Rare 1978 Apple II Star Wars and Star Trek Cassette Reaches September 8 Collector Deadline

Heritage Auctions closes offers today on an exceptionally early boxed 1978 Apple II cassette featuring Bob Bishop's Star Wars adaptation alongside an unlicensed Star Trek game.

A remarkably early piece of videogame history reaches a collector-market deadline today, 8 September, as Heritage Auctions closes offers on a boxed Apple II cassette containing Star Wars and Star Trek software dating from 1978. The item was left unsold during an earlier Movie Posters Signature auction and has subsequently been available through Heritage's offer process, with an asking price of $625 and an offer deadline scheduled for this morning in the United States. The most fascinating aspect is not the eventual selling price but the software itself. Heritage describes the Apple II Star Wars program, designed by Bob Bishop, as the first videogame adaptation of Star Wars. Historical superlatives of this kind are always worth attributing carefully because early computer software was often distributed informally and documentation can be incomplete, but there is no question that a 1978 Star Wars game sits extraordinarily close to the birth of the franchise itself. George Lucas's original film had premiered only the previous year. The cassette's other side contains an unlicensed Star Trek program, reflecting an era when home-computer software distribution was considerably less formalised than the licensed videogame industry that emerged later. Apple's II computer was itself only introduced in 1977. Early owners commonly loaded programs from audio cassette before floppy drives became dominant, meaning the physical media is representative of a brief and important period in personal-computer history. Software could be duplicated, traded and sold on ordinary magnetic tape at painfully slow data rates that seem almost unimaginable beside modern solid-state storage. Surviving boxed software from that period is therefore much rarer than later disk releases, particularly when tied to globally famous entertainment properties. The auction also highlights the preservation tension surrounding collectible software. Sealed boxes, original cassettes and printed documentation have increasing financial value as objects, but their data is historically valuable too. Magnetic tape degrades, and merely owning a pristine-looking cassette does not guarantee that the program recorded on it will remain readable indefinitely. Ideally, historically significant examples eventually receive both careful physical conservation and verified digital preservation. Whether this particular copy enters a private Star Wars collection, an Apple II archive or remains unsold, its appearance on the market provides a useful reminder that commercial videogame history began before cartridges and floppy disks became the default image of retro gaming. In 1978, one of the world's newest home computers was already being asked to recreate one of cinema's newest phenomena.