When Elite was released in 1984 I was 10 years old and had a BBC Micro and saw the poster in (probably) W H Smith and it looked interesting so persuaded my parents to buy it for me. In those days there weren't game trailers (obviously) and very little pre-publicity so no-one really knew how groundbreaking it was going to be.
My family and me happened to be on holiday that weekend so then I had the fancy box and manual (and novella) to read but we weren't going to be back home for a few days (where the actual computer was). So I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. The manual was amazing, and done in 'in universe' style, as if you had just purchased a Cobra Mark II spaceship, the main control panel of which just happened to look like a BBC Micro Model B. I was reading it thinking 'Is all this in the game? docking, space combat, trading, all those different types of spaceship to encounter, upgradable weapons and peripherals, eight galaxies, police spaceships, planets with descriptions of their inhabitants, mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace. Readers: Yes, it was all in the game.
As a ten year old it was a very hard game though. Docking was HARD. Understanding trading was hard, what should I buy with my 100 credits at Lave that I could profitably sell at Leesti? There wasn't an internet to look this up on. I suppose there might have been articles in magazines, but not sure it would have occured to me to go looking for those. Space combat was great though, the 3D scanner with the vertical bars made it very intuitive. The magic of locking a missile and then firing it off!
I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading (I was 10, ok? And no-one had ever seen a game like this before). A few years later Elite Cheat got released - a program to make fake 'save files', and then I really got to explore what the game could do.
"I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading"
Elite's rating is solely a measure of the number of kills you have. No trading performance or any other metric included. Here's the table: http://www.elitehomepage.org/faq.htm#A4 As the page says, different versions had different "kill points". At a straight 1.0 on the BCC, Elite would truly be a slog.
I fetched it out of the bargain bin for about $2, probably still one of the better game purchase I've ever made, though the modern Steam sales certainly have some stiff competition. It's been a long time. I'm pretty sure I made Dangerous, I may have made Deadly, I never made Elite, and looking at that page I can see why. Even with more than one point per some kills that's a tall bar to leap without getting bored.
Exactly. I never got enough credits to upgrade my ship much, so kept getting picked off by random pirates. So although the rating was only based on kills, you had to nail the trading to really get anywhere.
I seem to recall (maybe Elite Plus?) that you couldn't progress if you weren't in the first galaxy, ie. if you had used the galactic hyperspace upgrade. In any case I got stuck on Dangerous and that's what I blame.
One of the special missions requires you to start in the first galaxy. If you’ve moved beyond the first galaxy, you can’t trigger that mission. If you warped off the 8th galaxy, you returned to the first galaxy, and would then become eligible for the special mission again.
But as others have noted, it's not necessary to do any of the special missions to gain Elite status.
I was slightly older but just as fascinated. I knew some programming and it blew my teenage mind how they managed to cram all those universes inside a freaking C64. Mostly I just enjoyed the game.
Docking was bloody hard indeed. Luckily you could buy a Docking computer. It took me another few years before figuring out why it would play The Blue Danube waltz by Strauss. :-)
I love this for you. I love the image of a little kid spending the weekend getting immersed in the game world and systems, before finally sitting down at the computer, at once deeply prepared for what is about to happen, but also with no idea...
In the internet age, is it still possible to have this type of experience? When the final boss is always on Youtube, and a strategy guide is a click away? Sure, maybe you don't look it up, but the cultural knowledge will seep in.
This is how I play through the Ultima series with my eight-year-old. She doesn’t have a device of her own to look up spoilers, she takes notes and draws maps on paper, and looks through them when I’m not available to play with her.
It was a little like this with tape loading games - you had 10 to 15 minutes (an eternity when you were young) to do something, and that's if you were lucky with tape head azimuth and you didn't knock the joystick controller - if there was a manual you read that every time, I even remember reading the copy protection sheets over and over again.
I wonder if the famous Interstellar's docking scene was inspired by this game mechanic. It's pretty much the same concept - you had to align yourself with the station first and then try to match the rotational speed. If the previous alignment step isn't perfect than during the rotation matching the entrance would wobble and make it impossible to dock. Docking was indeed as hard as it looks in Interstellar :)
> mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace
This mechanic was so interesting - it would happen to me, I'd manage to survive the assualt, and then be so far away from anywhere to refuel, and without enough fuel to jump again, that I'd be dead-in-the-water every time. It was so weird to win the battle and then.. not. But I couldn't help but always get excited when it would happen! Did anyone ever survive this?
Yes, because I figured out how to reliably force a Thargoid incursion every time I did a hyperspace jump. From memory (BBC micro model B disc version):
- Pause the game and press the ‘x’ key. You’ll hear a beep. I don’t know what this does.
- Engage hyperspace. As soon as you see the concentric hexagon animation, press and hold the ‘Ctrl’ key.
You should see the animation a second time as you drop out of hyperspace surrounded by Thargoid ships.
That’s very similar to my experience except docking was just too hard. No matter how carefully I tried to match the rotation, 99 times out of 100 I crashed. I still don’t really understand why! So I just stayed around the starting point, which was a shame but still quite fun.
