected when I look back at my earliest blogs. I still can't believe I thought that doing Prehistory in a single blog post was going to work. More like a PhD thesis. Yikes.

So now, it's definitively time to move out of Genesis and into the Promised Land - 1971 marks the official commercialisation of video games (if only just), and the proceeding rapid spread, innovation and technical advancement thereof. I know I've been away for a while, but just thinking about what's to come gets me very excited to commit some more time to the blog. I hope you, reader, are excited to come along the journey with me.