# Computer/Video Games Most People Don't Remember
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594
**Category:** The Game Room
**Tags:** video-games-e-games
**Created:** [March 8, 2024, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594 "2024-03-08T03:41:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 9
### Author:  [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/161 "2024-03-18T12:00:07Z")
I’ve played that one a few times. I was never any good at it. More than one version out there if you want to play it again.
> **[Star Trek (1971 video game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game))**
>
> Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series (1966–69) and originally released in 1971. In the game, the player commands the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. The player travels through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy to attack enemy ships with phasers and photon torpedoes in turn-based battles and refuel at starbases. The goal is to eliminate all enemies within a random time limit.
> Mike Mayfiel...
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### Author:  [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/162 "2024-03-18T12:03:29Z")
> [@DPRK](#):
>
> The Star Trek variants date from the early 1970’s;
I was going to argue this, but I’ve learned to do some research first to avoid embarassment. LOL Good thing, too, because I discovered that there were some desktops available as early as 1977 and became much more common in the early 80’s. They must have been crap but were apparently good enough for primitive games.
> [@DPRK](#):
>
> It was so popular that I doubt it can be considered _forgotten,_ but how many times are you going to sit and play it?
Well, I had totally forgotten about it until you got me to do some thinking on the subject. Besides, within the thread title, I see, “most people don’t remember”. Given that, I’ll stand by my contribution.
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### Author:  [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/163 "2024-03-18T12:06:54Z")
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> They must have been crap but were apparently good enough for primitive games.
Some of my earliest memories of my dad are playing Adventure on his Northstar Horizon.
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### Author:  [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/164 "2024-03-18T12:07:35Z")
1971?! Are you kidding me?! There were no computers in the public domain that early, so who even played it? Bored workers on government and corporate main frames? Wow. I would say that this qualifies more as “never knew in the first place” than “forgotten”.
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### Author:  [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/165 "2024-03-18T12:16:13Z")
> [@DPRK](#):
>
> The Star Trek variants date from the early 1970’s; you are probably thinking of _Super Star Trek._
It was on a machine that had Windows 95, so would that be Super Star Trek?
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### Author:  [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/166 "2024-03-18T12:16:15Z")
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> 1971?! Are you kidding me?! There were no computers in the public domain that early, so who even played it?
It or a near-successor was available to the public to play at the [Lawrence Hall of Science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hall_of_Science) in Berkeley, CA in at least the late 1970’s. I remember me and my step-brothers trying to figure out photon torpedo targeting. I didn’t quite get it back then at my tender age, but my older step-brother (later a programmer 😉) was quite good at it.
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### Author:  [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/167 "2024-03-18T12:25:42Z")
Okay, Star Trek was and is super popular, so that maybe wasn’t a good contribution, but I’m back for battle with a contribution that may challenge even our most experienced gaming gurus!
I just remembered this because it was already old even when I was a kid. There was a thermo nuclear game for two players. Each player bought missiles, planes, and nuclear subs during the preparation stage. Then you had at each other. Usually, the entire world was destroyed. LOL
Addendum: REALLY primitive. Your “territory” was basically a grid. No pictures of any kind.
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### Author:  [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/168 "2024-03-18T12:55:14Z")
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> Your “territory” was basically a grid. No pictures of any kind.
Yep. There was a much earlier space combat game _Spacewar_ (1962), but the _Star Trek_ game was explicitly designed to be a game sort of in the same vein but that had no pictures of any kind and could be played on a teleprinter.
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> Wow. I would say that this qualifies more as “never knew in the first place” than “forgotten”.
Ok, but _conditional on being enough of a nerd to be a computer gamer in the 1970s_, well, by 1980 it was “one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around” [_Dragon_ magazine].
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### Author:  [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/169 "2024-03-18T13:46:50Z")
> [@DPRK](#):
>
> Ok, but _conditional on being enough of a nerd to be a computer gamer in the 1970s_, well, by 1980 it was “one of the most popular (if not the most popular) computer games around” [_Dragon_ magazine].
So, that means I get one in the win column for this? Remember, “most people” is in the thread title. You guys here haven’t forgotten anything, so you don’t qualify as “most people”. LOL
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### Author:  [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/170 "2024-03-18T16:59:10Z")
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> 1971?! Are you kidding me?! There were no computers in the public domain that early, so who even played it?
