Retronauts - 752: MAGfest: Star Trek & Sega R360

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Spin you right round baby, right round baby! Kevin Bunch and Brian Clark talk about Sega’s gravity-defying R360 arcade hardware, followed by Kevin’s MAGfest panel about Star Trek fan games.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, keep rolling, rolling, rolling, keep the caba rolling, singa. Apologies for my singing. It won't happen again. I hope. You hope. The courts hope. This week, I have a two-fer for you coming out of Magfest, the Music and Games Festival that plays back in January in National Harbor, Maryland.

I gave a presentation there called 55 years of the Star Trek fan game, I recorded to present to you for this podcast. That will be our second segment here. But since, you know, that only accounted for about 50 minutes or so, I feel like I can do better than that for you, the listener. And therefore, I'm recording this first segment based on a presentation that Brian Clark gave at Magfest about Sega's R360, which is basically the arcade cabinet equivalent of a Bugatti. And joining me for that is the man. himself, who I just want to say made a fantastic YouTube video about the R360 that you should totally look up and check out. Go ahead. Yeah, please do check that out. Thank you. This is Brian

Clark from One Million Power. And I'll just say, I'm really going to try to not hit the big red give up button before we're finished recording this podcast. I'm really going to try, but no promises. We'll see how many planes you can shoot down before you have to hit it. Probably just three. So let's sort of open up here. What the heck is the R360 for people who were not hanging around arcades in like 1990, 91? Yeah, I mean, the best way I could describe it is some of you who have been to arcades in recent years may be familiar either with the Gundam pod or the Star Wars pod or really any variety of pods. pods are very big in arcades these days

well if you imagine one of those but really cranked up and put on steroids and that can actually spin you around rotate you in R in 360 degrees I would say that's the Sega R360 it's essentially a cockpit and we'll get into why it was designed to be like a cockpit that responds to your movements on a flight stick

which means boy oh boy are you going to be doing a lot of loops yeah you know 360 degree rotating cabinet you spin you right round baby right round we're hitting all the all the topical song choices here today you know it's the music and games festival it seems

appropriate at least I just spoken word that one so they can't they can't get me for that so our 360s they were famously like not massively produced very hard to find these days what what's your experience with this machine and what drew you to this topic what interested you in the r360 i wish i had experience with it before i did the filming for that video honestly uh as you said they're extremely rare and so unless you were there at the time the time being kind of the the 1990 to 1991 time frame when they were going out to arcades,

and we'll talk about maybe what kind of arcades you could find them in, hint, it's not your local holes on the wall. You really wouldn't have had a chance to play them. And so as I've become more and more interested in like arcade history over the years, I started digging back at some of this stuff. And you don't have to dig very far to start hearing about the art. 360 because it's pretty legendary due to, you know, the scope of it and the size of it and the price of it.

And it always had kind of stuck in the back of my mind. But my natural conclusion to that was, well, I'm never, I'm never going to be able to try it because they're basically all gone. Right. But then I actually, I am a Chicago area local and the Galloping Ghost, which we'll talk about later has one and got one back in 2020. 2020 was of course not a time when a lot of people were thinking about going to arcade, so I gave that a miss at the time.

But then I kicked it down the line maybe longer than I should have before finally deciding to go out and give it a try. And by then I'd started making YouTube videos. I just bought an expensive camera and I was interested in filming, going out and filming more things for said videos. And so it was just kind of a perfect confluence of ideas. is. You know, that's kind of a positive because, like, they're super rare.

There's not a lot of footage out there of them in operation. Right. Isn't, you know, grainy 30-year-old clips. And also, most of it, because I was not the first person to film myself riding an R360 at the Galloping Ghost, as you'll see, you know, by a quick YouTube search. But most of the videos that I found with the exception of maybe one and the video that is the exception, reused other people. people's footage. They didn't have any of their own original footage of this. Most people, it's just

like, I'm a galloping ghost. I'm riding the R360. And that's about the extent of it. Right. It's like, look at how crazy this thing is. And I saw an opportunity there to do something a little bit more with it, like more, you know, presenting it more in historical context. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is sort of a part and parcel of Sega's history with like arcade cabinets because there is a pretty lengthy history of making arcade machines that are just super elaborate kind of beyond anything you could play around at home and Sega's really always been kind of at the forefront of that like back in the 60s they had their periscope machine which is gigantic super elaborate I think there's like one on location in Youngstown, Ohio at an Arkansas.

Oh, interesting. I've never been able to stop in there, but they have a bunch of electromechanical games, and I believe they have a periscope up and running, which is super fancy. But then you get into, like, the video game era, and they've got all sorts of weird stuff, like heavyweight champ has, or had, I don't know that there's really a whole lot of these left, but it had, like, boxing glove handles that you'd, like, move up and down to block and punch. And then you started getting into, like, a deluxe versions of games that they were putting out as uprights like Star Trek, Monaco, GP, Turbo.

And that sort of continued on. And they started getting into what was the Kaikon cabinets? Tycon. Yeah. Tycon. Thank you. Yeah. So these are like the sort of top of the line version of the deluxe cabinet concept.

And the ones that more people probably know, right? Yeah. So these are like games like Hang On or Afterburner, Outrun, Radmobile. Like, you have a sit down machine, but also, there's like parts that are moving around a bit. Like the hang on one is like a sit down motorcycle. Yeah. Right?

That you like lean back and forth to move it. I feel like if you watch enough GameCenter CX, you see those pop up occasionally. And the cameraman Abe is always the one driving it. It's the first thing I think of when I think of a hang on machine now. I can't, I can't unthink it. Yeah. But, but you know, they were doing these machines for a while. they were really like, it was really setting them apart in terms of the experience in arcades, really.

Yeah, and I mean, obviously other companies would quickly follow suit like, you know, your Namco's and your titos and your titos and things like that because they were just constantly in competition with each other for that arcade floor space. But I guess I can't really say with confidence that Sega was the first to do a machine like that. But I can definitely say that they are the company that most people think of or at least thought of when they think of machines like that that are more kind of experiences versus just I'm sitting down in a stool or a chair or standing up or whatever and just playing a stationary video game. Yeah. You don't want to call out Taito and their fancy Space Invaders jumbo that was just a big screen TV with Space Invaders part two on it. Well, it wasn't moving me around, was it? That's all I'm saying. Yeah, if they had like a seat that was like shifting you back and forth while you're moving your base.

But it took Sega to make that a thing, really. Yeah. If only they would have come up with a body Sonic way earlier than they did and had it thump along to the space invaders. Oh, man. But, you know. You know, that's the setup right there. You know, one of those people that like set up the body Sonic in like their computer seat. for Darius.

Someone could home brew that. Yeah. Someone could home brew that. It can't be that hard. But yeah, so they, they, uh, they were baking these machines and I guess kind of, I don't know that I would call the R360, the natural extension of this because it, yeah, it's quite a jump. It really feels like the kind of, uh, insane idea that only could have come into being

during that bubble economy period where there was just a lot of money flowing around. Yeah. I think the key. factor behind how all this came to be is definitely that it was Japan's bubble economy. Because really, if you step back and look at this whole story, this was a terrible business decision. It was a fantastic creative decision. It was a terrible business decision.

Absolutely. And Japan made a lot of those terrible business decisions during the bubble economy when they could just kind of shrug as they, you know, lost a whole bunch of money for their crazy decisions. Listen, that real estate market is just going to keep going up and up and up. It's like the AI business. You know, if these trends continue, eh. But yeah, so, you know, you did this great video about it.

I don't want to, like, spoil everything about it. Sure. But my understanding is that they, this sort of came out of a visit to Australia. It did. So, uh, the, we, we have quote, translated quotes and everything in the video, so if people are wanting to learn more, they should definitely check it out.

