Digital Trends – The shadow of the Star Trek franchise is enormous, not just in film and television (where it has generated nearly a dozen feature films and half a dozen TV series) but in technology and gaming as well. Star Trekâs original flip-open communicators were an inspiration for the mobile phone; the ubiquitous âpadsâ that littered Trek series from the 80s and 90s are in some ways the predecessors of todayâs iPad and Android tablets. And Star Trek has an enormous history in computer gaming: some of the first true computer games were actually Star Trek games designed to run on time-sharing mainframe computers, and innumerable Trek titles have littered the shelves, hard drives, and game consoles of gamers for generations.