Elite's 25th Anniversary

Awesome game at the time.
Had it on the BBC-B and then much later on the PC.
We had some homemade joysticks that made docking a little easier. They were analog, and didn't spring back into position, so one you matched the rotation speed of the station it was quite easy to drift in.

Managed to hack the save game file on the PC version to give myself lots of missiles which I could then sell for cash :)
One of the things I think they added to the PC version was Tribbles.
There is quite a good book called 'The Backroom Boys' which has a chapter on Elite, well worth a read.

CC
 
There were Tribbles on the C64 as well. And as most people here in Hungary knew nothing about 'imperialist' Star Trek 25 years ago, they almost all fell prey to the little critters ;)
 
The good times.
I spent countless hours on Elite on c64, MSX and Amiga and later on Frontier.
I have been waiting Elite4 for some years now.. ;)
 
Great summary! Ah yes, good times. I saw this first when my older cousin played this on his C64, then later played it myself on my Atari ST (lovely smooth graphics). I still think of the Blue Danube each time I see a docking sequence anywhere, be it on TV or in a game.

I really liked grabbing cargo from space in particular. I got quite good with the shooting and with a few decent upgrades this was a very big and interesting source of income (after all you never knew what you'd find). Even when you were not a pirate yourself (which I've done for a while, it's hard work killing all those police vipers, but hey ;) ), then when pirates attacked you you could still get some nice cargo (though from pirates it was often something 'hot' like weapons or some such).

I can't actually remember Thargoids, but I never jumped through that many galaxies - only maybe once or twice. When you found two planets close to each other with wildly differing economies, it was very attractive to just go back and forth and make a small fortune in trading, then move on only to find a planet that had different weapons.

Anyway, brilliant game. Also, I feel old.

Laa-Yosh said:
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! :)
Click to expand...
 
I played Elite a bit when i was young, but gave it a proper go a few years ago playing Elite the new kind. Which was a modern port after the source code was released.

I consider Elite somewhat of an inspiration for GTA. since being a space pirate is much like being a criminal, and your score is your money and noteriaty.
 
"What do Elites say?" "I'm docking to Lave" *coat*..

One summer of my life went completely to playing Elite on C64. Completely. I mean I was lost in the world of trading and surviving, no matter how nice weather was outside. The memories of scooping fuel from the surface of a burning yellow star and fighting Thargoids, trading illegal goods and evading police ships.. until I became Elite.

God I loved that game. Amiga version was the greatest imho.
 
Arwin said:
I can't actually remember Thargoids, but I never jumped through that many galaxies - only maybe once or twice.
Click to expand...

You'd probably remember Thargoids after just one meeting... there usually was a mothership sort of thing with small fighters and they were turning around you all the time, so you had to keep working with the joystick a lot. Gave me sores in the shoulders for days :)

There was a random chance of meeting them as far as I remember, they could stop you through hyperspace journeys.
I also recall that some later mission was supposed to do with them... but I never got that far, because I couldn't complete even the first one.
 
Nice touch that you could occaisionally catch the smaller thargoid ships in your cargo scoops and get something, can't remember if it was slaves or meat or something. quite funny regardless
 
Laa-Yosh said:
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! :)
Click to expand...
That sounds like revolutionary stuff considering its been released back then!
 
Elite is as close to genius as we've ever come in computer games, IMO. As out-of-the-blue as Relativity.
 
I absolutely loved this game - spent countless hours on it while I should have been doing my school work!

Played it on the spectrum and remember the relief when I had enough cash for the docking computer! The anti missile systems (ECM?) was also one of my early purchases. Trading contraband goods was great for the quick profits (though often leading to bother with the police vipers!). I also remember the strange anti piracy system they used for the game here in the UK (involved holding a plastic lens onto the tv screen to read some codes as I recall).

Great game!

Lee.
 
xexuxjy said:
Nice touch that you could occaisionally catch the smaller thargoid ships in your cargo scoops and get something, can't remember if it was slaves or meat or something. quite funny regardless
Click to expand...

Yeah, I remember that. If you destroyed the mothership the drones would then just drift along to be scooped up into your hold. I think they were named something like Exotic Goods. I'm pretty sure you could jettison cargo too. So if you had a hold full of food (cheap) jettison and scoop up some pirates bounty.

I remember the first time I used the Galactic Hyperspace. I thought the next galaxy out of the 8 would be totally different. It wasn't really, but as said above, my imagination filled in the blanks.

As legendCNCD said I spent an entire summer with it too. I'm sure it was the reason I got through three C64 powerpacks. Those suckers were expensive back then.

I might keep an eye on that twitter feed. Come on Braben... let something slip.
 
xexuxjy said:
Nice touch that you could occaisionally catch the smaller thargoid ships in your cargo scoops and get something, can't remember if it was slaves or meat or something. quite funny regardless
Click to expand...

Yeah. I always scooped them while evading mothership energy beams. Additionally you could fire a missile successfully (on C64 atleast) if you got near enough the mothership, which was quite dangerous.

Or how about firing the jump-engines and landing at witchspace? Then few Thargoid dropships attack you and you have no means of escape, because the jump took all your fuel...
 
Occasionally when about to defeat an enemy, he'd use an escape pod. Using the fuel scoop to collect it gave you slaves to sell. I think the Thargoids became the 'Alien Items' trading good.

Think Ill be firing up the Speccy emulator today!
 
bigtabs said:
Occasionally when about to defeat an enemy, he'd use an escape pod. Using the fuel scoop to collect it gave you slaves to sell. I think the Thargoids became the 'Alien Items' trading good.

Think Ill be firing up the Speccy emulator today!
Click to expand...

Good memory. That was it exactly.

I take it there are plenty of emulators and software available? I've got an Elite itch I want to scratch...
 
ahhh, just done the lave - zaonce run on new kind, even manged to dock though the paintwork took a bit of a beating :)
 
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