But Masaki Matsuno, who was an engineer for Sega, he designed a bunch of the drive mechanisms for some of those earlier Taekon games and ended up being the leader of the R-360 development team, basically was told by Sega higher-ups that he was going to Australia because he had to investigate reports of a game

that could actually spin a person around and had a display within it. I don't think details are out there as to why that interested them so much, other than just it would have been so novel at the time because the Sega Tycon games were amazing, but none of them spun you. They all kind of had just like a basic back and forth motion as, you know, people have experienced if they've played like a working afterburner or a working Radmobile or whatever. It's cool. It's not going to change your life probably.

And so maybe they were just so enraptured by that. But they ended up finding it. And according to his description of it, it rotated on all three axes, X, Y, and Z. But it was kind of a slow, gentle movement. But the craziest thing about it is that running on that machine, because, you know, it has to be, there has to be game in there, right? Is it an original game? What is it? No, it was just Sega's afterburner put into this cabinet, which they had no authorization to use whatsoever.

So they just kind of threw up maybe an afterburner board or something in there and used this as kind of like their prototype machine. So far as I know, no legal action or anything was taken out of this, or at least it wasn't in any of the documentation or the accounts I could find. And so when Matsuno came back to Japan, he was immediately asked, can Sega do this? Can Sega do a version of this? And they were like, yeah, of course we can. And so it all just kind of kicked off from there. Yeah, I suppose, like, as long as they bought the after burner machine fair and square, like they could kind of do what they wanted with it, huh? Yeah.

And again, they didn't, I feel like there's definitely some details that someone at Sega probably remembers that didn't go into any of these accounts. but it wasn't it wasn't really clear from the interviews I read where it was set up in Australia. Like, was it in an amusement space collecting money? I don't know. They didn't actually spell that out. There is a picture of it, but it's kind of hard to like frame what location it's in based on the picture. It's time to raid Sega's archives and look for the memo about it. Yes.

So they brought this idea back. and someone at Sega, some madman, said, yeah, let's go ahead and do this. And, you know, we're talking a pretty intensive machine with a lot of engineering challenges, you know, has to be able to move on all axes. It has to be able to move a CRT television or a monitor rather on all these axes without like screwing up the picture. Because, you know, 20 inch, 20 inch CRT is in there. Which, you know, if you ever lifted a 20-inch CRT, that's a miserable experience. It has to be, you know. It has to be heavy, like, heavy duty enough to be able to hold that in position while you're, like, shuffling around.

And, you know, if you're not familiar with CRT, like, cathode ray tube technology, those aren't really meant to move while they're on. No. Because that, like, it gets screwy with the Earth's magnetic field and, like, your picture gets weird. So they had to engineer around that. Yeah. Automatic degousing routine. I believe is kind of how they solve that, which is crazy.

Doesn't seem like it'd be good for the TV. No, no, it doesn't. And I wonder, I actually, I should ask Kevin Kiner, the guy who restored the cabinet that the Galloping Ghost has, whether that's the original CRT, or whether he had to replace that himself or something at some point. Because, yeah, I wonder how many,

like, in the scope of the R-360s, Like how many of those monitors lived and how long they lived for. Right. And like, you know, this is a big machine. You have to strap someone in with like, what, a four point harness. It's a four point harness that they custom made. Yep. Custom made.

You have to have an attendant there while the machine is running. Yeah. Because, you know, otherwise you could hurt yourself. It has to be able to automatically detect if someone's like body part is outside of the seat area. Yeah. So it's stopped. There are sensors all around the machine. They're not incredibly visible, but they're there.

So basically, if anyone approaches from the outside or anyone like sticks their arm or leg or whatever too far out from inside, or if anyone hits the big red give up button that I alluded to earlier, the machine will stop you where you are. And when I say that, I mean it will stop you exactly where you are, even if you are upside down. And then the attendant has to hit a couple buttons on the tower to make the, R-360 kind of spin back around into the position. But in theory, if you were operating that by yourself and you just hit the button inside to stop yourself, you're stuck upside down potentially.

Good luck. Yeah, I did like the bit in your presentation where you talked about one of the engineers who was working on the machine. Who got stuck debugging overnight. And I believe they said he was upside down for about two hours before the night guard at Sega found him and bailed him out of the machine. machine. And that's why you always have a buddy running at a 360. Yes. Like, unless it's modified, it cannot run without someone at the attendant tower, like,

activating it. Yeah. And people have modified it. Kevin Kiner, one of the people who I interviewed for this video, actually, he talked about how he modified his to just be completely operable, you know, independent of the attendance tower. But like you, that's someone with, you know, knowledge of electronics. Like, that's not just something. You know, you can do. He has videos like doing complete tear downs of his R-360 from back like 13 years ago or something like he knows how to work on those things. He is a he's a braver man than I should just like hop in that thing without anyone hanging out. Maybe maybe braver than he ought to be but maybe like design this you know ludicrous concept for a machine and uh they had a big

fanfare announcement for it. Uh, I did like you mentioning that uh, They were having trouble like getting it through the doors to like the, oh yeah, the, they're like display area. Yeah, they have like a press conference reveal for it basically before they did location testing. And yeah, they, there's these stories about them. Oh, we checked, you know, we pulled blueprints for the hotel ahead of time to make sure it could fit. But it almost didn't. And then there's, you know, the challenges with three phase power.

like this thing requires three-phase power and is the hotel's, you know, power system really ready for this. So yeah, they were sweating bullets, I think, that morning, not to mention move it the weight of this thing. You know, this thing is just, it's, you know, multiple tons. It's probably the, I'm guessing, maybe one of the heaviest arcade machines to ever exist.

It's got to be. They got it. They did it. They had the press conferences. And the thing that really gets me, though, is, and no one ever really talked about this, is how, like, even your biggest arcades in Japan are, I would say maybe they don't have the biggest doors

or the biggest, you know, means for transporting large objects in because it's Japan. Like, what I want to know is the story about Sega getting these to the arcades that bought them and what hells they had to go through during that process. Yeah, I remember, like, years ago, when we've recorded like a podcast about Darius. And we were talking about like the nightmare of moving one of those giant machines around like stairwells.

And like, you can't even do that with this. One of them like crashed a Darius machine like hit a wall or something and like knocked a bunch of mortar down onto someone's car, I think is a story we told about that. But yeah, imagining like an R360 you just couldn't like a Darius machine, it would be horrible and heavy. but you could probably move it with a few people. And R360, like, just no, you just can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. And like, these things aren't really meant to be disassembled once they're built together,

which, you know, Kevin Kynert, I'm pretty sure, has learned how to disassemble them. Yes. Just because, well, a lot of them, because these were placed in, like, hotels and amusement centers and, like, high-end locations that could afford the, you know, eye-watering price tag for this thing. Think like big arcades in Vegas or like, you know, Disney World. I mean, those arcades probably don't exist anymore. But if you are of a certain age, you probably remember like, oh, the Starcade from Disney World or like the Luxor or something in Vegas. Like these are the types of places that really got these in the U.S. anyway.

Yeah, you're not finding this at Aladdin's Castle or a Red Baron. No. It's picturing like a tilts and tumbles in a mall getting an R-360. Can you imagine? As a person who used to work at a tilts and tumbles, we could barely keep our machines up as it was. Maintaining an R-360 is just absolutely unimaginable to me. The thing that kills me is there were people who,

people were great in the comments to this video and left accounts of where they played it back in the day, which is fantastic, especially like all the people from Great Britain and stuff like that who would just name off all these arcades. But there were people who mentioned Gatlinburg, Tennessee. And I went to many a family vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

And I probably saw it because I was definitely going there in that period. And I was definitely going to arcades during that period. But I don't know if I somehow missed it or if I saw it and I was, you know, because I would have been no older than 11 at that point. So maybe I looked at it and I was like, maybe not. This looks scary. But either way, maybe I had a chance to try it and miss my chance. back in 1991 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Well, it's going to say, like, these were expensive per play. Like, I think in Japan it was, what, 500 yen? Yes, which was crazy. Because a Taekon, even, you know, playing a Taekon was only 200 yen. And up until relatively recently, a regular play of a non-Tycon game was 100 yen. 50 yen if it's old enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you go find one of those, you know, 50 yen arcades or whatever.

