Star Ship Command

When I think about a computer from 1987 and its graphical capabilities, I mostly see monochrome text and maybe some scribbles made with ASCII characters. Star Ship Command comes along and drops you into the command center of a starship, letting you run it. Nothing more, nothing less — and that's before you realize you're actually commanding gloomy buildings made of text, numbers, and lines that pretend to be stars.

This is a tactical game where you're the captain of a ship staring down enemy vessels against a black background. Your goal is crystal clear: survive and destroy the rest. Control is a matter of typing commands or navigating menus — there's no mouse acceleration here, you just input orders and see what happens. You're juggling energy between shields, weapons, and propulsion. Every turn is a chance to fall apart or buy yourself time for the next phase.

From today's perspective, this is something for people who can't be bored into submission. The screen is sparse, animation exists only in your head, sound — if there's anything there at all — shows up as a tone in the silence. But that's exactly where the magic of the era lies: the game demands your brain and imagination. There's no gloss here to dazzle your eyes with pride. There's pure decision-making and consequences.

Star Ship Command orbits around a style that no longer exists. This kind of tactical game survived only in memories and in the projects of indie creators. In the nineties, it was one way to make sci-fi on PC without a Lucasarts budget. Today, that sort of thing lives on as roguelikes or procedural variations, but that cold, numerical reality of the command deck — that doesn't come back.

If you want to revive the nostalgia of pure tactics without the sugar coating, or if you're curious what the sci-fi genre looked like when it wasn't about animation but just about possibilities, Star Ship Command will give you exactly that. You won't settle into it properly in a browser, but if you remember how games from the nineties felt played on a typewriter — this is a good trip back to that time. It's not entertainment in today's sense, but it's a thing.