The manual was bundled with the cassette or disc, and it states in the 'Docking Procedure' section:
Approach the final moments of docking at DEAD SLOW SPEED
However this is dead wrong! If you put some speed on before entering the 'letterbox' you're actually far less likely to crash, unrealistic though this may be. It's perfectly possible to dock successfully at full speed. Try it out here:
The trick was to get perfectly perpendicular to the face of the spacestation that had the docking slot. But that was very hard to do visually. You had to fly directly away, turn around and watch the space station very carefully as it rotated to see if the rotation was symettrical from your point of view. Then approach slowly, match spin, but dont go too slow that actually made it harder. But even then would be game over one time in 20 or so.
Re:docking, if you went far away from the station, then kept it aligned in your crosshairs as you approached, you would be perpendicular to the front face of the station. Once I figured that out I could dock every time.
I don’t think you needed to match the rotation of the station at all (at-least, not in BBC micro disk Elite).
Memory is a strange beast.. although I had, but never played Elite, I was playing Saboteur 2.
I remember on Saboteur 2 the room where your character could 'duck'and would get god-mode/full energy. And I hadn't played the game since... I'll say 1985?
I had a nostalgia phase a couple of summers ago, found it in one of the abandonwares and with DOSBOX I played it again. Yes I could remember the room!
I was lucky enough to have a pair of non-self centring graphics paddles attached to my BBC. Docking with these was easy as you'd just line up, get the rotation right and then leave the stick where it was. I was 12.
40+ year old me tried docking on an emulator using the keyboard. It didn't end well :D
in dealing with any alien life form, for the purposes of trade, there are three cardinal rules:
- Learn the body language of the alien race
- Cover up your body scent
- Beware of Carapace concealed weapons
But there were some hints about obscure functionality - It is rumoured that the Galactic Navy are designing their own remote-controlled fighter, and will pay well for Thargoid ones to study - this could be done in the game. Also there were some hints about the possibility of capturing enemy escape capsules and then selling them as slaves.
I played the Electron version, which was even more limited, as the Electron's video chip couldn't do all the tricks the BBC Micro's could. (I think you even got some of the game memory looking like random garbage on screen. But that could have been a different game.)
I don’t think the generation ships (mentioned in the manual) were in any of the original BBC micro versions, but I think they were added to a 16-bit computer version later.
I was about the same age when I played and found it equally hard.
The only way I ever got anywhere was that the Spectrum version had a bug where if you saved the game on the start screen after dying, it would save the state as if you had successfully docked at the space station in the system where you died. Do that a few times and before long you have all round military lasers and can actually survive in combat.
Just tried it for MacOS X. I didn't get past its request for permission to access keystrokes from all applications. I denied it and then even the menu shortcuts didn't work.
Maybe need some fixes to the way they handle the event code on MacOS.
Hmmm.... I may have self-signed. I distributed the game on Steam but my handful of sales may have all been Windows, ha ha. My own downloading and testing didn't show any prompt - but would it on my own devices? I don't know.
Fantastic port, with many of the things I wished Elite could do and show when I was 11. I am tempted to brush off my almost-dormant coding skills, in fact.
I thoroughly enjoyed that story. I know it's a BBC patriotic puff piece a little but the tech tricks they did were neat. I hadn't heard of Elite at all and that's too bad because it would have been right up my alley back then.
It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc.
Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board.
Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them.
Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player.
a few edits:
I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress.
Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser.
The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped.
FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.
I only have some 60 hours in it but I have not gotten close to getting bored. If I get bored with bounty hunting I go trucking, if I get bored trucking I go exploring, if I get bored exploring I try to make some progress on my engineers.
I haven't even touched Odyssey yet.
I think Elite is just surreal, the scale of it is just astonishing. My main is an ASP Explorer, and I like to just travel with it. Just hop from star system to star system and see what's out there.
Not only that but the networking is so unreliable that it effectively is single player, except that other players can hide away in private mode and affect things for everyone else, completely unopposed in a direct way.
The game is pretty much in maintenance mode, so many mechanics that haven't received any updates despite needing them.
The story has dragged on for years with anything of substance happening so rarely that it's like they wait for the hype to totally die down before moving forward.
I've had problems there too where I would have to email them because the game had a networking issue while transitioning from space to planet that just sort of locked me out of a save.
Years ago they designated some large sector as closed , for story reasons. And I had to email them to get my ship moved as I loaded my game only to find I was locked in this bubble near the Horsehead nebula with no path my ship could take out.
I logged about 1,500 hours, got all the updates/season passes and even bought some ship skins.
Exactly the same situation here. I was really into the PvP aspect (especially powerplay - I liked to be a mercenary running defense for cargo ships hauling stuff into a system the power was trying to take over), put in a ton of time working through the engineering grind and learning to proficiently fly without flight assist (trying to navigate through the edge 'channels' of the Coriolis stations without colliding was fun practice).
