Star Trek: The Rebel Universe - Memories

There had been many unofficial Star Trek computer games in the past, but this was one of the earliest 'offically licensed' games to hit the market. The license was negotiated in New York from Simon & Schuster.

Star Trek: The Rebel Universe was released for the Atari ST in 1987 after a troublesome development period. The programming team consisted of G.P.'Kenny' Everitt and Steve Cain, who had previously written Black Lamp for Firebird on the ST and Amiga (as well as previously belonging to 8-bit programming team Denton Designs). The game was project managed for Firebird by Pete Moreland. Mike Singelton - famous for his Lords of Midnight games published by Beyond - was drafted in by Simon P. Goodwin to help knock the game design into shape, thus delaying his own Firebird game Dark Sceptre in the process. It also put the work Mike was doing on the third and final Lords of Midnight game Eye of the Moon on the back burner, and ultimately it was never finished.

Both Star Trek: The Rebel Universe and Dark Sceptre were originally intended for the Beyond label, but both ended up as Firebird titles after the label was finally laid to rest. The Beyond stand at the 1986 Personal Computer World Show held at Olympia was dressed up to vaguely resemble the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Pictures of the main cast of Star Trek adorned the walls. Each framed picture had been screen-grabbed from VHS videos and then blown up especially for the show.

My involvement with the game was as play-tester on the C64 and PC conversions. From what I can remember, the PC conversion was completed first, followed by the C64. The PC programmer was (if I remember correctly) an Australian called Steve who lived in St Albans, Hertfordshire (UK) and the C64 version was handled by 'Foo' (Fouad Katan) who ran the successful software development company, Bits and who had previously coded C64 Empire! for Firebird as well as help finish Tracker on the C64.

Originally, there were plans to also release the game on the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Timothy Walter was coding the Amstrad CPC version, and Anthony Taglione (aka Tag) started the spectrum version. In the early days of the game's development, they were the only versions available! ST development was way behind schedule, and technical considerations ultimately doomed both Z80 versions. I can clearly remember seeing the enterprise bridge and some of the multivision system working on the Spectrum Plus 3 disc version, but that was about it.

An Amiga version was never produced, despite rumours to the contrary. ST and Amiga versions of games usually went hand-in-hand, but for reasons that I never discovered the Amiga version failed to materialise.

Being officially licensed, each significant version had to be posted to Simon & Schuster in the US for comments. Most of the hard work had already been done on the original ST version, so the PC and C64 conversions were fairly straight-forward.

The game got mixed reviews when it was originally released for the ST, probably because the expectations had been so high and the game was infamously late. The PC conversion also didn't go down too well, but back then the PC couldn't really cope with games when compared to the ST or Amiga. The C64 conversion on the other hand got much better reviews. Technically it was about as good as it could be on the C64, and the whole game was present and accounted for - including the wireframe 3D battle sections that the machine wasn't particularly good at.

The main problem with the game was that the arcade and adventure sections were extremely simplistic, and the adventure element was also a bit linear. Time after time you would beam your party down to a planet and encounter a door, another door, a janitor robot and a force field generator! You would randomly select a member of your party and their suggestions would always be the same - e.g. Sulu would always suggest shooting, Uhura would normally suggest beaming signals, etc. Using items collected elsewhere to get around specific obstacles did give the player some feeling of achievement, but it was usually short-lived.

The arcade section was also poor. Selecting a target and then hitting the fire button (without overloading the phasers) was hardly an exciting or skillfull past time. Ultimately, both the shooting section and the adventure elements became a repetitive chore.

Thanks to Tony Beckwith for some of the memories detailed above!