Visible Starcross is now available to all

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Comments: (live)

Tagged: if, interactive fiction, starcross, infocom, visible zorker, patreon, zarf

As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross!

A screenshot titled "The Visible Zorker: Starcross". The left side of the window shows the opening of Starcross, up to the command STARBOARD. The right side shows a list of ZIL function calls and the message "The alarm bell on the mass detector is ringing stridently." "The challenge was issued eons ago, from light-years away."

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

This was a fun one to work on. Infocom tackled the idea of epic sci-fi with verve, if not absolute originality. (Even at age 13, I thought "Huh, the author must have read Rendezvous with Rama.") The alien beings you discover are set-pieces, but each one is a cameo-sized micro-story within the spacecraft's long journey. An early example of we'd call "environmental storytelling" these days.

As it happens, I never owned a copy of Starcross. I bought a copy -- for a friend's bar mitzvah, with the shameless intention of immediately pirating it back for myself. (Don't worry, I traded him all my Zorks.) This means I do not have the treasured flying-saucer package, nor the wonderful mass detector chart (printed in un-Xeroxable purple and orange on silver paper).

But don't worry; I've redrawn that chart for your pleasure:

A chart drawn in radial white lines on a starry background. Geometric symbols with four-digit designations are marked in orange and magenta. A legend on the right, on a silvery background, says "M. C. S. Starcross: Mass Detector Output". My recreation of the Starcross Mass Detector Chart. (High-resolution source archived here.)

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

As for the in-game map display, I'll leave that as a surprise. Suffice it to say that the interior of a cylindrical space station was an entertaining mapping challenge.

By the way, this is the first known release of Starcross (release 15). Normally I prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each game for the Visible Zorker project. For Starcross that would be release 17. However, we don't have source code for r17, so I had to go back to r15 for this exhibit.

More readings on Starcross:

And, as a bonus:

Upcoming work:

Visible Suspended will be the next public release on August 1st. Watch for robots!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Suspended a month ago, and The Visible Witness today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

For the record, NarraScope in Albany went great.

See you next month!

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