Starcross
About
Starcross is a 1982 interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Dave Lebling and published by Infocom. Like most Infocom titles, it was developed for many systems. It was released for DOS, as a PC Booter, Apple II, Atari ST and Atari 8-bit. It is Infocom's fifth game. It sold 90,315 copies.
The game was Infocom's first in the science fiction genre. It takes place in the year 2186, when the player's character is a lone black hole miner exploring an asteroid belt. 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 is not 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. Starcross has an appearance in Zork: The underground empire.