But yeah, that's quite a jump. And in the U.S., you know, similarly, it was like between $3 and $5 a play by all account, so kind of equivalent. Yeah, and, you know, I think, I remember reading years and years ago that the average arcade goer would spend like $5 a visit. So, like, this would be your one game you could play at the arcade versus, you know. One 90 to 120 second running on the R360 versus, you know, many, many more chances at other games at, you know, 25 or 50 cents or whatever a play.

And like, yeah, this was 1990, 91. There were some really good games at the arcade. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, this, this ran like a specialized version of Glock that didn't have quite so many enemies trying to kill you. And a lot more, you had unlimited missiles, too, basically. I think they recognized that limiting your missiles in a, in a playtime that short may have made some people angry.

So they're just like, ah, whatever, you can fire off all the missiles you want. fine. You only got like, I think you can adjust the machine settings to be a maximum of 320 seconds or something, though I'm sure no arcade did that because that would just, that'd be given away money. Yeah, like, you have to pay, you have to pay this thing off. So yeah. I'm so curious, like, did they location test this machine? What, uh, what was the feedback they got from that? Yeah, I don't, they didn't really talk about, uh, the specific feedback that they got. But they did locate. They did locate. They. They. They did do location testing out of it in Japan. It was specifically at high-tech land Sega Shibuya, which I think is still there under a different name now. I mean, obviously Sega took all of its names off of arcades, but you can find old pictures of it and like how it's changed over the time and things like that. But apparently they had a story about how they had to give out like numbered tickets.

There were so many people. It could do about 100 plays per day running like 14 hours nonstop. And like that arcade did really well. because while people are there waiting for their turn, they're playing other games and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, none of the interviews I read went into like what kind of feedback they received from location testing, unfortunately. I'm just wondering if, like, that's where the unlimited missiles came from or like the specific time settings and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's an interesting idea.

There's probably a non-zero chance that, yeah, that maybe it was a more straight, a more one-to-one version of G-lock. And then people were like, I can't. This is too few missiles for 90 seconds or whatever. And yeah, maybe they tuned it. Yeah. So, you know, you can only play this at high-end arcades. A lot of them, like, they had to, like, drop it in and then build the building around it. So, like, they're kind of entombed unless you are a wild person who wants to dismantle it and pull it out piece by piece.

Which, you know, there's like Kevin Kinerd doing that. And basically, no one else I think is wild enough. to do it. Maybe there's someone in Britain. No, I mean, I feel like it's akin to deciding to just tear down your car and rebuild the transmission in your garage.

There are people who can do that. But your average person would be like, what have I done? It's like trying to tear down your car to fix the transmission without having access to like those books on how to fix your car's transmission from the library.

I can figure this out. How hard can it be? Yeah, surely. The Sega R360 has plenty of documentation. Yeah, like, it's fascinating that, like, in 1994, I believe, Sega got into, like, the amusement park industry with Joypalus, and they had a couple other locations and other parts of the world outside of Japan. But this feels like, I don't know, them dipping a toe into that sort of amusement park

ride world with the R360. 100%. So maybe that's why they don't like look back on this. It's like, man, what a bad idea that was. Yeah. And you can kind of bear that out too because some of the promotional flyers for the R360 at the time would also show some of Sega's other lineup that they'd have at places like Joy Palace and kind of like your bigger amusement centers in Japan, like one in like Tokyo

Dome City and whatnot. They featured things like Cyberdome, which you can find. I think the YouTube channel OnionSoft actually has some good footage of Cyberdome, actually. It's like an eight-player game that had like combined display technologies to basically make like a 300-inch screen. And CCD cart, which is some kind of multiplayer game where each person is in a sort of cart. So like they were kind of going, they were definitely dipping their toe in this direction and thinking, yeah, well, we won't be able to sell this stuff to every arcade, but like the bigger places we maintain, we can at least put these here as sort of like attraction set pieces.

And so, yeah, the R360, I think, fit pretty nicely into that. Yeah, there's like a, there's, I don't know, something in the water at the time. Maybe it was the bubble economy, but like Namco was doing a lot of these installation games, too, like the Galaxian 3, which, you know, if you're on a good day, you could find one working in New Hampshire. There is one Mikado Did a video on it not too long ago And I can't remember if it was working But there is a Japanese arcade

That actually also has a Galaxian 3 I think it's somewhere out in the boonies It's not like you know It's not Mikato themselves And it's not any arcade in like a major metropolitan area Unlike the R360 of which there are no known Instances of those left in Japan at this point as far as everyone knows they're completely gone.

Any that exists are outside of Japan. Yeah. And while I'm on that, you know, Namco also, when they did Ridge Racer, they did a specialized version that had you in like the body of an actual Miata driving in the game. Like they just didn't have an engine in there, but it was, you know, for all intents and purposes of Miata. And, you know, it's not very many of those in working order. I think there's like maybe one in the UK.

I've never actually seen one. Yeah, I've never actually seen one. I would love to try one of those out one day too. That's Namco for you. They had the one-up Sega on the weirdest possible axis. But yeah, so like these were more expensive. There was like a novelty factor to them, but like once you played them, that was kind of that. Like, okay, do I want to spend another 500 yen or five bucks on this?

or do I want to play something else? Especially because initially it was only Glock. Like another game, Wing War would come a few years later, but you've got one game you can play on this initially, which is not the biggest draw, especially since Glock was a game, which already had come out in the arcade earlier that same year in various deluxe and non-deluxe forms.

So, like, people who wanted to play G-lock, probably had already played G-lock and gotten really good at it and whatever. And, like, I'm sorry. Glock is just not that great compared to like Afterburner or whatnot. It's not. I think it's a more manageable game to play, at least for me. It's a little bit less hectic than Afterburner.

But as a consequence, it's a little bit less exciting. I mean, the R360 makes it exciting, of course. But just taken as a game, yeah, it's a much tamer and thereby maybe not as exciting sort of version of Afterburner for sure. Yeah. And of course, you have to have someone like on attendant duty.

You have to repair this thing. because there's a ton of moving parts. Yeah, it's not your average arcade repair person maybe can't deal with something like this. So it really feels like a machine that, like, yeah, this was going to have a shelf life of like a couple of years and if you're lucky, you would pay it back. And I don't know how many of those locations

were actually that lucky. I'll be entirely honest. Yeah, that would be an interesting number to get, wouldn't it, to talk to like an actual arcade owner from back then and be like, how did that actually do for you? Like, did it pay itself back? How long did it take to pay itself back?

Yeah, that's an interesting angle on that that I hadn't considered. Time to track down Gatlinburg's arcade guy. Right, yeah. And yeah, the Wing War was interesting because you mentioned in the presentation at Magfest that had like an extra mechanic added to it, like a throttle was it? It was a throttle, yeah. So, like, did they make another run of our 360s or they just put out like instructions and how to modify the cabinet?

That is a great question, which no one actually seems to know the answer to, funnily enough. I even asked Kevin Kynard about it, and he definitely confirmed. He was like, yeah, I was like there was no throttle on the original because he's had over the years

kind of both versions of the cabinet. So he's like, I'm actually not really sure if they made more or if they just, you know, offered some sort of a survey, or like you said provided instructions to be like this is how you can modify it. But like your your average arcade would have just been like, what? No. I'm not doing that.

I guess if you still have an R360 in 1994, it's not going to do anything else for you at that point. Yeah, but the problem is that most people didn't have R360s anymore by 1994, right? So it was it was a little bit of a too little too late situation. It took them in an unfortunately long amount of time to get a. an actual good game, sorry, another game. I don't,

I, I, I, I don't think Wing War is any great shakes either. I don't know how I'd rate it versus Glock, but, uh, it certainly maybe a little more original,

because it was sort of a more 3D take on a jet fighter game. Yeah, it's like a, it's like a dog fighting kind of game, isn't it? Like, and you could link those cabinets together. If you were a crazy place that had two of them,

uh, you could link them together to, to actually do a multiplayer dog fight. I don't know how often this was actually done in the wild. I can't imagine there were hardly any instances of it. Like, again, Kevin Kynert has a video of modifications that he did with his R360, playing together with wing war running on a cabinet, and they can both play together,

which again is like, is crazy. but I wonder how many places actually had two R360s by 90s. I mean, in general, right? Even before 1990, how many places actually had two R360s? He's got like, what, 10,000 yen to burn on a single machine? Yeah, yeah. I forget exactly how big the number was.

It was pretty chunky. But yeah, you know, the fact that, like, you had to modify it to connect it to a normal wing war cabinet is just, it feels like one of those things like, well, we could do it. So we did it, even though we didn't expect anyone to use it, which I guess, like, I don't know, they did have that version of F-16 fighting Falcon for the Sega Mark 3 that you could link to, like, another Mark 3 running the game. But you had to, like, build the cable. That's. And they just told you how to build the cable.

Like, yeah, you do it yourself. It's very much from that, uh, that's, that school of thought, I think. And the other thing we should mention is there almost was another R360 game somewhere in the middle there. There almost was Radmobile for the R360. There's video footage of it running on what seems to be a location test because it's clearly in a Japanese arcade. But it never came out. So I don't know if they just scrap that or what happened really. But the interesting thing about Radmobile and it makes sense because it's a driving game and not a jet fighter.

game is Radmobile running on the R360 is only kind of moving you back and forth and left and right. It's a little more like a, you know, maybe like a more extreme version of the regular Tycon game because it, if you're doing loop to loops in a car, you are in some trouble. Like you are doing something very, very wrong at that point. Though I do wonder, because it is possible to crash in Radmobile, I wonder if it looped you, did a loop, like a single loop when you crashed or something maybe, but there's no footage of him of the person playing that game crashing in that video, so it's hard to say. It's been a few months since I played Radmobile.

I don't remember you like... I don't think you actually turn in the car on the game, but it would just be a neat thing to do with the R360, like, oh, it doesn't make sense to spin them in the regular gameplay. Maybe we just do it once when they crash so they can get the sensation of it spinning or whatever. I could see that. And, you know, like, Radmobile does have a lot of, like, hills and whatnot. So I could see the, like, up, down motion there. But, yeah, like you said, like, you can get that out of a deluxe cabinet. You don't need the full R360. So it would kind of, I don't know, kind of be a waste. Yeah. If you can fit into a deluxe Radmobile cabinet that was, like, made for people much shorter than me.

Made for a teenager with, uh, with some pocket money. So, you know, Like you said, there's no real, like, publicly known units to be in Japan. Like, I don't know, maybe there's a Japanese collector that has one. Possibly. Or like the parts of one. Yeah. But, like, there are some in Europe. There's some in the U.S.

In private hands. Maybe Australia. I don't know. Seems like something the Australians would have. Yeah. There were definitely documented cases of arcades that had it there. So, yeah, it's not unthinkable that an Australian collector could have one. Yeah.

And there is, like you said, one that's playable at the Galloping Ghost. Brookfield, Illinois. If you two want to check that out, you should probably give them a heads up ahead of time. So that they know to have someone on hand. They usually have enough people to handle it. But yeah, just as sort of a courtesy. So they, because they definitely do not discourage people from using it. But obviously, since it's a game that requires attendant, they can't just put it on the floor and let people go wild because liabilities.

So, and, you know, it's worth trying, though. And who knows, you could be the first person to lose your lunch after riding the R360 there because apparently it hasn't happened to them yet. They should make some galloping ghost branded like barf bags. There you go. Like they have galloping ghost everything else out there. They do. I think this is the next step. They do.

Doc Mack needs to expand his empire a little bit further. But I didn't want to touch on one thing before we wrap up here. like so Sega didn't do much with the R360 after wing war but they did make like a successor machine like 13 14 years ago for a Transformers game yeah Transformers human revolution and this one was like lower of a theme park ride like you're not controlling your uh your 360 movement it's just sort of like taking you on a journey yeah it's capable of doing the same rotations but yeah you're not you can't just make yourself do loop-de-loops anymore. You pretty much

do what the game wants you to do. What's the over-under on Kevin Kiner getting one of these things and like figure out how to like modify it into a proper 30-60? I should have asked him that actually. If any if anyone would, he would.

I wonder, there's definitely footage online of people filming this at JoyPullis which are mostly in Asia, not strictly just Japan, but like various parts of Asia. I wonder if they're still running there, actually, is an interesting question, because there was a time when even in the U.S., you could find the regular version of Transformers, human evolution, and round ones. But I don't think many round ones really have that anymore. I was at one fairly recently and did not see it. Because I thought, oh, it might be cool to get footage of just even the normal version of the game running. But no, I think they've, I remember seeing them back in the day, like when a round one first opened, me, not the R360Z version, but the regular one, and just kind of shrugged because I don't

really care about Transformers that much. But as soon as that came up as being the game that they used the R360 Z for, I was like, oh yeah, I remember when round one had those. What a choice. I understand, like it's Transformers. It's probably going to make bank, but what a choice. Yeah, to bring the R360 back for that is, yeah, it's an interesting choice for sure. and I would imagine they scoped it similarly in terms of units produce

given that they just distributed that to their, once again, their own JoyPillus arcades. Yeah. And you know, after Burner Climax was right there. Yeah? And probably a better game, if I'm being honest. But to be fair, I haven't played Transformers Human Evolution, so I guess I can't say for sure.

But After Burner Climax is a great game. So I'm not going to say that Transformers games have a great track record. They really don't. It would have to prove it to me. It's probably better than Convoy-N-Azo, at least, but you never know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, is the last boss just the Transformers symbol is the real question? I hope so.

Now I wonder if there's like a play-through and there's a long play of it. And I want them, if it's not there, I want them to modify the videos that ends with the Transformers logo that you're shooting at. Oh, my gosh. Well, I think that's about it for the R360. Is there anything you would like to promote before we move along to the second segment? Oh, sure. You can find the R360 video on the One Million Power YouTube channel, which you can get to that through YouTube,

or you can go to One Million Power.com for links to everything and different translations I do and things like that, all video game related. And there's also a Patreon for all of that if you're interested, which is patreon.com slash one million power that gives you the usual stuff, you know, early access exclusive videos. But as of the time we record this, the next sort of documentary style video of mine, The Fate of Castlevania is up there,

though by the time this episode comes out, it will probably just be on the YouTube channel as well. So if you go to check out the R360 video, watch that one too. I'm in that one, so I can attest that it's quality. You and a Diamond Fight and other people who Retronauts listeners may know. That's true. We're all over the place.

You are everywhere you want to be, like JubJubb. As for me, you can find me on Blue Sky, on YouTube, on the web, on Patreon, Atari Archive. That's also the book I have out through Limited Roald. And you have a book out through Limited Run as well. I do. Gameplay harmonies. Yeah. So if you're interested in also weird old games that intersect with Japanese music, that is the book for you. All right.

Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you. Welcome everyone to 55 years of Star Trek, but not, you know, the TV show, because it's not been 55 years for that. It's been 60 later this year. This is about the original basic fan game Star Trek, which, you know, you know, as you might find out, is probably not the original, but it's the one everyone actually cares about. So I think we can do a quick show of hands.

I have a feeling I know the result of this. Who here knows Star Trek? Yeah, yeah, that's a good chunk of the room. Yeah, it's about right. So, yeah, this is the 1960s TV show, Star Trek. These are some fun publicity photos. I love the one on the right with Yelman Rand with whatever the hell that is. But who's familiar with this particular Star Trek?

Okay, I'm seeing like... It was a little bit more than the numbers. Okay, I'm seeing like a dozen or so. That's good. That's a good start for this. Well, you know, that is the Apple II version. So this is... How could I best say this?

So, Star Trek, not hugely popular during its initial run, famously. It had a very passionate fan base that only grew as the show entered a syndication in 1969. I think that's fairly well known. And those fans

started doing fan works. This is one of the earliest fandoms in the modern sense. You have fanzines, fan art, fan run convention. at Star Trek lives. I think it's one of the very first. A lot of these fans, I will make note, were women.

