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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."
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
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!"
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!
Well according to David Braben hardly anything said online about Elite 4 is true... argh... damn cock tease
"Braben did, however, allay fears that Elite 4 may never see the light of day by confirming it is in development.
âoeThere is absolutely tons of stuff about Elite online,â he said. âoeHardly any of it's true! Some of it is, but I'm not going to say which. We are working on it and it's very exciting.â"
http://www.videogamer.com/news/hardly_any_elite_4_online_info_is_true_says_braben.html
Here's to the crazy ones
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.
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.
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!""