EGATrek

There are games you pick up just to have something running on screen, and then you come back to them even thirty years later. EGATrek is the second case — a simple little game that someone programmed out of Trekkie passion and the limits of EGA graphics, and that's precisely what makes it something special.

You're hammering away in a space sector, shooting at enemy ships and collecting energy. There's no plot here, just repeating waves of crabs and white square enemies on a black background. It's about surviving as long as possible and racking up the highest score. Simply what works when you're playing in an old computer's shoes — no dialogue, no flash, just the game.

The controls are clunky, but nobody minded that for many years. You move with arrows or function keys, shoot with some button and that's it. Bullets fly, enemies disappear, energy drops. There's none of the complexity you'd later experience with something like Raptor or Tyrian — it's old-school, direct and no-nonsense. After a while you realize there isn't much depth to it, and when the game puts you in a tight spot, it really plays at a brutal pace.

That something memorable came from this isn't thanks to game design, but rather the appeal of the era's theme. Trek was still hot in the nineties, and if you had a computer with an EGA card at home, you didn't exactly have a basket of options. You could try this thing for free or for a few coins on some floppy disk.

Today there's no real reason to play it seriously. The graphics didn't turn out pretty, the sounds aren't worth noting and the content would last you maybe twenty minutes tops. But if you're curious what fan-made games looked like back when Star Trek was selling like legal heroin and your computer had 640 KB of memory max, you can find it in your browser and squeeze out at best some melancholy and nostalgia. Nothing more, nothing less.