The enduring popularity of the Star Trek science fiction franchise has led to numerous games in many different formats, beginning in 1967 with a board game based on The Original Series and continuing through the present with online and DVD games.
Official game titles include the following:
Starship simulator games which are set in the Star Trek universe occupy a large role in the history of video games. Some of the earliest and more influential space simulator video games were Star Trek simulations designed to run on mainframes.
David H. Ahl played such games in the late 1960s at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley. He stated that they were much less sophisticated than Mike Mayfield's Star Trek text game, which originated as a BASIC program on an SDS Sigma 7 mainframe system in 1971 and ported to many different systems. Decwar in 1978 was also a groundbreaking game. Another is Super Star Trek, an early text-based, DOS-based game. This game created an impressive starship experience using only text-based commands and graphics. The game Begin is considered notable for having a convincing model of game dynamics, as it has very few random elements, and is highly mathematical. In 1986, the game Multi-Trek (MTrek) was brought online at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Written in C for a PDP mainframe, and also available via dialup and later TELNET, MTrek was arguably the first ever game to combine a persistent world, online multiplayer environment with a real-time, true 3-dimensional game engine and versions of the game still have an active player base.