Slashdot Mirror
Elite Turns 25
satellite17 writes "The BBC notes that the classic space combat / trading sim Elite is 25 years old today. Elite was one of the first 3D games produced for a home computer and also one of the first open-ended games. Odd as it sounds now, this meant that even though it was popular with friends of the creators, David Braben and Ian Bell, they initially struggled to find a publisher. 'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,' Braben said. It is also credited with influencing quite a few modern classics."
I like love to read stuff like this, although I have heard of Elite before I did not read up on it much. Truly a ground breaker by any measure of the word. Any day I can learn something new is a good day :)
I wish they'd get working on Elite 4. :(
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Until Elite 4 comes out (ahem, cough) Infinity: Quest for Earth looks to be its spiritual successor (yes there's seamless space travel to planetside, as showcased in the trailer)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp8WOCuR_pQ
Site: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/
Can't wait for this to come out... Frontier First Encouters with a DirectX engine just isn't cutting it anymore....
Here's to the crazy ones
... if you could actually figure out how to play it that is...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It was something that I thought was a bit more recent phenomenon. But it seems that once a market becomes "established" that it becomes tougher to get people to invest in an idea that isn't safe. And it just goes to show what a significant impact that this game had on the industry and what a shame it would have been if they had given up.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
I remember getting Elite on my BBC Model B back in '84 on cassette. It took quite a while to load but was well worth it. When I upgraded my machine with Opus DDOS and an 800K double sided, double density 5 1/4" floppy drive I was able to get the floppy version which loaded my more quickly. You really needed the analogue controller too. I stuck an old Scalextric controller on top of mine to give me a full hand grip and I could fly rings around other ships.
I tried other versions like the C=64 and PC versions but they really didn't work as well as the version for the BBC despite the fact that there was little use of colour (only the dash) but the mode 4 high resolution monochrome graphics were much crisper and animation was faster on the BBC than other platforms. The BBC Micro was a real gem for quality games. The versions of arcade games like PacMan, Defender, Scramble and so on were in many ways better than their arcade equivalent. The BBC had some really nice hardware acceleration features such as hardware scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) and a very configurable video ULA which is how they were able to do the mode switching part way down the screen in Elite where it switched from mode 4 (320x256 1 bit colour) to mode 5 (160x256 2 bit colour).
It was a real slog to get to "Elite" but worth the journey. Very few games today are anything like as enjoyable despite the improvements in technology. I guess GTAIII was the first time since Elite I had anything like the same feeling of freedom and the thrill of just being bad.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
FTA:
I wish more developers would do this with today's games. Then perhaps i wouldn't have to upgrade my computer so often when i wanted to play a new game. I know the article only mentioned memory usage, but i'm sure this goes for cpu / video power as well.
If you launched, then spun round and re-entered the dock hitting hyperspace at the same time, you appeared, docked, at your destination.
Saved all that tedious trading until you could buy lots of weapons etc.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I found oolite a year or two ago and was amazed at how much fun this game still is!
If there is one thing I miss about my old C64, it's Elite. I lost many, many hours on that game. How they built such a large universe on such a small platform I'll never figure out. Thanks guys!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Wow I feel old... this was seriously the bomb when it came out. So far ahead of its time, had me hooked for years!
Well, yeah, they were. You just had to have played long enough.
It took me a long time (Apple ][ version) before I encountered them by chance. Still wasn't sure it was real the next morning. Then a couple of weeks later, the Galactic Navy found me. Had some papers they wanted delivered.
And then "Thargoids. Why'd it have to be Thargoids?"
It wasn't a story arc by modern standards -- but after countless hours of play that stood on their own as just plain fun -- to have something like that pop out of nowhere, and to have the rarest "random encounter" spawn chase me more than halfway across the galaxy... was something I remember to this day.
It wasn't until DOOM came out that I had dreams about a video game.
Happy 25th, Elite. I still have that Apple ][, and I'm digging out that disk this weekend.
I have to say that I was so disappointed by the sequels compared to the simplicity and variety of the original that I'm afraid for any further sequel. I felt that Braden and Bell tried to expand the game too much for what the capabilities of systems were at the time. It'd be nice to see what they can do with the flexibility of modern systems.
I think what made the game so successful (at least it did for me) was the ability to do what you wanted to do and when you wanted. The most fun I've had with video games have been those that had this element to some degree. And, it wasn't just pointless free will like wandering around the unpopulated, unused portions of a game map. I'll never forget the excitement I felt when wandering into a system with a Python transported by a flotilla of escort fighters. I had a choice to attack them or move on to the space station (and you know I made the wrong decision!).
but plagued by mutant tree frogs.