College students, etc. It was written in BASIC, a pretty portable programming language that was very widespread, so it got around and was ported all over the place. The first time I played it was in the 90s as part of the port of FreeBSD games to Linux (a re-write of it in C).
I dunno, I had played it and had forgotten about it. So you get at least a teeny win, there.
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### Author:  [@Tristan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tristan)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/171 "2024-03-18T17:37:29Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> Kingdom (Hammurabi gets grain to feed a growing population, insects eat it)
OMG I have looked off and on for that game online for like, 15 years. LOVED this game. If I recall, have a grain surplus bumped your population, which you could use to expand your empire, but if you expanded to fast, or grew too many people, you wouldn’t have enough grain, and … yeah.
So many, many classics of my childhood C64 playing era, and the IBM clone my step-grandparents had that allowed us to play M.U.L.E and a few other classics I can’t recall the names of anymore.
My dad had been given a shoebox full of disks for his C64 by a friend, and they were almost all games, from The Last V8, to BoulderDash, and many more.
One that my dad had was called “Galactic Empire”, it was a simple strategy game that had a grid, with a letter (representing a planet) at various coordinates. You started on a planet that produced ships each turn, built up your ships and sent them to another grid coordinate and fought the ships that had built up on the “neutral” planet, hoping to defeat it, and add it and its production to your empire. Me, Dad and my 2 step brothers played that game a LOT. SUPER simple, but always fun.
I kinda miss that kind of gaming, in some ways. Nothing is quite the same these days.
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### Author:  [@SunUp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SunUp)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/172 "2024-03-18T19:00:58Z")
> [@Jasmine](#):
>
> I just remembered this because it was already old even when I was a kid. There was a thermo nuclear game for two players. Each player bought missiles, planes, and nuclear subs during the preparation stage. Then you had at each other. Usually, the entire world was destroyed. LOL
Nukewar by Avalon Hill.
> **[NukeWar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NukeWar)**
>
> NukeWar is a 1980 video game by Avalon Hill for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, Commodore PET, FM-7, TRS-80, and VIC-20.
> NukeWar is a game of global thermonuclear war represented by text and sprites on the screen.
> In 1996, Computer Gaming World declared NukeWar the 135th-best computer game ever released.
There’s a guy who did a [replay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GelvNTRUX04) on Youtube.
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### Author:  [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/173 "2024-03-18T19:57:26Z")
Nuclear war games… there is _Balance of Power_, but that is a _Cold War_ game— it ends rather abruptly if things go hot 🙂 , plus I believe it is not forgotten.
Bravo Romeo Delta, on the other hand… an interesting game, but I can never even remember its name.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Winston\_OBoogie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Winston_OBoogie)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/174 "2024-03-18T21:19:56Z")
I’m sure that a number of people here have heard of “Rogue-like games”. How many have actually played Rogue?
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### Author:  [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/175 "2024-03-18T21:35:44Z")
> [@SunUp](#):
>
> Nukewar by Avalon Hill.
The Wiki article for Nukewar is bereft of information. I thought it might have been based on one of Avalon Hill’s many board games, but it looks like this was an original game. I was a wee lad of four in 1980, so I have no memories of this game.
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### Author:  [@Imuseless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Imuseless)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/176 "2024-03-18T21:47:14Z")
Haze for PS3
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### Author:  [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/177 "2024-03-18T21:54:18Z")
The BASIC code for this game is very short, a few pages. I don’t know if Compute magazine or something similar had the whole game?
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### Author:  [@Eric1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eric1)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/178 "2024-03-18T22:18:57Z")
I liked Haze - it was kind of short. Yet the characters were were in some way funny and it was worth playing.
I liked the corniest game Mickey’s Space Adventure. It spurred my friends and I to try to copy the planets in little planetariums
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### Author:  [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/179 "2024-03-18T22:23:53Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> The BASIC code for this game is very short, a few pages. I don’t know if Compute magazine or something similar had the whole game?
Here is a BASIC version of “Dukedom” from _Creative Computing:_
> **[Big Computer Games: Page from Big Computer Games](https://www.atariarchives.org/bigcomputergames/showpage.php?page=14)**
>
> Big Computer Games: Page from Big Computer Games
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### Author:  [@Dr.Girlfriend](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Girlfriend)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2024, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-video-games-most-people-dont-remember/998594/180 "2024-03-18T23:00:26Z")
Yes, this was it! I had totally forgotten about the Star Wars connection.
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