The True Story of the Original Star Trek Prodigy

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Star Trek Prodigy wasn't a TV cartoon. Gather round as your fandom grandma tells you all about a bunch of fans on a prehistoric online service who accidentally invented role playing and their own very silly, Star Trek-based town called Roddenberryberg.

It was back in the early ‘90s, when people were first discovering that their PCs did something even better than word processing: going online. Via dial-up modem, one could connect to one of several subscription based online services, like Compuserve, America Online, and….

Prodigy. The country bumpkin of online services, Prodigy had a graphical interface and was designed to be simple to use, but lacked a lot of the functionality of the other services (in large part because, as a subsidiary of IBM, it did not use the newly developed Windows OS of archrival Microsoft, as AOL did -- but I digress). 

What other services usually called forums, Prodigy called bulletin boards – the feature that allowed users to interact via text messages (not in real time – chat would only come later). It tells you a lot about the lack of imagination of Prodigy execs that BBS were added to the service as something of an afterthought. They woefully underestimated people’s appetite for communication with total strangers about topics of interest. Of course, before long, fandom sprang up on the BBS, and Star Trek fandom was front and center. TNG was in its first run, and Trekkies who had never had an easy way to connect with fellow fans were thrilled to be able to find each other and interact.

As is wont to happen, like-minded groups began to form, creating their own “subjects” (Prodigy’s designation for user-created threads, before anyone realized that these would become more like communities than topics). One was Adult Trek Fans (ATF) – the “adult” indicating serious discussion, not porn, which was most emphatically prohibited on Prodigy. But people tended to get off topic, crack wise, and generally goof around, so a spinoff subject was created.

Thus was born Adult Silly Session, or A$$ (because Prodigy controlled language so strictly that even the word “ass” was verboten). The folks who hung out there were very happy to have a new home, and soon turned their (admittedly not very adult) wit to imagining it as a virtual town filled with bad Star Trek puns and silly pretend activities. They named their town Roddenberryberg (RBB). Soon, its citizens (RBBeings) began creating for themselves personas. Knowing nothing of role-playing games, they essentially invented a Star Trek-based digital LARP. 

Exclusive French dining was available at the Captain's Table; the big box store was, of course, Q-Mart; the cemetery was at the end of Expendable Way; you could work out at the He's Dead Gym, visit the Great Bird Aviary, launch a boat from Worf Wharf, or buy a suit at the Measure of a Man tailor shop. Popular entertainments included tribble races, the nanite marching band, and poetry night. Everyone had the job and the home of their dreams, as long as they dreamt shamelessly of Star Trek and bad puns.

One of the shortcomings of Prodigy BBS was that there was no way to download and save content. It could only be printed out. Eventually, the chancellor of Roddenberberg University (motto: RU (I am!)) – spent many hours assembling, printing, and reproducing a hard-copy collection of hundreds of these posts. Titled “CLA$$ICS: A Roddenberryberg Anthology,” she distributed it via snail mail to a few dozen RBBeings for just the cost of postage (I know, because she was me). Another (far more creative) citizen drew an amazingly detailed map of RBB, including just about every location that had ever been mentioned in the group. That, too, was sent in hard copy (in a beautiful, poster-size format) to fellow RBBeings. 

Its members came and went, but RBB and A$$ continued for several years with a fairly consistent core group, until the invention of the Web browser made proprietary online services like Prodigy obsolete overnight. There had been a couple of meet-ups and real-life friendships formed, but most of the participants fell out of touch when Prodigy became defunct. Decades later, some found each other again via social media, and while RBB wasn’t resurrected, it was at least remembered fondly.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time this obscure chapter of Star Trek fandom history has been told outside the small group who were there. RBB wasn’t exactly a major milestone in Trek history – it wasn’t big, it didn’t change anything, and it wasn’t even known beyond its small circle of a few dozen participants – but I think it’s still worth celebrating. For possibly the first time, a group of Trekkies came together in an act of ebullient creativity to invent their own little world, concocted irreverently but lovingly from the ingredients of their fannish passion.

The following images include the introduction to the CLA$$ICS collection, a few random A$$ posts, and the map of RBB. Enjoy, and don’t forget to close the door when you leave – you don’t want the nanites getting out.

*NOTE -- The photos you see in the posts below were added to the hard copy after printing. Prodigy didn't support photos anywhere on the service, and the BBS supported only ASCII text.

Intro of the CLA$$ICS anthology:

A sampling of A$$:

The map of RBB, in four parts: