The player flies their ship around a two-dimensional scale model of the Solar System with no objectives other than to attempt to land on various planets and moons.

Space Travel never spread beyond Bell Labs or had an effect on future games, leaving its primary legacy as part of the original push for the development of Unix.

Space Travel is a spaceflight simulation video game, presented in a two-dimensional top-down view, with monochrome graphics consisting of white lines on a black background.

Players are able to edit the program to change the conditions; popular variations by the original players were increasing the gravity level and thus the difficulty, or an adjustment to the coordinate display system so that, rather than the ship staying in the center of the screen and the planets moving relative to it, the current dominant planet would always be at the bottom of the screen, with the ship moving relative to it.

[1] In 1969, programmer Ken Thompson worked for Bell Labs on the Multics operating system on a GE 645 mainframe.

Multics was a collaborative project between several institutions for an interactive, multi-user operating system that provided convenient access for programming.

[2] Thompson then ported the Space Travel code to Fortran so that it could run on the GECOS operating system already present on the GE 645.

[1][3] Thompson and other Bell Labs employees, such as Ravi Sethi and Dennis Ritchie, played the game on the system.

[1] Additionally, the system required the user to type in commands rather than press buttons, resulting in the ship being difficult to control.

The PDP-11 arrived in the summer, without a hard drive, and the entire team began porting the rudimentary operating system from the PDP-7 to the new machine.