Starcross is a 1982 interactive fiction

Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

 game designed and implemented by Dave Lebling

Dave Lebling

P. David Lebling is an interactive fiction game designer and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid....

 and published by Infocom

Infocom

Infocom was a software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone....

. Like most Infocom titles, it was developed for many systems. It was released for DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

, as a PC Booter

PC booter

A PC booter, or booter, is a type of software for home computer era personal computers that was loaded and executed in the bootup of the computer, from a bootable floppy disk, rather than as a regular program; a booter thus bypassed any operating system that might be installed on the hard disk of...

, Apple II

Apple II

The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...

, Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 and Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

. It is Infocom's fifth game.

The game was Infocom's first in the science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 genre. It takes place in the year 2186, when the player's character is a lone black hole

Black hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...

 miner

Miner

A miner is a person whose work or business is to extract ore or minerals from the earth. Mining is one of the most dangerous trades in the world. In some countries miners lack social guarantees and in case of injury may be left to cope without assistance....

 exploring an asteroid belt

Asteroid belt

The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...

. The player's ship, the Starcross, is fitted with a mass detector to look for "quantum black holes", which are such powerful sources of energy that one could provide a wealth of riches. When the mass detector finally discovers an anomaly, however, it isn't a black hole but something else entirely: a massive craft of unknown origin and composition.

The player must dock with the mysterious ship and gain entry to its interior. Once inside, the player discovers a wide variety of alien plant and animal species and an array of unfamiliar technology.

Feelies

Before Infocom released Starcross, it released Zork III

Zork III

Zork III: The Dungeon Master is an interactive fiction computer game written by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson and published by Infocom in 1982. It was the third game in the popular Zork trilogy and was released for a wide range of computer systems...

, and Deadline

Deadline (computer game)

Deadline is an interactive fiction computer game published by Infocom in 1982. Written by Marc Blank, it was one of the first murder mystery interactive fiction games. Like most Infocom titles, Deadline was created using ZIL, which allowed the easy porting of the game to popular computer platforms...

before that. Deadline included several physical items related to the game's theme, which Infocom referred to as feelies, and they continued the technique by providing feelies with Zork III and Starcross.

The Starcross feelies consisted of the following items:

• Log of the M.C.S. Starcross, a whimsical journal of the player's character's experiences on the ship
• A letter from the "Bureau of Extra-Solar Intelligence" providing advice for any encounters with alien lifeforms
• A partial space map of charted masses, including instructions on how to use the navigation computer

Taglines

The challenge was issued eons ago from light years away. And only you can meet it.

Rendezvous with an alien vessel.

External links

• The Infocom Gallery entry on Starcross including photos of the box, feelies and entire manual (PDF
  Portable Document Format
  Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
  
  format)
• Infocom-if.org entry for Starcross
• The Infocom Bugs List entry for Starcross