I gave it so many chances but eventually had to just accept that FDev didn't really care that much about improving the game when one of the powerplay powers 'collapsed'. The original deal with regard to that happening was that FDev would remove that power, progress the lore and maybe introduce another power eventually. Instead they ignored it and allowed other players to exploit the situation, completely breaking powerplay as a system.
It's such a shame, because the flight engine is superb, the graphics and sound design are spectacular, and (especially in VR) the immersion is just superb.
But the game is a _grind_. It does not respect the players time at all.
It's impressively immersive, but at least when I tried it, not something I would categorize as an absolute blast. The PvP aspect seemed to take a back seat to creating a beautiful and expansive spaceflight simulator. (Which it is!) Mining resources and transporting goods just seem like excuses to fly around and can become tedious. Exploration felt repetitive, too, though I can hardly imagine the excitement of the first player to have an alien encounter.
Eh, if you want to play a game that FEELS like it was balanced with a "pay real money to buy in game credits" feature but doesn't actually have that feature, then yes it's great.
One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog.
I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.
What shocked me when I saw Elite for the first time, is the huge number of star systems with their own names, population size and descriptions. I knew there was no way such volume of data in the tiny executable file.
There was a "remake" in C of Elite called Elite: The New Kind. The source is on github (https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind). There is a funny, albeit showstopper bug: if you try to look at a sun, it will try to explode, but it can't so the game crashes.
Played a lot of Elite on my trusty old ZX Spectrum. Contrary to what many people say here, I hardly ever had any problems with docking: the game was quite forgiving, and you could dock from rather insane angles, the only real requirement was to get into the 'dock' rectangle at an acceptable speed.
I also fondly remember Elite successors, Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. The great feat of those was fitting an insanely huge galaxy with orbital stations, surface cities, mountains and such on ONE FLOPPY DISK!!! These days just an image on a launch screen would require more bytes than those whole games full of content and missions and ships.
I was nine in 1984 and had a BBC B for my 9th birthday earlier that year. Later I modded it with the speech ROM chip docked in the left hand panel open slot.
That boot up noise brings back a lot of memories, as did the 5-10 minutes waiting for the cassette tape to load the games.
I had to wait for my next birthday to get my hands on Elite, spending my time with Meteors and Kingdom and other games that I can no longer remember. Apart from dipping into games like Repton for my siblings, Elite became the game I played religiously, often late in the night without my parents knowledge, and giving up my TV rights to watch the A-Team and Knight Rider (but not Battlestar Galactica) — determined to reach Elite status.
I became extremely proficient at trading slaves, drugs and people, and dogfighting with the police vipers and bounty hunting pirates. I amazed my friends how quickly I could dock, since for newbies it was extremely hard to get the right roll and trajectory until it finally “clicked”. A proficiency in hand-eye coordination in 3D space.
I managed to complete it some three years later. It’s one of the few games I’ve actually ever “finished”, not that you could ever really finish Elite.
This machine was what started me on my path to where I am today. Later I added a Commodore 64 to my collection, and the poor old Beeb was relegated to the attic and finally given to someone else by my parents, but that mottled cream tin box shell with its mechanical keyboard will always have a place in my heart. I also remember it being very heavy, but I was a nine year old child.
I achieved Elite status and nobody can take that away from this nearly 50 year old geek. Sometimes I'm tempted to put that on my CV as a conversation starter.
Never played Elite, but I got to see Dave Braben do a post-mortem of the development of it at GDC many years ago. It was super interesting hearing about some of the optimisations they were doing to make it work.
I played Elite in my early teens, at that peek where free-time and maximal coordination and reaction time, intersect.
I got so good with the keyboard that I could line up enemy ships in my crosshairs and destroy them before they were larger than a dot. Combat became tedious, like periodically wiping away a crumb, or a bit of dust.
I still sunk more hours into it than any other game I had, only giving up when I was Elite status and had played all the special missions.
My family and me happened to be on holiday that weekend so then I had the fancy box and manual (and novella) to read but we weren't going to be back home for a few days (where the actual computer was). So I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. The manual was amazing, and done in 'in universe' style, as if you had just purchased a Cobra Mark II spaceship, the main control panel of which just happened to look like a BBC Micro Model B. I was reading it thinking 'Is all this in the game? docking, space combat, trading, all those different types of spaceship to encounter, upgradable weapons and peripherals, eight galaxies, police spaceships, planets with descriptions of their inhabitants, mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace. Readers: Yes, it was all in the game.
edit: original manual at internet archive: https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up
As a ten year old it was a very hard game though. Docking was HARD. Understanding trading was hard, what should I buy with my 100 credits at Lave that I could profitably sell at Leesti? There wasn't an internet to look this up on. I suppose there might have been articles in magazines, but not sure it would have occured to me to go looking for those. Space combat was great though, the 3D scanner with the vertical bars made it very intuitive. The magic of locking a missile and then firing it off!
I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading (I was 10, ok? And no-one had ever seen a game like this before). A few years later Elite Cheat got released - a program to make fake 'save files', and then I really got to explore what the game could do.