For PC gamers who grew up in the 80s, Starflight was a thing of awe and reverence. Packed into a pair of 360 KB floppy disks was an entire pocket universe, with hundreds of star systems and planets to explore, a half-dozen alien races to talk to or fight with, and a cleverly revealed plot holding the entire joyous package together. Starflight defined the genre of space exploration games, and among its direct spiritual successors are Star Control II (available in its modern open source incarnation as The Ur-Quan Masters) and the Mass Effect series.
The player begins on a space station orbiting the human homeworld of "Arth" in the year 4620. The inhabitants of Arth, it is revealed, have uncovered a set of underground ruins on the planet containing the remains of a faster-than-light starship, with enough fuel and technical documentation to construct a small fleet of duplicate vessels. You have been selected to captain one of these ships, and your mission is simply to see what's out there in the galaxy. Arth, whose inhabitants include not only humans but also members of three other alien races, has been isolated and without interstellar travel technology for hundreds of years, and records concerning the rest of the galaxy are outdated or missing. Your job is to poke your head out and see what has been going on over the past centuries.
As the player, you must gather and sell minerals to gain credits with which to upgrade your ship and train your crew; this artificial grind provides the structure for most of the early game. As you travel to nearby star systems, you'll inevitably encounter aliens, some friendly, some not. Eventually, you'll begin to pick up on the main plot of the game: a wave of solar flares is sweeping through the galaxy like the hand of some monstrous, horrible clock. You must find out why and then stop the flares, before the wave reaches Arth's sun and your home is destroyed.
Starflight was something new: though Braben and Bell's Elite had come out for the BBC Micro two years prior and had pioneered the idea of an open world trading and combat simulator, Starflight offered something that no other game had yet brought to the table: the ability to crew and command your own starship on a mission of exploration. Your ship didn't really look like the starship Enterprise, but you could certainly christen her that, and I'm pretty sure every single person who played the game named their crew—which consists of a science officer, a navigator, an engineer, a doctor, and a communications officer—exactly as expected.
The game's brilliance becomes obvious as more of the onion skin plot is peeled away. The player discovers exactly what happened to humanity's true homeworld, Earth, along with the Old Empire of which humanity was a member. Through a combination of talking to the alien races you encounter and digging up archived messages in old ruins in the post-flare "dead zone" section of the game's universe, the game conveys a sense of a tremendous, almost oppressive weight of history hanging over the player's head, and you are continually given the impression that you're fumbling around in long-abandoned places once inhabited by beings vastly more powerful than you. Each of the alien races with which you must talk or fight have their own personalities, from the easily intimidated Spemin to the proselytizing Gazurtoid to the implacably hostile and enigmatic Uhlek, and each have their own part of the story to tell—even the Uhlek, though they communicate only by firing plasma bolts at you. Eventually, the steps to "win" the game and save the galaxy from the wave of flares are revealed, though they are difficult to accomplish, and they bring with them a terribly high price—the flares aren't random, and saving the galaxy from genocide means committing a form of genocide yourself.
Storytelling on this grand a scale certainly wasn't common in space video games of the mid 1980s. Sierra's Space Quest series wouldn't debut until several months after Starflight's launch, and most of Starflight's contemporaries featured a lot of shooting and not much talking. Starflight was a sandbox game before sandbox gaming became a thing, allowing players to follow or ignore the main plot as they wished and do things their own way ("I think I'll go exterminate the Spemin fleet today!"), though the ever-advancing line of solar flares does ultimately set an endgame timer that cannot be worked around. The scale of the universe guarantees that you'll be spending some lonely time voyaging between stars, but random encounters can provide a break in your travels—and nothing is scarier than detecting an approaching alien craft when you know you're deep in hostile territory.
Starflight spawned a sequel, Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, which added to the first game by introducing the concept of trade and barter; it also brought with it all new aliens in an all new sector of space. Starflight II does lots of things right, including revealing the sad back story of the Uhlek, but it lacks the pure and powerful mystery that the first game's blank canvas allowed. Beyond its direct sequels, Starflight's pedigree is visible in many other places down the PC gaming timeline. Sadly, space exploration games are not much in vogue these days; with the weak exception of the original Mass Effect, there hasn't really been an entry in the genre for more than a decade. Gamers' tastes these days are focused more on real-time strategy games like Starcraft or 4X-style games like the Civilization series. Games like Starflight, which marry story and role-playing elements with exploration and combat, are sadly missing from the new release schedules.
Never fear, though: if you want to try out Starflight for yourself, it's available (bundled together with its sequel!) at Good Old Games for $5.99. For retrogaming enthusiasts who haven't played the game, or for nostalgic folks who want to re-experience their gaming roots, that would be money well spent.
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