Hard to convey how effective Starflight’s game design was within the limits of the day.

The embedding of the story within what was almost entirely free-form exploration & adventure across a huge galaxy was masterful.

You could feel how close the creators were to the edge of what was possible with the save game system: Basically, the disk was a memory image. As you played the game would rewrite itself, so if you got stuck there was no “reset”. The documentation was emphatic: Only play with a copy of the original disk!!