Well, wow.

My mind is blown. Ever since I was 13 years old, I have wanted to play this Star Trek game I enjoyed at the time. The game was hosted on pre-Internet technology, electronic Bulletin Board Services (BBSs) and it was my first ever Star Trek game. It was played in ASCII with letters to represent R-Romulans, K-Klingons, E-Enterprise, B-Starbase, etc. You could fire phasers and torpedoes at the enemy and blow them up.

The game was quite popular at the time but disappeared as more sophisticated games came about. In fact, I completely lost track of it but it has always held a special spot in my memory. I thought I’d never get the experience of playing that game again.

But then, in anticipation of a webinar session I am doing tomorrow on Prompting, I thought, why not give it a shot?

And, oh my goodness, my hour of play has come pretty close to getting the result desired. Must have gone through about 20 iterations in prompting. I cited it all (links below).

You can save a copy of the HTML file attached in this message, and play it in your browser. You use W (Up), S (Down), A (left), D (right) to move around on the 10x10 grid, and fire phasers (“fire p”) or torpedoes (“fire t”) followed by the direction you want. It has a status update and everything.

Now, in putting this game together, I started on Claude but once the game got complex, I had to load the code into ChatGPT 4o, and it allowed me to finish it. It rendered the code super fast, which was amazing.

Citations