This was a very popular show among nerdy women. And they were writing the first slash fix. Shout out to Spirk fans. They were designing custom cosplay costumes. Famously, the show got a third season because of this fandom. Bejo Trimble organizing a whole letter writing campaign to convince NBC to give them another go. Did not work for a fourth season, but that's fine.

We got enough to get syndication. That's the important thing. So as this show enters its syndicated second life, some of these fans were starting to create computer games. And for this, I want to sort of step aside, sort of a sidestep, and discuss a little bit about the Dartmouth time sharing system and time sharing generally. Someone here loves Dartmouth.

Hell yeah. Yeah, so, you know, this whole Star Trek syndication thing took place, sort of coincided around the same time as this push to make computers more accessible to the broader public. If you know anything about computer history and, you know, the 50s and a chunk of the 60s, you really would not have access to a computer.

unless you worked at like a very specific university or lab or maybe even a couple of the businesses that had computers like RCA's Bismack got used a few places or the military and you were doing things in sort of batch processing so you'd like put a program together on a punch card you'd put that in the queue to be run it would go through and then you would be returned with the results almost always these would be errors that you would have to correct in your code and it was a miserable experience no one really liked it that I've talked to anyway. Time sharing was a whole different concept. This sort of was thought up around 1962 and Dartmouth and its folks John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz. They really spearheaded the university like giving this a shot and seeing how it worked out. So the idea here is that you have one big computer and then you have a bunch of little terminals that folks can access and use this computer and for the Dartmouth system they had like a secondary computer that would sort of manage these requests for information and whether or not the main computer needed to halt a program to run another program. But in this sense, a bunch of people

could use a computer at the same time, and it felt sort of real time, like you wouldn't really have a noticeable delay between entering your program and getting your results back. This was first put into play in Dartmouth, I almost said Baltimore, in 1964. And this co-endominy. cited with the birth of the basic computer language, which Chemony and Kurtz also came up with for this time sharing system, because their idea was, well, we want everyone to use this.

We want all of our faculty and all of our students, so we can't just have them learning Fortran, because Fortran's a miserable experience to program in. So they invented this. It's much more accessible. It's all like human language

driven. It's not as fast to some of the other languages, but it didn't need to be. So they sort of required all their students to go through this as part of like an early introductory math class. And Basic took off. A lot of people started writing programs for it. Chemony in particular encouraged people to make games using Basic and using this time sharing system.

He wrote one in 1965 football. It's not super relevant to this talk, but it exists. It's still cool. So basically, this is, went over really well and they started writing reports and giving talks about it at different organizations and trying to get government grants to expand it. This was funded through the U.S. government because at the time the U.S. government was funding a lot of computer programs and science and other things they're not doing right now. So that's my soapbox for the moment.

So with that in mind, the Dartmouth time sharing system started spreading to both other universities and also public and private schools, including high schools and et cetera. And eventually this spread across New England as far west is Minnesota, south as far as New York. And because they were putting out these reports and giving these talks, other people were picking up on what they were doing and they were starting their own time sharing networks. That's where you got the Mech Network in Minnesota. Plato and Illinois was already sort of in the early stages, but I get the sense that the fact that Dartmouth proved this work gave them a lot of leverage to keep moving. There were other smaller networks in California and a bunch of other states.

And for this particular talk, I feel like Minnesota and New York and California are going to come up a fair bit. But the short version is that if you were at a school, with a time sharing connection, and the odds were pretty good that you knew how to work with Basic, and you'd have students and faculty writing programs or pulling programs and games off of an existing library. So that brings us to Star Trek, in a sense. So this accessibility led to Star Trek fan games starting to be developed and written. So these are a couple

little clips. Only one of these has been preserved to my knowledge, and it's the one in the middle. But these are some very early recollections and reporting on Star Trek fanworks for these computer networks. So on the left, you have one from Mid Carlton College in Minnesota. That's a write-up from a student newspaper article about computers and computer games, and one of them is this Star Trek game. On the right, you have David Olsen. recollections of seeing Star Trek games around 67, 68. And here we have in the middle, Star Trek by Colonel William Lubbert. This is, to my knowledge, one of the earliest Star Trek computer games that still exists.

This one is from, you know, I'm going on a quick sidebar. Luppert was, as far as I can tell, he was like an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and he wrote this game while he was at West Point on their computer network. And somehow it made its way to the Mech Network in Minnesota. And it's been preserved a few years ago. So you can go mess around with it. It's like a strategic Star Trek game where you're fighting a Klingon ship, as is the case with almost all of these Star Trek games,

which is very funny because it's a show about not necessarily getting into space battles and getting into fights generally. And yet, and yet, almost every single one of these Star Trek games will have you fighting Klingons. So, thank you very much, Cold War and Military Industrial Complex. So I'm going to go over quickly some of the other Star Trek fanworks before I get to the main one. I just want to compare and contrast here. So this is Trek 73. This is one of the other surviving ones.

This particular one is the Atari 400 conversion. This was from William Schar, Perry Lee, and Dan G. They wrote it at their high school and their Hewlett Packard. Hulet Packard time sharing system. This is sort of a one-on-one game. You're fighting a Klingon ship. You're the Enterprise. You're like maneuvering around, issuing orders on what to do.

This particular version doesn't use Klingon because it was published through Atari, so instead you're fighting the Kreegers, whatever that means. Maybe someone's an Archer fan. I don't know. But yeah, you're moving your ship, you're making repairs, ordering attacks. Versions of this did bounce around on computer networks in the 70s, but it was not nearly as prolific as the main game of this. To my knowledge, this, after like the 80s,

you'd stop seeing a lot of versions of Trek 73. But like, it's a neat little program. I mean, you're watching me. miss some torpedoes here. This one was turned up a couple of years ago, actually. This is sort of a narrative

Star Trek game from 1971. This was originally written by Bill Peterson for the CDC 6000. It was modified in 1972 by Dan Daglow. Daglow? Is it Daglo? Whatever. By Don.

He's well known. He got into video game industry stuff. But this is actually footage of the original version of it that turned up a couple years ago on Facebook of all things. Someone posted in a group that he had a bunch of printout documents from a university he used to go to, I think, Leahy. And one of them happened to be this previously lost game. So this guy who made this video, Bob Alexander, he typed it in and got it running on an emulator. So this is his footage. But the short version here is that, again, you are fighting, usually a Klingon, sometimes a Romula, and it's like it has some randomization elements to it.

And you are communicating with your crew members. They're giving you responses based on whatever. And what they do and what happens is, again, a little bit random. But the short version is you are always going to get into this confrontation and how you handle it. It just sort of depends on what you do. So this one, yeah, it was floating around. The Daglow version was floating around mostly. He has, for a while, he was taking credit for having done it entirely.

But now that this has turned up, it's like, well, you made a version of it. And that's still pretty important and impressive, but it's not quite the same thing. This one, I think most people here, I don't know if anyone's really familiar with this one. Has anyone heard of this one from the Federation Trading Post? Okay, two people, like one and a half? I don't know. So this is kind of wild. In the mid-70s, there was a retail store called the Federation Trading Post in Berkeley, California.

They had a second outlet in New York. And they sold Star Trek-related items like toys, costume parts, et cetera. And more pertinly, around 1977-78, it hosted. a custom-made arcade machine, this little guy here, that was developed by a future Amiga engineer, Dave Needle, Bob Ull and Stan Shepard.

