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 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.
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.
David H. Ahl played such games in the late 1960s at
Carnegie Mellon University and the
University of California, Berkeley. He stated that they were much less sophisticated than Mike Mayfield's
Star Trek text game, which originated as a
BASIC program on an
SDS Sigma 7 mainframe system in 1971 and ported to many different systems. Ahl published source code for this game in his best selling
BASIC Computer Games, and variants of the game spread widely to
personal computer systems.
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. In late 2006,
Bethesda Softworks released several console games which carry on the tradition of classic
Star Trek ship simulator/combat games,
Star Trek: Legacy for the
PC and
Xbox 360,
Star Trek: Encounters for the
PlayStation 2,
Star Trek: Tactical Assault for the
Nintendo DS and the
PlayStation Portable and
Star Trek: Conquest for the
Wii and
PlayStation 2. 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.
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. == Pinball games ==