Starship 1 is an Atari Arcade Game from 1976. It's a space First-Person Shooter, with all the Star Trek references that Atari could get away with in those less copyrighted days. You fly through hyperspace, dodging planets and asteroids and shooting enemy spaceships. You can line them up in your crosshairs and shoot them with phasors, or fire one of your five proton torpedoes and destroy everything on the screen.
There are four types of enemy ships, worth between 50 and 500 points. One is obviously the Enterprise, one is a Klingon warbird, one is a Flying Saucer, and one looks like a cat sticking its tongue out at you (!) Score 3500 points and you get 30 seconds of extra fuel. The game ends when you run out of fuel, there are no lives lost if you crash into planets or enemy ships.
It had a loose Atari 2600 adaptation called simply Starship.
Starship 1 provides examples of:
- Asteroid Thicket: Hyperspace is full of planets and asteroids coming at you. Steer the ship to dodge them.
- Attract Mode: The ship flies through space as planets and asteroids go by while it waits for someone to insert a coin.
- First-Person Shooter: You’re looking out the front of your spaceship, shooting enemies as they come towards you, and lining them up as they try to maneuver away from you. It’s primitive, and no one is shooting back at you, but still recognizable as an ancestor of today’s FPS games.
- One Bullet at a Time: Your phasors fire out into space and explode when they reach the end of their range. Then you get to fire again.
- 1-Up: At 3500 points you get 30 seconds of extra fuel.
- Scoring Points: The enemy ships are worth between 50 and 500 points.
- Shout-Out: Copyright was looser then, so the Star Trek: The Original Series references are somewhere between shout-outs and an outright Mockbuster. One of the targets is a side view of the Enterprise with the engine nacelles moved down, while another looks like a front-end view of a Klingon D7 cruiser. Your weapons are the Enterprise’s phasers (called “phasors” here) and photon (“photon”) torpedoes. And you’re fighting for The Federation, even though you’re shooting at both Star Trek Federation and Klingon ships.
- Smart Bomb: Photon torpedoes that destroy every enemy on screen. You get five of them.
- Timed Mission: You start with three minutes of fuel, and can get an extra 30 seconds.
