The second concerns their difficulties in finding a publisher for it. There are two excellent stories of the original elite: the first concerns how the enterprising duo were able to cram the game into 32k of memory. For all the odd things that aren't in the game that some of them were sure they remembered, not a one of them ever claimed to see a "game over" other than in the personal sense of "press space".įor the time (1983) it was relatively unusual to have more than one author for a game, but David Braben and Ian Bell realized they were working on similar projects and collaborated whilst undergraduates at the University of Cambridge to produce Elite. So I'm pretty sure they actually played it and weren't just BS-ing. Kind of a "Holy Grail" of games, the game that never had to end. There was nothing you *had* to do or accomplish, and you could just go forever, bumming along through space and seeing what wonders you could find. One thing they agreed on, though, was that it wasn't like most other games. Not many other games result in as many "tall tales" as Elite. That's one of the qualities of a legend though, isn't it? When a thing is remembered as perhaps greater and more wonderful than it actually was. In other cases, I think that the universe and adventures that they imagined, the "game in the head", superseded reality and they recalled the game as being much more than it actually was. In some cases, I think it likely they mis-remembered features of other games as being somewhere in Elite. While there might have been some alcohol-inspired exaggeration in some cases, I don't think they were trying to intentionally BS me so much as that they actually *did* remember the game that way. Oh, the graphics and etc were "old school", but there was agreement that it was by far the best game. One thing they agreed on was that Elite was the greatest spacegame of all time, far better than others I'd played at that time, like Starflight or Wing Commander. I just nodded and figured it was out there somewhere and I'd find it eventually. Seeing the wreckage of your own ship if you restarted and then later found exactly the same spot where you'd been shot down.Īt the time, I wasn't far into the game, so all this sounded plausible enough. Intercepting messages that had to be decoded in some way. Struggling to avoid falling into a black hole. Emergency missions running a special load of vaccine to worlds having plagues. Having a wingman/partner that flew along and occasionally advised. Alien ships flying in large geometric formations before they'd break to attack. Another recalled having gotten her engines and shields upgraded as a result of an encounter with friendly aliens. One recalled, in some detail, a mission where he was carrying some special sort of missile and it malfunctioned while onboard his ship and had to be defused, which involved figuring out some sort of numeric code. Some others agreed it sucked when that happened. LOLĪnyway, one of them talked about how he'd often been boarded by "the vipers" and inspected for contraband. I was playing the DOS version on a Radio Shack computer that was not quite as good as a 286. I'm not one of the people who played Elite when it first came out, I couldn't afford a computer then. They'd all played it before, but I was making my first runs at that time. But some of the things they remembered were odd, in that I'm fairly sure they didn't actually exist in any form of Elite. We'd been talking about computer games and etc, and a few people had played Elite. Years ago (in the early 90s) the topic of Elite came up at a party. The later non-BBC ports of the game variously added new ships, more colour, replaced The Dark Wheel with Imprint, etc.Ĭomment I think a lot of it is due to the imagination factor. This money allows the player to upgrade the ship with improved weapons, a larger cargo hold, an automated docking system, an extra energy bank and more. Credits can be accumulated through piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and asteroid mining. Most of the ships that the player encounters are named after snakes or other reptiles. The player initially controls "Commander Jameson" and starts at the Lave orbital space station with 100 credits and a lightly armed Cobra Mark III. The Elite Player's Guide was authored by Bell and Braben but did not make it into the box.a postcard for posting back to Acornsoft when one reached Elite status, so that they could send one a special badge!.' The Space Traders Flight Training Manual.a strip of card to place above the red function keys on the BBC Micro explaining their role in game (Launch/Buy Cargo/Equip Ship/Long range chart etc).The BBC version of the game originally came on cassette in a box - on the top left there is a photograph of the front and back.
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