Elite's 25th Anniversary

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I'm not one to often create threads. But I'm glad I have the opportunity for this game...

Elite's 25th Anniversary. It was actually yesterday but I've only just seen an email a friend sent me with that BBC link. Sigh. Makes me wistful for my Commodore 64 and Archimedes.


We've come so far! I had endless hours with this game. Despite the obligatory quote from Braben to the BBC I'm keeping expectations in check. I remember a project for the Archimedes named Karma. Had a lot of promise for the time but I don't think it ever came to fruition.

*Mumbles something about youngsters these days...*

Come on oldies. Join with me in this celebration... :(
 
eek, happy memories of this on my old bbc b. Think I've even got the dark wheel and the rest of the pack up in the loft somewhere. Looking forward to introducing my son to this, though I know he'll look on it with scorn, even at 2 years old. <sigh> happy days :)
 
I remember playing Elite on the Amiga, and the buggy Frontier-games on the PC.. Good times.

X3 is probably your best bet to hold you over while waiting for them to ressurect the franchise. :)
 
Never reached the Elite rank in the game, although I think I spent enormous amounts of time playing it, I reached the rank second to Elite, was it Deadly?
This was one of the first games I ever bought for my first computer C64.
The whole package was very classy at the time, I kept the box on display in my bedroom bookshelf, the stylish box artwork was beautiful. The novella that came with the game was also a good read and realy helped to drive the game along as it gave food to imagination (I kept searching for the mysterious ships referenced in the novella, until I learned they didn't exist in the game.)
 
I never "got" Elite.

I wanted to. I put a lot of hours into it. But it never hooked me and I just failed to understand what all the fuss was about.

I realised then, just as I realise now, that it was my failing and not that of the game itself ;)
 
I think you could argue this was the first real open world (space) game that did it well.

It'd probably be easier to ask what you couldn't do in the game than it is to ask what you could do. :D

Regards,
SB
 
Well it looks to me that the only thing you did was fly into endless space.....alone.

Staring at a black screen and pretending that I am controlling a tie fighter in space with my keyboard wouldnt make much difference :LOL:
 
Nesh said:
What exactly did you do in this game?
Click to expand...

You flew through space, trading and fighting. Get enough credits and upgrade your ship. The ultimate aim was to get the rank of Elite. And it was such fun, because it was so basically realised, you had to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. And imagination is far better than any 3D world!

In a fit of nostalgia I booted up the BBC B last night and had a blast on Elite. And then Hybris, Alien Breed, and a dash of Starglider on the Amiga. I even went as far as bringing out the Spectrum 48k for a bit of Underwurld action!

Ah the good old days!

*Raises a glass to Elite!*
 
Nesh said:
What exactly did you do in this game?
Click to expand...

There were eight galaxies, each with a lot of star systems. I guess only one planet per system though.

You could buy and sell some of about 16 categories of goods, from food through electronics to various contrabands like drugs. Agricultural planets had cheap food but payed extra for electronics etc. So the basic gameplay was about trading.

From all the money you could buy various kinds of equipment for your ship, weapons, shields, missiles but also escape pod and other stuff. These were useful to defend against random space pirate encounters in the systems, and also some aggressive aliens called Thargoids that could jump you out of hyperspace.
Or you could also become a pirate yourself and use equipment to get the cargo from destroyed ships. But this made docking at space stations problematic and police ships attacked you on sight as well.

Eventually the game offered some missions as well, but I've failed to get a completion notice for the first and never got any more. It was a bounty hunter mission for the government, catching some experimental ship.

This may not sound like much, and is pretty similar to Privateer on the PC, but the game was released on 8-bit home computers 25 years ago and back then it was as amazing as it could get...


Oh, and before you had a docking computer, you had to manually enter space stations that were spinning. And during docking it played the Blue Danube waltz just like in 2001: Space Odyssey! :)
 
I never understood why this was never realized as a MMO.

And don´t give me EVE please :)

A Epic Space game with endless space to travel and endless content to add.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
There were eight galaxies, each with a lot of star systems. I guess only one planet per system though.
Click to expand...

This, and the 3D graphics, was what set this game apart. Eight galaxies each with 250 systems, complete with names, stats etc, all fitting in just 32KB RAM. Everything was procedurally generated of course.

The scale of the game was mind boggling at the time.

Cheers
 
Never really found the docking that much of a problem , though I did end up with a docking computer in the end. I'm pretty sure I did reach elite, though it may only have been deadly, managed to do the first mission to get military lasers but don't think I managed subsequent ones. There was a huge amount of freedom and the game helped you a lot, things like fuel scoops for picking up much needed fuel from the surface of a sun when getting near to the space station wasn't an option. The sheer fun of sitting outside a space station and lasering it until a swarm of vipers came out and kicked your ar*e. As mentioned above even the graphics were like nothing that had been seen before. Add to that that the BBC disk version loaded reasonably quickly and had lots of nice little extras like seeing other ships in the space station when you docked and it all felt part of a nicely consistent world, which even seemed to develop it's own mythology (generation ships.) . Sigh. showing my age now :)
 
xexuxjy said:
Add to that that the BBC disk version loaded reasonably quickly
Click to expand...

I can vouch for that. I first saw Elite on the BBC, it loaded in seconds (single digits) and looked and played awesome.

When it got out for the C64 I got it immidiately, and was mildly let down by the 4 minute tape load and the stuttering graphics (the C64 was half as fast with a 1MHz 6510 vs. the BBC's 2MHz 6502).

Good times.

Cheers
 
Ahh, Lave and Leesti... I knew you well once! I wasn't great at the game so ended up playing the first systems a good deal.
 
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