...you may like Oolite, an Elite tribute. It has the goodness that ArcElite has too - it is not player centric, you can encounter epic battles (I've seen three or four distinct groups of ships battling it out, with the Police mixed in there too). The game is open source (GPL) and expandable with expansion packs (so now you can have Generation Ships and Space Dredgers, as well as scenes from the Dark Wheel like the Tionisla Orbital Graveyard). It's available for OSX, Linux and Windows (it was originally developed for OSX).
http://oolite.aegidian.org/
Latest version is 1.73, and there is a wiki for the game at http://wiki.alioth.net/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Sure, it's fishtank physics, but you have the same ability to take off from a station, choosing to either pirate your way to riches or trade valuable goods across the galaxy. Even better (or worse, perhaps?) is that you get to compete in these activities against real people (not Thargoids, as exciting as they were).
Francis Spufford's book The Backroom Boys has a chapter about the creation of Elite, and a fair chunk of it is on The Guardian's website. One of my favourite bits is, after they came up with the procedural method for creating the universe, how they picked the seed:
"Braben and Bell called the starting number for a galaxy "a seed" and, in truth, creating the game this way was more like gardening than deliberately constructing something. You had to plant the seed and see what grew. It was another sense in which they were ceding direct control over the game in favour of working indirectly on the player's experience. But they did want to start the player off in a reasonably friendly bit of space, where the pickings were good and they wouldn't get instantly clobbered. Since there was no way to edit a galaxy, you just had to try galaxy after galaxy, seed after seed, until something suitable grew. "I remember thinking it was very wasteful," Braben says. "You'd type in a number, a birthday or something, and see what galaxy that came out with. 'No, I don't like that. No, I don't like that. That cluster looks horrible'." They also decided they had better check the 256 system names in the galaxy where the player would be plunked down, in case any of the four-letter words were actually four-letter words. "One of the first galaxies we tried had a system called Arse. We couldn't use the whole galaxy. We just threw it away!""
Elite has certainly been very influential on later games but it didn't appear out of nowhere. The authors were inspired by Star Raiders on the Atari 400. I also wonder if the earlier BBC Micro game Starship Command might have been an influence.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
how did they do that ? ( It always bugged me)
---
3D Shooter Games @ Feed Distiller
...then watch the musical!
No, really, go and look --- it was written by Aiden Bell (Ian Bell's brother) and Brian Phillips. Okay, you are going to have to stage it yourself, but the full book's there.
There's lots of other good stuff on Ian Bell's Elite website, including versions for most microcomputers, actual source code for the original BBC Micro version (which is damn scary, by the way), concept art, lots of reviews and interviews, a version of the trading engine written in C that's compatible with the original, unreleased versions (Game Boy Elite!), the novella The Dark Wheel that came with the game... and, sadly, lots of info about the ongoing feud between Bell and Braben after they fell out.
...after all, it's been 25 years. That's 25 years in which to come up with new ideas.
So where are we now?
I recently paid Steam £30 to play X3: Terran Conflict - a 3D space sim where you start with a basic ship, and have to trade/ fight/ pirate your way up the food chain..... .....oh.....
some ppl are working on an OS game kinda like frontier 2
http://pioneer.sourceforge.net/
It looks like a super-deluxe version of Star Raiders from the Atari 8-bit. Or is that a bad analogy?
'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,'
Funny how that drives games development until this day. It's not 3 lives, but in the MMO market, for example, few dare to deviate from the "Level 60 cap, classes, crafting and grinding" concept. And those that do are almost always the minor players.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The disk version did page to disk on docking but only to load alternate sets of ships, etc. All that game in basically 10K. (Props to Star Raiders too for similar on the Atari as referenced elsewhere) Those were the days, etc.
Off topic but I recall a similar code-cram pubished in a magazine: a small routine to display text in any colour at any angle at any size anywhere on screen. This did use the OS character maps (each display character stored in 8 bytes) but managed the functionality in 256 bytes of 6502 assembly.
Beeb was good for first introduction to beating protection mechanisms - it was possible to set an execution only flag on binary programs (so run only - you could load then save). However, this could be defeated by a few bytes of code to reset the relevant protection bit in a routine called several times a second by using the screen refresh interrupt. Very useful for getting games available on tape only onto disk. Load the image from disk, then move it down in memory over the memory allocated to the disk drive and run it. &E00 - those were the days, etc. As a professional programmer that same buzz is hard to come by...
I cant even begin to imagine how many hours my younger brother and I put into this game on the C64. I was hooked from the start, with the fabulous novella that came in the instruction manual. I pity those that only ever had a pirate version, the box set/manual/novella were a huge help in fuelling the imagination.
I still remember the day though when I came back home and my brother said 'oh I was playing Elite and it said something about 'Do you want to accept this mission' so I said no'
He still has imprints of my hands around his neck. I never ever saw a mission appear when I was playing.
