Introducing the Ars Technica / GOG store page—let’s buy some retro games!

That changed with the 1992 release of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, or ST25 to its friends, which brought the original series Enterprise and its crew to life in glorious 256-color VGA. And to players’ vast relief, it was not a half-baked effort—locations like the Enterprise bridge were lovingly recreated, with beautiful atmospheric sound effects lifted straight from the TV show permeating every scene. The character art is sharp, and it’s easy to tell Bones from Spock. The entire game is like a love letter to OG Trek.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the time, ST25 is a mouse-driven point-and-click adventure game. It’s broken up into seven discrete chapters, with each chapter being a self-contained mission with problems to solve and objectives to accomplish. Starfleet Command is always watching—complete the minimum number of objectives and an admiral will give you a middling performance review. Go above and beyond and do everything, even your bonus objectives, and you’ll have lavish praise heaped upon you by a grateful admiralty.

The missions themselves tend to follow a pattern. Each starts with the crew of the Enterprise on the bridge as Kirk makes a log entry. Starting with the CD-ROM issue of the game, all the lines are fully voiced by the original cast, so every mission kicks off with Bill Shatner’s familiar “Captain’s log…” lead-in telling us what we need to examine, investigate, locate, or shoot at. (Sadly, the only major voice cast omission in this one is Majel Barrett as the computer.)

Then there’s what I always felt was the weakest part of the game: Most missions kick off with some sort of space battle, where the player has to awkwardly maneuver the Enterprise with the mouse, dodging phaser blasts and photon torpedoes (or just eating them because the controls are just that awful) and trying to blow the other ship up before it does the same to you.