Elite.
The
game was written by David Braben and Ian Bell starting in 1982 and launched in
September 1984 by Acornsoft.
I
played this a lot at school. Curiously,
on the Internet you can download an unpublished Atari version of the game which
makes an interesting comparison to Star Raiders.
Besides
being the source of much nostalgia – it is the geek equivalent of a first kiss
for many of us – it needs some scrutiny as a game. I interviewed hundreds of programmers at IG and I ask many of them what
their favourite game was: the most popular was Elite. Why? People
usually cited the limitlessness of the universe and the open-endedness of the
game play. They liked the illusion
– and it was much more imaginary than real – that they could go be a
pirate or a trader or whatever. Searching
my own memories hard and replaying it, I think the main thing was the endless
blasting. Certainly, it was banned
at my school after all the space bars stopped working.
There
were a raft of ports and a number of disappointing sequels. Games like Wing Commander never really lived up to the legacy left by
Elite and the genre seems to have disappeared with only Microsoft Star Lancer
carrying the flag forward. I think
this is a forgotten genre that is worthy of re-exploring.
Now we moved to a completely different genre: the real-world simulation
*
Elite links:
Ian
Bell’s homepage You can find the Atari 8-bit version here.
Frontier
(David Braben’s company)
BBC Emulator to play the game and a list of downloadable games are here.