Freelance Traveller

Starflight

reviewed by Jeff Zeitlin

Starflight. Greg Johnson et alia.
Originally published: Electronic Arts, 1986
Current Availability: Secondhand market and certain abandonware vendors; can also be played free in browser at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Starflight_1986

Reviewer’s Note: This review is based on the original MS-DOS version. Versions were also released for the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and early Macintosh that were identical within hardware limitations, and for the Sega Genesis which had some major operational differences, but the same universe/story line.

Every once in a while I decide to dive into my DOSBox installation just for nostalgia or to relieve boredom. Sometimes I play with old office programs (like Microsoft Word 1.1) or programming tools (like SPF-PC or Turbo Pascal), or maybe an old game.

This time, it was Starflight, a game from the mid-1980s by Electronic Arts. While there’s no real connection between this game and Traveller, if you squint a bit, you can see something that looks like Traveller over there on the next hill.

Games in this period were either not thought worth copy-protecting, or they were copy-protected mostly in ways that didn’t involve preventing the user from making accurate physical copies. Instead, many games were sold with ‘feelies’, inexpensive souvenir-like items that ostensibly offered verisimilitude to the game – and, in many cases, incidentally acted as the ‘copy protection’. In the case of Starflight, not only weren’t you discouraged from making copies of the disks you were sold, you were specifically instructed to do so. The copy protection was via one of the ‘feelies’, a ‘code wheel’ where at specified points during game play, you would be instructed to set the wheel in a certain way, and key in an answer that you’d read from it.

You start the game with a limited amount of money and a ship that’s little more than a hull with minimal engines. Your initial mission combines elements of the Traveller scout and belter: bring back minerals, artifacts, knowledge, and make contact with aliens. It is up to you to configure your ship, hire (create) a crew and assign their roles, and go out there and Do Stuff that will allow you to come back and sell things to make money to allow you to improve your ship and train your crew to higher standards.

Once you’ve had enough time for a brief shakedown cruise, it’s time for an adventure: The scientists have discovered that the sun is going to flare and kill everybody, and that the cause isn’t natural. So, while you still have to Do Stuff that will make money so you can keep your ship going, you also have to follow all sorts of obscure clues and Save The World. Or maybe the Universe.

Nothing in the game is ‘fire-and-forget’; you’re going to learn things that require you to upgrade your ship or arm or disarm it, change your crew, deal (or not) with various aliens, and so on. You’ll be balancing goals against each other, always having to decide which clues and adventures you need to pursue most urgently to satisfy your possibly-conflicting goals, including the ultimate goal of preventing your homeworld’s star from flaring, and destroying all life on your homeworld.

As early as this game was, and given that they also had to make it fit on two 360K floppy disks (the 5¼-inch type), one useful thing that wasn’t built in to the game was a way for you to keep track of useful information and Clues. Grab a notepad and pen, or, since today you’re probably running it in DOSBox on an operating system that allows you to have multiple programs open at once, fire up a program that will let you keep track of what clues you find in the program – anything from Notepad to OneNote to a wiki; whatever you find most convenient and efficient. But you need to take those notes; there’s too much for anyone without an eidetic memory to keep track of without doing so.

You’re not going to finish this game in one sitting. Really. As small as it is, and as limited your interactions with various aspects of the game are, it’s still plenty complex. When you save the game when it’s time to break a session so you can sleep – or work, or do Other Necessary Things to pay for the time you spend playing games – you’re actually modifying the code, not creating a save-data file. This is why you’re told to make copies of the disks when you first open the package, and to never play using the disks that you found in the package.

Even after having played this game several times, I still enjoy it. It’s only barely Traveller-ish by stretching definitions, but I suspect that it will appeal in some way to many Traveller fans. I won’t comment on whether it’s worth the price, simply because there’s no fixed price, and it’s your decision whether to pay any particular source’s asking price for it. I will say that you shouldn’t be put off by the 1980s graphics and sound or the somewhat mechanical game play; look beyond all that to the richness of the game universe and the vision of the designers. It was a reasonably successful game when it was originally released; there had to be a reason for it.