Star Trek - The Next Generation - Trivia

I was convinced back then that I knew TNG by heart. Captain Picard, Data, Riker — that's no problem, right? And then a trivia game from Micro F/X Software popped up from the floppy disk and I couldn't stop shaking my head.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Trivia is exactly what the title promises and nothing more. No story, no animations, no big production. Year 1990, MS-DOS, simple interface — this game exists solely to test how seriously you took the series that was only in its third or fourth season back then. It's basically a quiz wrapped up in a program.

The mechanics are straightforward: questions, answers, scoring. Keyboard controls, no graphical extravagance. The difficulty is nothing to sneeze at — the game doesn't ask about main characters and their basic traits, but goes after the details. Episode titles, specific quotes, supporting characters and their story arcs from the early seasons. Whoever watched TNG with one eye while eating dinner back then bombed here. And they bombed hard.

What's actually interesting about this from today's perspective? The game was created at a time when TNG wasn't even finished — there were no encyclopedias, no wiki, no easy access to complete information. Fans' knowledge was truly acquired by watching, reading fanzines, and debating at conventions. A quiz like this made sense back then as a tool for a community that really knew that world and wanted to verify or test themselves against their friends. Today it's different — the answer to any question is ten seconds of googling away, which takes away some of the magic.

Today, basically only die-hard fans will play it. You have to love TNG, you have to be willing to accept a bare DOS program without any wrapping, and you have to realize that nobody else is playing here except you against your own memory. For retro software collectors and series fans, it's an interesting historical curiosity — a testimony to what fandom looked like in 1990, when someone went through the effort to write such a program and release it. For everyone else, it's just a series of questions on the screen. But that's basically always been the case.