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Those of us that wasted whole summers playing Elite were in for a shock when PC's came along - no games were anywhere near as good as Elite! We had been brought
by Theodores 13y ago
Those of us that wasted whole summers playing Elite were in for a shock when PC's came along - no games were anywhere near as good as Elite! We had been brought up on the good stuff and nothing that came along subsequently was anywhere near as compelling. Even the licensed versions of Elite on other platforms were a pale imitation. Because of this I gave games a wide birth, probably until the Playstation came along a generation later.
What Bell and Braben were able to achieve was tantamount to magic in many areas. As explained in the article the 8 galaxies with 256 stars was quite amazing. We all knew there were only so many banks of 16K RAM so how was this possible?
The display was also quite incredible, even if you thought you knew a lot about the display modes. The top 3/4 was hi-resolution black and white and the lower dashboard was chunkier 4 colour. Swapping display mode mid-screen-refresh was truly out there.
As for the 3D graphics, there was no openGL back then. Anyone that has had a go with openGL knows it is hard enough as it is. Bell + Braben did 3D with no library and in pure assembly language, hidden line removal included.
The game may not have been networked however that was not a problem, there was plenty to talk about. This word of mouth aspect meant that a lot of Elite gameplay (such as the missions, getting stuck in hyperspace, mining asteroids and the consequences of trading in contraband) was part myth. There was no knowing what extent the gameplay really involved, friends could tell you things they found and you might not be able to find out for yourself.
There were plenty of other BBC micro games that were excellent, obviously not to the same degree as Elite, however, Elite did captivate a whole generation for months at a time. I wonder what the opportunity cost of this was. Instead of moving up from 'mostly harmless' to 'elite' we could have had a lot else done by the likes of myself during that time.
- willmacdonald 13y agoI spent so many months playing this game. Loved it. Regardless of the technical achievements of the developers, it also captured the imagination like no other game. I'm anxiously waiting for the Kickstarter funded release of Elite Deadly.
- GFischer 13y agoI wasn't aware of that. It's called Elite: Dangerous now :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous
- gadders 13y agoI always felt oddly cheated that some of the massive spaceships mentioned in the booklet that described the galaxy never appeared in the actual game.
- Jare 13y agoOn 16-bit, Carrier Command was not as amazing as Elite but it was definitely a worthy successor.
- SeanDav 13y agoMy first experience of Elite was on a PC. It truly deserves its reputation as one of the best games ever made, not only from pure gameplay, but also because technology-wise it was just in another league for its time.
- antimagic 13y agoHere - go waste another season :) http://oolite.org/ http://oolite.org/
- MrBra 13y agoOr if you want a similar experience plus modern detailed graphics plus the ability to land and explore planets plus more http://pioneerspacesim.net/ http://pioneerspacesim.net/
- codeulike 13y agoAnd it was so hard! It wasn't until "Elite Cheat" came out (they had reverse engineered the game-save format) that I encountered most of the purchasable weaponry, etc.
- JetSetWilly 13y agoThe Acorn Archimedes version of Elite was excellent. It was essentially a clone of the original BBC elite, but with superior graphics and AI. The archimedes version even had a 6502 emulator built in so that the original procedural generation routines could be directly run on the acorn, to produce the exact same universe. Very impressive for the time.
- Theodores 13y agoI don't know how I missed that! I think I missed out though! There was some hardware genius in the original Archimedes and there was this game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch Written by Braben - of all people!