The players operated the Enterprise and a Klingon D7. It's a two-player game. So you're fighting each other in a sort of space war kind of battle. And occasionally a Romulan bird of prey will pop out of nowhere and just shoot at one of you. You can attack it back if you really want. to. What makes this interesting is that each ship has shields, and as the particular area of shields

takes hits, it will eventually fail. And if you get a shot in through that gap, that destroys the opponent's ship. And at that point, the Doomsday Machine from the Star Trek episode of the same name will show up and eat the loser. Yeah, so no one had seen this for years after like the Star Trek. store had closed. Like Dave Needle, he did an interview like, I don't know, 12 years ago or so, where he wasn't really sure what happened to this thing. But there was a documentarian who was filming bits of this in the 70s, bits of the store, and another documentarian came along in like 2011. I got all this footage. This did not make the final cut, but he did post it on

Facebook in 2018. So I will let you see this thing. Klingon ship. Stand is on the Enterprise. And the joystick moves the ship around. We can rotate it in either direction by moving the stick. We can fire phasers as such. And I got them again. There are photon torpedoes we can fire. The ship we just saw up here in the middle of the screen is a Romulan vessel.

He shows up every once in a while and shoots... And that's the whole clip. Yeah. But that was Dave Needle talking apparently. So, yeah. This did lead to Dave Needle and his friends getting a job within the game industry where they went on to develop space encounters for Midway

which apes Star Wars instead, the trench run specifically. It's actually over in the museum, you can check it out. It's a pretty fun game, I quite like it. So that brings us to the main event. Mike Mayfield's games. This is Mike Mayfield. I said 2010s, but I think it's actually closer to like 2000, but he's never updated his picture online.

So Mike Mayfield wrote this game originally for the Sigma 7 and this is a very weird story. So Mike Mayfield told his story to myself and to historian Ethan Johnson and he's posted a few bits and pieces online as well. I actually talked to him last week. He was very excited I was giving this talk.

I wished he could make it, but Magfest is sold out. You gotta get something for magnetic. Right, right. I told him this is happening and that if I make it to Portland, we can do a panel together. But anyway, around 1971, he was a high school senior

on the cusp of graduating. He was interested in computers because a road trip with his parents a couple of years earlier, he found a copy of Kemeny and Kurtz's basic programming book, which was a guide on how to program for Dartmouth Basic.

He was literally, living in Villa Park near Irvine, California at the time. And he had a motorcycle that he bought at Sears, or a motorbike, as he put it. It wasn't legal to go on the highway because it couldn't go that fast, but he could take the side streets, local streets, to get to UC Irvine, which was about 20 miles away at the time. And UC Irvine had a couple computers in their computer lab. They had a time sharing system, an SDS Sigma 7, and a deck PDP-10,

which you could do batch processing on. And he was very interested in these things. As a high school student, he did not have access. He did not let this stop him. So if you're wondering how he got into this computer lab, he told me all about it. So he said that there was a tech-related class at the university. The students got login access to the computers.

So what he did is he would wait a couple weeks after the class started and see who never showed up or who dropped it. And then he would take their account and just log in with that and give it his own password and that was that. It's incredible. And because this was, you know, not an actual account for him, he did not trust that he had disk space to like save any programs on. So what he would do is he would just print whatever he was working out on paper tape and

take it home. This was actually quite prescient because they did. lock him out of his account and he had to keep doing this a few times over the course of the summer until he actually started going to the university. So he also got access to see Space War on the deck computer. And he remembered seeing a lunar landing game, probably the tech space one that was published around 1969. And he really liked Space War. I do want to make a note the difference in technology between the PDP and the Sigma 7 real quick here. So if you've ever seen Space War, that's running on a deck PDP computer, specifically ones that had a monitor. That was not all of them

because these were very expensive pieces of equipment, especially monitors at the time. So this is a game where you have two ships. You're flouting around a star or whatever. There's a few different flavors of space war. And you're trying to destroy each other. Seminole work. Sort of, they've Velvet Underground of games in the 60s and that not many people actually had access to Space War, but the people who did went on to found, say, Atari and do a bunch of other interesting stuff. So Space War got around through word of mouth, I guess, you'd say. But anyway, that's not what he really had programming access to. Like the deck was a batch processing unit, as he remembered, not time sharing. And he had a

timeshare account. So he could not actually use this. If someone else loaded up Space War, he could play it, but that was about it. This is what he got to work with. He got to use the Cigna 7. That's the teletype terminal, or at least similar to the one that he got to use. If you've never seen a teletype, it's basically a keyboard with a typewriter printer system hooked up to it. You would put in what you're, yeah, you would type in your code or whatever you're doing to the computer. You would hit enter, and then the computer would run its program, whatever. And then you would print out the response, 10 characters a second.

So he wanted to make a space war kind of game on that. So he did get to spend time playing stuff on there. But yeah, this is what his challenge was. So like, how do you make Space War plus a teletype into a game? an actiony game. And the answer is you don't really, but you find a workaround. So what he wound up doing

is he brainstormed with his friends at the time and his thought was, okay, well, what if we do a game that's like sort of turn-based? What if it's on a grid and you're firing at each other? That way you don't have to constantly

refresh using this teletype. So yeah, And they wanted to do a Star Trek theme game because they were Star Trek nerds at the time, of course, as you would be for writing a Star Trek game. So once he finished high school, he started visiting this computer lab a lot and working on his program. And it wound up being spaghetti code of like four or five pages. He had to figure out how to convert Dartmouth Basic to the Sigma 7's flavor of Basic, which apparently was a huge pain for someone who, had no background in computer programming prior to this point. But, you know, through the course of the summer, he finished his game.

So the ideas here that they wound up with was that you would have a galactic map, then you would have smaller, like, sector maps. They called them quadrants, which is really funny, considering it's an 8x8 grid and not, you know, four. But, yeah, and then you would have to, like, deal with energy. supplies. These were like the three main pieces. And because he didn't know programming very well, that kept feature creep to a minimum, as well as the fact that he, again, is using a teletype with 10 characters per second. So he remembered that this was really popular among he and his

friends. Some of the other people at the lab thought it was interesting and wanted to play it too and they liked it. And that might have been the end of it if things had gone differently. But here's just what he came up with. Found a video of someone running it because this turned up like 15 odd years ago. Like not the original version, but like the next one that he did. And someone on YouTube,

blessed their soul, decided that they were going to do a playthrough of the earliest version of Star Trek, which saved me a lot of trouble. So, yeah, this is sort of what the display is. You've got your time, you have your energy supplies, many photon torpedoes you have. You have like a limited supply of energy and torpedoes. There are star bases in the galactic map. If you go and dock at one of them, you'll get restocked

on all that stuff. And you have to look for Klingon ships in this galaxy map, and you have to destroy them. If you enter a sector that has Klingons, they will fire back at you. They don't really move in this version. They just sort of hang out where they're hanging out. And the two weapon systems do different things. The phasers always hit, but the further away you are from your target, the less damage they'll do. And because you're using your finite energy supplies that you also need to move and energize your shields, that's something you have to really keep in mind. You have photon.

You also have the photon torpedoes. The photon torpedoes are very nice because they almost always are a one-hit kill, but you can really only fire them along specific trajectories, and also you only have 10 of them or so at a time. Again, because he had no disk storage space, this was on a paper listing at the end of the day when he was done putting it together. Everything's done in ASCII, because again,

it has to be done on a teletype. And, you know, that was kind of that. He said by the end of the summer he was done with it. That brings us to the fact that it's still a game that you can play today. Because, like, I talked to Mayfield a week ago, like I said, and I asked him, like, do you still have this, like, Sigma 7 code? And he's like, I don't think so. I think that's long gone.

But thankfully, he kept it at the time. So the next year, I guess, early in the year, he really wanted an HP35 calculator because he thought that was super cool. He remembered it might have also been a 45. He wasn't quite positive, which is which. I guess he hasn't aside. He mentioned he donated it to one of the museums in D.C. I'm not sure which one. He's not sure which one.

I'm guessing the American History Museum, but I couldn't say for sure. But it's somewhere. Either way, he remembered that he wanted this calculator, so he started hanging around the Hewlett-Packard sales office,

just like bumming around with these guys. and talking about computer stuff. And he mentioned at one point that he'd written a Star Trek game for the Sigma 7 in Basic. And they asked him if they would if he would convert it to run on HP's version of Basic

for use in their new 2000C time sharing network. And in exchange they would give him free access to that network himself, which he thought was a pretty good deal. He wound up rewriting the whole game because, you know, again, it was spaghetti code.

