In the game, the player commands the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships.

The player travels through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy to attack enemy ships with phasers and photon torpedoes in turn-based battles and refuel at starbases.

It was picked up from there by David H. Ahl, who ported it with Mary Cole to BASIC-PLUS and published the source code in the Digital Equipment Corporation Edu newsletter.

Additionally, dozens of variants and expansions were made for a variety of other systems, based either on Leedom's or the original Mayfield versions.

Torpedoes do not suffer this drop in power and will destroy a Klingon ship with a single hit, but have to be aimed using polar coordinates.

[1][2] Later versions of the game expanded on this combat system by adding features such as Klingon ships moving after each shot if not destroyed, enemy attacks damaging systems such as scanners or shields, stars absorbing torpedoes that hit them, and a calculator to help in determining the proper angle to fire the torpedoes.

[2] In some versions of the game, there are additional options for emergency situations, such as calling for help from a starbase, using the experimental Death Ray, loading raw dilithium crystals into the warp drive, or abandoning ship.

A score in the form of a ranking is presented at the end of the game based on energy usage, damage taken and inflicted, and any remaining time.

[1][2] In 1971, Mike Mayfield, then in his final year of high school, frequented a computer lab at the University of California, Irvine, while teaching himself how to program.

As none of the group had much experience with computers, most of the ideas were unfeasible, but one concept he liked and thought was possible was a game based on Star Trek, then in syndication on television.

He and fellow employee Mary Cole ported STTR1 to DEC's BASIC-PLUS in the summer of 1973, with some additions, and he published this version in the newsletter.

He changed the user interface, replacing the original game's numeric codes with three-letter commands and adding status reports from show characters and names for the galaxy quadrants, and overhauled the gameplay, adding moving Klingon ships, navigation and fire control options, and an expanded library computer.

David Matuszek and Paul Reynolds wrote an expanded Fortran version of the original game as UT Super Star Trek; Eric Allman ported this version to the C programming language to become BSD Trek, which is still included in the Debian classic Unix games package.

[1][14] BYTE published a BASIC version by David Price in March 1977 that used the original command system based on numbers.

[8] In 1983 BYTE columnist Jerry Pournelle claimed to have written "the world's most complex Star Trek game" in CBASIC.

[15] A shareware version for MS-DOS, EGATrek, was released in the late 1980s that replaced the original text-based screens with basic graphics that implemented a multi-paned display.

The TRS-80 had at least three separate commercially available Star Trek games, including Trek-80 by Processor Technology (later retitled Invasion Force) which added more interactivity and a number of new options incorporated from the unrelated Trek73, a second Trek-80 by Judges Guild, and Startrek 3.5 from Adventure International.

[22] Numerous hobby projects have continued to port the original game versions and enhanced variants to other languages and systems through to today.