Elite History
Elite was the creation of two Cambridge University students David Braben and Ian Bell. It was written in the long ago dark days of home computing in 1982. In September 1984 it was first published by Acornsoft on the BBC Micro. Immediately it was a success gleaning praise and sales from journalist and games players alike.
The rights to other platforms were auctioned off and consequentially BT published many versions for different platforms under the Firebird label.
I first played Elite in ’85 on a friends BBC, the disk version. It blew me away and in doing so caused no end of frustration that there was no Dragon 32 version, which was all I had at home. Shortly afterwards I bought a ZX Spectrum and got stuck in to the world that was Elite. This was my first "2am cup of cocao" game with out a doubt.
The gameplay was groundbreaking, it’s the first game I remember not having a score, or any particular endpoint or aim. You started off with one hundred credits and a simple trading craft and progressed from there in whatever direction you wished. You could take up trading and slowly make credits trading legal goods or trade faster by running guns or drugs. Alternatively you could make your money stealing other peoples trade goods and becoming the pirate scourge of the galaxy, or be the bounty hunter that sucked on the blood of pirates. Or perhaps a little of each.
Elite sold over 1,000,000 units and is still played by people today. It regular features in the top 5 of classic game lists and the like.
Elite spawned a sequel written by David Braben, Frontier Elite II. Frontier added lots of things kids used to dream about in playgrounds. What if you could buy new ships? You could. What if you could land on planets? You could. Wouldn’t it be cool to have loads more missions! There were. Imagine if it was based on our real galaxy with real star systems and multiple planets. It was. Frontier was great, some complained the graphics were poor but the gameplay more than made up for it.
A thrid sequel was released in spring 1995, Frontier First Encounters. FFE promised many improvements over it’s predecessor with better landscapes, coloured lighting, procedural textures. Unfortunately it was shipped by Gametek chock full of bugs, leaving a sour taste in many gamers mouths and quickly souring it’s reputation. It is still played today as has recently been patched up and released by Frontier Developments as shareware and can be found on there site.
Elite always was great, still is great and will be for a long time to come. Now we only await the release of Elite 4 and all that it has to promise.