Anyone else get through the missions? They still remain one of the greatest mysteries around that game to me.
SubLOGIC Flight Simulator introduced 3D flight around 1980-81. If we're talking about history, that is what really started things.
I've been wanting an Elite clone for some years now... never worked out whether Vega Strike was that; it always ran too slow.
Oolite, moreover, is in the Ubuntu repositories! Clearly someone out there is thinking...
Not strictly on topic... but Elite is mentioned and I just have to post this as this entire thread reminded me of the following animation;
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/heyhey16k.swf
Awesome... and good old days. Damn... now I'm going to fill the rest of my week of vacation playing Oolite... thanks, Slashdot :P
This sort of thing would apply to space combat to an even larger degree. A computer would be handling all the complex aspects of moving the ship and aiming the weapons, a human would only specify targets and destinations and such.
So thanks but no thanks, I'll take highly unrealistic, fun games. ...except that it is fun, but EVE is about politics more than Newtonian physics simulation.
You as the pilot simply set destination and targets and when to fire, but you'd be amazed at the complexity of the game.
You often find yourself engaging and killing enemies at ranges greater than 50km but there are other techniques to have close range combat, but since you don't directly control the flight of the craft that doesn't matter that much either.
Overall, I have a hunch if we were to have space combat in the future, it would be like EVE in which you engage your opponent at vast distances with smart weaponry.
Trust me... Its a blast.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I must say that Elite is one of the earliest computer games I played on a PC. I never managed to get the C64 version which is a shame, but around the time I (or my parents rather) upgraded my C64 to a new PC (a nice shiny 486 20Mhz with 2MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive), Wal-mart had a ton of their old stock of PC games on the floor clearances for $2 each. I remember getting Elite and Millenium from that stash, and both were a blast. There may have been an old Commander Keen game in there too - can't remember.
Elite was truly a demonstration of how little graphics and storage you needed to make a fun game.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(.. VIRUS !!! SICK SICK SICK Late 80s.. many 12hr+ sessions.. wish I had taped'em..)
What's I'd like to see in a space combat game is some of the stuff described in E. E. Smith's Lensman series; always enjoyed those "cones of destruction" and "planet smashers". First we need the inertialess drive, though :)
Space combat with laser weapons in a world of Newtonian mechanics just isn't interesting, because it consists of
Victory is entirely determined by who has the most power behind their shields and lasers. You spend the majority of your time in the early stages of Frontier avoiding combat because you'll be whiffed out of existence like a water balloon hitting the sun. Then when you have enough cash to beef up your ship, you are effectively untouchable.
Short-range particle bolt weapons and etheric rudder may not be realistic, but they are a lot more fun.
Well it's not like lasers and Newtonian physics are a package deal.
Terminus used Newtonian physics and particle bolt weapons (and torpedoes), and it was hella fun, such that I find "etheric rudder" (nice term btw) games to be boring. If I wanted aerodynamic flight, I'd be playing a combat flight sim!
3D circle-strafing (sphere strafing?) ruled. Get 4 or more ships involved in the dogfight and you had some seriously awesome space ballet going on as everyone tried to dodge out of the other's lines of fire. And you really could take the lightest, cheapest fighter and smoke the biggest, heaviest gunship just by being faster -- though in practice that was very risky, since the heaviest gun could blow your ass to pieces in one decent hit and your ship still had momentum.
Terminus had its own set of problems (mainly not being popular enough to have 4+ ship battles be very common) but it showed how fun Newtonian physics could be in a space sim. I'll never play another space sim that doesn't do it.
And hey, at least theoretically you could have lasers and other light-speed weapons... that would just mean combat would take place at distances far enough that you still have a chance to dodge (or rather, move erratically hoping the beam you can't see heading towards you isn't going to hit you). So well out of visual range and with completely automatic aiming, so maybe that wouldn't be as fun.
The enemies of Democracy are
....so this means I've been waiting 25 years for an newer version of Elite. :(
...except that it is fun, but EVE is about politics more than Newtonian physics simulation.
You as the pilot simply set destination and targets and when to fire, but you'd be amazed at the complexity of the game.
You often find yourself engaging and killing enemies at ranges greater than 50km but there are other techniques to have close range combat, but since you don't directly control the flight of the craft that doesn't matter that much either.
Overall, I have a hunch if we were to have space combat in the future, it would be like EVE in which you engage your opponent at vast distances with smart weaponry.
Trust me... Its a blast.
Funny. I did the EVE 14 day trial about a month or so ago, and found it one of the most tedious games I'd ever played. And it's decidedly non-newtonian physics really annoyed me, especially because with the computer controlled movement and combat there's essentially no reason *not* to use newtonian physics.