It was a mess. He was able to shorten it up a fair bit. But he remembered that functionally it played the exact same, and I guess that's sort of the important thing. He submitted his final revision in February 73, although he remembers giving them the initial one in October of 72, credited it to centerline engineering because he thought he was like a hot shot,

and this would be like his own business name at some point. So he's like, yeah, centerline engineering. That sounds cool. So the HP 2000 was a very popular time sharing program, a program, computer platform. And coupled with the Star Trek syndications run and its growing popularity, people started playing it wherever HP computers were found.

And HP computers were found in a lot of different schools and universities because between them and deck, they kind of had that market locked down for the most part. And speaking of Deck, this is probably the catalyzing moment as to why Star Trek is as well remembered, the Mayfield game. And that is because of David All, who at the time was working at Deck. He was managing their newsletter, EDU, and doing a lot with the Deck User Society, Deccas, and their newsletter. So he recalled that when I talked to him a few years ago that someone submitted the HP version of Deck

or HP version of Star Trek, sorry, to the Deccas newsletter. And then he alongside Mary Cole, Ira Potele and Leo Lavador, converted it to Dex version of Basic, which is apparently a whole thing. And they ended up publishing it in the book, A 101 Basic Computer Game. games, which he published the first edition of in 1973. I think it sold something like 10,000 copies, which is a lot for a computer-based book in

1973, but also speaks to the growing popularity of time-sharing networks, I suppose. So this was sort of the standout game in the original 101 basic computer games. It's a lot of very simple little games here and there, a number of things from Dartmouth, including Kemenis football This, you know, obviously he couldn't get the Star Trek name at the time, so he just called it Spack War.

I think it's supposed to be Space War. But even in the description, he's like, yeah, it's based on the TV show Star Trek, right? You all get it. But this was sort of the standout game. And one of the folks that got to try this out was Bob Lidam, who actually lives in the area. Very nice man.

also did not come here because Magfest was sold out. Go figure. But he thought it sounded like fun. And he wanted me to tell everyone hello for him. So Bob Liedom at the time, he was working at Westinghouse on our radar systems. And they had access to a Data General Nova 800 computer at the time. And after hours, they were allowed to just, you know, futz around with this thing and do whatever they wanted. and he and his buddies, they would bring in computer games,

they'd write their own programs, all sorts of fun stuff. So at one point, someone got 101 basic computer games, brought it in, they started going through the various programs in there. And Bob was a big Star Trek nerd, once again, and he thought, this looks really cool. I'm going to try typing it in. This game's pretty neat. I enjoyed it, but it could use some quality of life improvement.

So this got some feature creep going, unlike Mayfield's game. So what he wound up with is like, okay, we're going to have a shorthand for your command, so you're not just putting in like one, two, three, and having to like remember what all of those are or look back on your teletype. We're going to have Klingon ships that can move because now monitors are a little more popular, so you can do that. You're not as worried about wasting a bunch of paper. and Inc. We're going to have

named Enterprise crew member mentions. We're going to name the sector maps. Specifically, I'm going to note this is the Commodore 64 version that I recorded footage of a while back. Because this

game, he wound up referring to it as sort of a superstar Star Trek, and he wrote into people's computer company about it. If you are not familiar, people's computer company, was a storefront in California slash a newsletter zine sort of thing for computer nerds to sort of talk about

things they were interested in, programs they were working on. And David Aal, of course, was one of the people subscribed to this. He saw Bob Leadum's letter about this and wrote to Leidam asking about Super Star Trek and if he could publish it through his new magazine Creative Computing, which he did at the same time. This was around when I'll met Gene Roddenberry,

the creator of Star Trek. And he asked him about this. He's like, hey, could we get the name Star Trek licensed for our computer game? And Roddenberry's like, yeah, sure, let me talk to Paramount Pictures, and he got a license to do this for free. So Creative Computing got to post this under Super Star Trek

when he did the new edition of Basic Computer Games, the second edition. He included this under the name Super Star Trek. It's kind of the centerpiece game, once again. It's the most, like, interesting and most complex piece in there. And that came out in, I believe, 1978, about the same time that microcomputers and were coming out and really taking off for the home. So as such, for anyone who was, you know, getting a computer at the time,

which was still admittedly a fairly small number of people, that all of a sudden, oh, hey, here's a cool Star Trek game. I can play at home. And I can play it on my Apple 2 or my Commodore pet or whatever nonsense. I guess if you have a trash 80, I'm sorry. And that brings us to this sort of weird third fork of Star Trek that was reasonably popular. And I mentioned earlier Star Trek, well, maybe I didn't mention earlier, but Star Trek was globally popular. And this is kind of how it got to be globally popular.

So in 1976, an engineer named Lee Chen Wang wrote to people's computer company about a version of Basic that he developed for very small systems, specifically the Altair 800, I believe, the Altair computer. And he also wrote Tiny Trek to go with it, a version of Star Trek designed to run in a very limited computer system, I think like 2K of RAM or something like that. So this is very stripped down. This particular version is running on Bally Basic, which also has like 2K of RAM to work with. It's a very like limited system, perfect example. And at the same time that, well, like around the time this got published, there was a Japanese, well, not Japanese per se.

There was a computer scientist named Haruisa Ishida, who moved to Japan after this. But he was working at the Bell Labs in the U.S. around 75 when he discovered the Mayfield and Bob Lidam versions of Star Trek. And then he also discovered Tiny Trek once that came out the following year. And this inspired him to write Micro Trek when he went to Japan to take a position at Tokyo University. And that sort of spread the game throughout the Japanese computer ecosystem because there's a whole write-up here in OMZ about the game that Brian Clark, who's in the background, or in the

audience somewhere, rather. He translated it for me. But yeah, it's a whole like history about how he got this game and how it's spread around. And he didn't just spread around Tiny Track. He also spread around Super Star Trek in the Mayfield original version as well. So as such, the Japanese computer ecosystem,

the MSX, PC 8,001, the MZ computer line, the Famicom through Family Basic. They all have versions of Star Trek on there and frequently Tiny Trek. In fact, I brought along in the museum space so you can try mini trek out on the

Famicom if you want to give that a world and there were some retail releases for Star Trek as well as the years went by like I know Creative Computing David Al said that they considered selling Super Star Trek as a retail product they wound up not doing so because the market at that time started going towards more action-oriented works at the same time I'm pretty sure they might have tried selling it. I don't know. He might have misremembered.

But Atari did, stellar track. They sold that through Sears, 19881. Rob Zidabelle, who also worked on that Trek 73 port to the Atari 400,

did this because he thought Star Trek was a really cool game and he wanted to see if he could get it going on the 2600. Very good port, I feel like. There's a Vagan attack. This was like a UK retail

product, Zetex Spectrum, Commodore 64, a couple other systems, I think, through Atlantis software. This one has some interesting little variations on there. It has a super weapon that you can use one time in the play-through, and it may kill you if you don't escape the sector fast enough. It also has like star bases you have to destroy. Otherwise, they'll just keep producing new enemy ships. And then on the right here, we have Pulsar no Hikari for the Famicom Disc System. This is kind of hybrid

Like you have the sector maps But once you close in on a particular enemy It goes into the sort of real-time combat sequence And there's also like shining planets and stars That can damage you just by hanging out Like near them for too long But I feel like the main reason Star Trek Didn't get too many retail versions

Is because Atari decided to go ahead and do Star Raiders This was by Doug Nubbush. Newbauer came out around March 1980 for the Atari 400 and 800 computers. And this is kind of like a real-time version of Star Trek. You're going around a galactic grid. You're hunting down enemy ships. And you're getting into sort of like dogfights against them, trying to defend your space stations.

This was like critically acclaimed. People were buying Atari computers just for this. I found like newspaper clippings about kids going to computer stores after school and just like hanging around playing their setups of Star Raiders. There was ports of this, like unofficial ports to this, to a bunch of different platforms, including like the Apple II, the Spectrum, the Atari 2,600.

