3 ms·
But while they were still sorting out the mechanics of combat and docking, they started to worry about the adequacy of what they'd be giving the player (whom
by milliams 13y ago
But while they were still sorting out the mechanics of combat and docking, they
started to worry about the adequacy of what they'd be giving the player (whom they
imagined, of course, as a hypercritical consumer like themselves, bored with Space
Invaders after the first brief rapture). It wasn't too hard to come up with a
solution. They could keep the player interested by letting them upgrade the weapons
on their ship to ones that made bigger bangs and allowed you to use different
tactics. But this little alteration perturbed the universe of the game. The classic
action game of the early 1980s - Defender, Pac Man - was set in a perpetual present
tense, a sort of arcade Eden in which there were always enemies to zap or gobble,
but nothing ever changed apart from the score. By letting the player tool up with
better guns, Bell and Braben were introducing a whole new dimension, the dimension
of time. They were saying they wanted the player to hope, to scheme, to plan. Also,
to play for much longer than a slam-bang 10 minutes. And that was only the
beginning. The solution threw up a further problem, as each of their solutions
would. How would the player get a bigger gun? They should earn it, Bell and Braben
decided. No free lunches in this universe. But that implied money, in a set-up that
a moment before had existed quite happily as an economy of pure explosions. "We put
a bountyon the pirates. Then we thought even that would become quite samey..." They
kept following the implications of each invention until they arrived at another
invention. A money economy with more sources of income than just bounty for shooting
pirates implied trading. Suddenly, the player's spaceship wasn't just a nimble 3D
firing platform: it was a cargo hauler as well. And trading implied places in which
to trade. The game needed serious three-dimensional geography. And things to trade.
And prices. And markets... The new wishes multiplied. They kept going.
I played Elite and Frontier on my Atari ST as a child but looking back I don't have much of a sense of what the rest of the games market looked like. Does anyone have a feeling of just how original and innovative this sort of open-world RPG style game was back then?
- dspillett 13y agoIt really was one of a kind in its time. Most of the individual elements existed in other places (sometimes in similar forms) but the 3D stuff only existde in demos for the most part and the whole combination was definitely something new and very much pushed the limits of what the 8-bit platforms were capable of (if you ignore the "master enhanced" edition it all had to fit in 32Kb of memory, 10Kb of which was consumed by the screen buffer). People playing the PC port (on an 8086 (16-bit) with 640Kb RAM) were impressed enough and the only real extra it added was solid 3D shapes rather than wire-frame - imagine how people playing it on a BBC model B (6502 (8-bit) with 32Kb) felt!
- sambeau 13y agoI do. It was a total game changer in every way. Partly, the 3D; mostly, the scale. If it wasn't for the discovery of the Mandelbrot set around the same time it would have been denounced as totally ridiculous. But, as Fractals were just becoming popular around then, it fitted neatly into the Zeitgeist. As for the 3D the only time you saw it on a home computer before Elite it was 'fake' e.g. in a basic maze game like 3D Monster Maze (think Wolfenstein but with only 4 straight-on views, no guns and a badly drawn pixelsaurus to run away from) or as an isometric game: Ant Attack springs to mind. As I recall Ant Attack[2] was also amazing for it's shear scale, if you look at the full 3D map[3] it's amazing to see how far we've come! In the arcade we had 'real' vector 3D: Battlezone and later on Star Wars[5], the latter being the first I remember being in colour. I am sure these were an influence. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack [3] http://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=AntAttack http://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=AntAttack [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)