The Atari 2600 also got an official port eventually. And it inspired a bunch of later works, like Elite and Wing Commander. And you wouldn't have gotten to those if you hadn't gotten to this, which wouldn't have happened without Star Trek, to proceed it. So it's really, it's both sort of the next generation

of Star Trek style games, but also the one that really makes it show its age. At the same time, that has not stopped Star Trek from proliferating. Here are a bunch of different versions of Star Trek from the past, you know, a couple years, plus a personal

favorite of mine. I love EGA Trek. Yeah, see, someone gets it. So Star Trek continued to show up for decades after Star Raiders came out after the game had originally been written and people came up with different gameplay wrinkles for it. Like, you know, the super weapon from Vagan Attack has shown up in other games.

It's like a kind of death ray. Some variations let you land on planets and like look for resources. EGA Trek has like unstable di-lythium crystals you can like mine and try to shoehorn into your system in an emergency. Some of them have Romulan birds of prey that show up.

One in particular, what to play is a Romulan, and you're like fighting, you know, other powers. EGA Trek here is a DOS version. I remember, I wish I could find, like, the file I had about it previously, but I remember hearing about a version of this game that was, like, multiplayer from the 90s. You did, like, a land for it or something. Some recent ones We have Super Star Trek 25th, this is on Itch So is the Pico 8 Star Trek game

I think that's a port of Tiny Basic Or Tiny Trek And classic Trek 80 on the iOS I have this on my phone And it's like a port of the TRS 80 version of Star Trek With some quality of life improvements When I talked to Bob Leadham about this

He mentioned that he kept getting letters about Super Star Trek into the 2000s from all across the globe, like people asking programming advice and how to get the game running on their hardware. And he's like, well, I'm not familiar with all these computer systems, so I would just be like, hey, try this, you know, see what happens. A lot of programming early on is just tweaking stuff

and seeing what it does. So good luck to you. Like Mayfield, when I talked to him like a week ago, he mentioned that at one of his previous jobs, like a few, years ago. It was like a game company, and people there knew that he had written Star Trek, and they had, like, an idea of doing, like, a competition where they would make the game again in C, like, not necessarily a port, just like the whole game running in C. And it never happened, but they wanted him to be the judge for it. And he's like, yeah, you know, like, yeah, people are still

into this game. Like, I did it in high school. It was a long time ago, but it's pretty cool that people remember it. And, you know, if I could guess, the sort of the main thing that sets this apart from its contemporaries, aside from the fact that, you know, it got the David Alpush and, you know, sign of quality, is that it's more approachable. Like, a lot of these earlier games were very strategic tactical sort of games. Like, you're maneuvering your ship around. You're trying to figure out trajectories, and you're using math to figure out where your shots have to go. Yeah, yeah. If you're not a math nerd, then that's not super fun.

And if you take that out, like, there's not as much to the game. Yeah, math makes it more fun. If you're a certain kind of person, you probably love Trek 73. But, you know, instead, you're kind of fulfilling the idea of Star Trek. You're like exploring the galaxy. You're seeing what's out there. And yeah, your mission is to go kill a bunch of Klingons who are just, you know, hanging around. but the fact that you're still

doing that part of the Star Trek ethos I think speaks to the game a little more and speaks to the franchise and what they were trying to do in sort of an actiony way plus you know it is complicated but in a way that's fairly manageable for a lot of systems

a lot of computer systems and a lot of players like you okay you just have to know how much energy you have and how much energy you have and how many torpedoes you have and how you shoot them at things. And then you travel to another sector and do that again.

It's a resource management more than a battle sim. And I think that makes it more approachable, more adaptable, and frankly more fun. And in conclusion, Star Trek's been the subject of fan works for decades,

you know, fan fiction, costumes, fan films, you know, and games. And there's something to be said for these ones that have stood the test of time and they're still popular targets for ports and playing today. Mayfield, he did not envision that his game would have kept going at this point. But, you know, it's continued existence. It's consistent conversions to new hardware, like, go on, peak 08. What are we doing with that? But the fact that it's still

happening, that it's still being played and imported. It's, I don't know, in some ways, at least to me, it kind of mirrors like the decades-long appreciation and popularity of the original Star Trek show that it's based

off of and has spawned all these other spin-off shows in the years since. So yeah, I have time for questions if anyone has anything they would like to ask. We'll start with you. I just noticed the

selection of fighting the Mongols. Yes. So the question was about EGA Trek and why the screenshot I have here has Star Trek signage and not, you know, off-brand the CVS brand version. And it's because

this game was in development for like six years and there's a lot of different versions of it floating around. This is from an earlier version that he had not gotten like a cease and desist from Paramount yet. So So it still has the Star Trek stuff. And then you had a question.

So you mentioned during the Super Star Trek. Yeah, so the question was regarding Super Star Trek and how I mentioned that the monitors were becoming more popular and asking if that's meant that the earlier versions you had to play using a teletype and the printouts of what was going on. And that is exactly what you did. Every time you put in a command,

you would get another line of printout. Again, 10 characters a second. not super fast. And yeah, there were monitors earlier than that, but they were not very common. I know Dartmouth had something like a dozen monitors in the early 70s and like 120-odd teletype setups. And obviously the monitors were going to be much more popular.

So you could not guarantee that. And if you're making a game that you wanted to be able to access, you would go with a teletype. So I have played the teletype version, of Star Trek. It's not super fun, but it is playable. Yeah. So the question was, you know, the person had played Wind Trek for Windows in the 90s and wanted to know how many of these were officially licensed. And to my knowledge, that would probably be David Al's Super Star Trek. I don't think that anyone else ever got the Trek licensing, although there are a couple Japanese games

that did come out in retail. There's one, let's it call a cast Star Trek. and that seems to have like likenesses and name, so I'm wondering that one might have been licensed, but I'm not positive because I can't read Japanese very well. But other than those two, I can't really think of any others. Yeah. Do you want to fire up a quick game of Star Trek? Which one do you go to?

The question is, if I want to fire up a quick game of Star Trek, which one do I go to? So I split between EGA truck, just because that's the first one I played, and that's very feature-complete. There's a lot of cool stuff to it. And the 2,600 port, because the 2,600's right there.

It uses a joystick. It's pretty easy to operate. And it also has most of the features of that you would expect out of Star Trek. Just a slightly smaller, like, galactic map. I think it's 6x6 instead of 8 by 8. Anyone else? Yeah.

One game I... So the question was, was regarding Namco's Bosconian and, you know, what linkages there may have been to, you know, what computer users and operators were playing with regarding Star Trek in Japan at the time and the arcade folks. And I'm not sure if I've seen anything like definitively linking it. That said, Namco did also put out Starluster, which is basically just Star Raiders, which makes me think that they were aware of computer games at the time, even like Western ones, like Star Raiders or Star Trek.

And they did have that like ongoing relationship with Atari as well, going back to the 70s. So it would not surprise me too much if at the very least they had seen Rob Zidabelle's a stellar track. Does anyone else have anything? If not, I've, oh, yeah. I guess I have more to follow up. So the question was, how would you program without a computer monitor?

And there were a few different ways. There was the punch card system, where you would just punch the cards in for your program code, run it through, and it would spit out what it spits out. Using a tele... Yeah, garbage in, garbage out. No one I've talked to has had anything kind to say about the punch card method. And using a teletype, you would... I mean, it would be functionally a lot like using a monitor, right? You would be putting in your code.

You would hit the next line button and continue typing in like that. And then when you push the button to run your code, it would run through the computer, and it would either run your game or it would crash and give you an error message. And you'd have to go back over your listing and see where you went wrong. You know, teletypes, like they functioned kind of like a slow monitor at the time, I guess, is the best way to describe it. Yeah, the folks I've talked to have remarked that using a teletype to program

was so much better than having to use punch cards. And they did go on to do monitor-based programming as well. I'm actually working on a piece for ROM chip about that. I'll get it to you this month, I swear. Anything else? If not, then thank you all for coming. enjoying Star Trek. This has been Retronauts.

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