Elite is a space trading video game. It was written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell and was originally published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro computer in September 1984. Elites open-ended game model, and revolutionary 3D graphics led to it being ported to virtually every contemporary home computer system and earned it a place as a classic and a genre maker in gaming history. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of "Elite".
Elite was one of the first home computer games to use wire-frame 3D graphics with hidden-line removal. It added graphics and twitch gameplay aspects to the genre established by the 1974 game Star Trader. Another novelty was the inclusion of The Dark Wheel, a novella by Robert Holdstock which gave players insight into the moral and legal codes to which they might aspire.
The first game was followed by the sequels Frontier: Elite II in 1993, and Frontier: First Encounters in 1995, which introduced Newtonian physics, realistic star systems, and seamless freeform planetary landings. The third sequel Elite Dangerous launched on 16 December 2014. It introduced massively multiplayer with an ongoing narrative, first-person on-foot gameplay and space colonisation. ED received several seasons of free content updates and two paid expansions: Horizons in 2015 and Odyssey in 2021. The Elite series holds the Guinness World Record as the longest running space simulation series in history.Elite proved hugely influential, serving as a model for other games including Wing Commander: Privateer, Grand Theft Auto, EVE Online, Freelancer, the X series and No Man's Sky.
Non-Acorn versions were each first published by Firebird and Imagineer. Subsequently, Frontier Developments has claimed the game to be a "Game by Frontier" to be part of its own back catalogue and all the rights to the game have been owned by David Braben.
Gameplay
The player initially controls the character "Commander Jameson", though the name can be changed each time the game is saved. The player starts at Lave Station with 100 credits and a lightly armed trading ship, a Cobra Mark III. Most of the ships that the player encounters are similarly named after snakes or other reptiles. Credits can be accumulated through a number of means. These include piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and asteroid mining. The money generated by these enterprises allows the player to upgrade their ship with enhancements such as better weapons, increased cargo capacity, an automated docking system, an extra energy bank and more.
In the game universe, stars have single planets, each with a space station in its orbit. Stars are always separated by interstellar distances which cannot be crossed using the ship's sublight engines. Travel between stars is accomplished by hyperspace jumps, and is constrained to those within range of the limited fuel capacity (a maximum of 7 light years) of the ship's hyperdrive. Sublight travel uses no fuel.
Fuel can be replenished after docking with a space station, which requires matching the ship's rotation to that of the station before entering the docking bay—a task that can be avoided by purchasing a docking computer. Equipment upgrades include a fuel scoop, which allows "sun skimming"—collecting energy from the stars' corona—described by the manual as "a dangerous and difficult activity", but in practice a fairly simple process far easier than manually docking at a space station—and collecting free-floating cargo canisters and escape capsules liberated after the destruction of other ships.
While making a hyperspace jump between star systems, the antagonistic Thargoid race may intercept the player half way, forcing the player's ship to remain in "witch-space" and do battle with the smaller invasion ships of the Thargoid. As the interrupted jump uses the full journey's fuel, the player may have insufficient fuel to subsequently jump to a nearby planet, trapping them in witch-space. They must either use an escape capsule, if owned, or abort the game and reload.
An extremely expensive one-time galactic hyperspace upgrade permits travel between the eight galaxies of the game universe. There is little practical difference between the different galaxies. However, in some versions it is necessary to travel to at least the second galaxy to access the game's missions. The planetary layout of the galaxies is different, and many players have discovered trade routes between closely positioned planets with fortuitous economic combinations.
Most versions of Elite included several optional jobs for the Galactic Navy. One requires tracking down and destroying a stolen experimental ship; another involves transporting classified information on the Thargoids' home planet, with Thargoid invasion ships doing their best to see that the player does not succeed throughout the duration of the mission involving multiple interplanetary jumps. Rewards differed depending on the mission - from cash and gems to esoteric hardware such as a cloaking device.
Development According to Braben and Bell, Elite was inspired by a number of sources. The developers refer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the original Battlestar Galactica as influences. Braben also cites the works of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert L. Forward, Isaac Asimov and Orson Scott Card.Rusell DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson, High Score!: the illustrated history of electronic games, p. 340-341 While both have confirmed that the default commander name Jameson was inspired by the Traveller tabletop role-playing game which Bell played, Braben has denied that substantial parts were derived from it.
When the developers met at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bell was already working on a game for Acornsoft called Freefall. Braben had started writing a game called Fighter, but had not yet completed it. The two projects were sufficiently similar that after comparing notes and seeing Star Raiders on the Atari 800 they decided to collaborate to produce what eventually became Elite. They first approached Thorn EMI;The Daily Telegraph the company's rejection letter stated that the game was too complicated and needed to be finishable in 10 minutes with three lives. Braben and Bell then met with Acornsoft; their demo of Elites combat and docking sequences impressed managing director David Johnson-Davies and other Acornsoft executives. The company agreed to publish the finished game, although they feared that it was too ambitious for Braben and Bell, and was uncertain about the merits of two developers instead of one on a single game. The programmers were given a £1,000 advance from the company and a royalty rate of 7.5% was agreed.
The game took two years to write and started out as a 3D arcade game without the trading element. It was written in machine code using assembly language, giving much care to maximum compactness of the code. The last part added was the 3D radar display fitted into the last few unused bytes in their computer.UK Channel 5 television program "Brits Who Made The Modern World", 7.30-8.00 pm 22 August 2008
The original BBC version used a novel split screen approach to show four colours (five, including the black background) onscreen simultaneously; the upper two thirds of the screen were displayed in Mode 4 while the lower part was in Mode 5. The subsequent Electron version ran entirely in Mode 4, because the video chips were not 100% compatible and therefore were in black and white only.
The Elite universe contains eight galaxies, each with 256 planets to explore. Due to the limited capabilities of 8-bit computers, these worlds are procedurally generated. A single seed number is run through a fixed algorithm the appropriate number of times and creates a sequence of numbers determining each planet's complete composition (position in the galaxy, prices of commodities, and name and local details; text strings are chosen numerically from a lookup table and assembled to produce unique descriptions, such as a planet with "carnivorous arts graduates"). This means that no extra memory is needed to store the characteristics of each planet, yet each is unique and has fixed properties. Each galaxy is also procedurally generated from the first. Braben and Bell at first intended to have 248 galaxies, but Acornsoft insisted on a smaller universe to hide the galaxies' mathematical origins.
However, the use of procedural generation created a few problems. There are a number of poorly located systems that can be reached only by galactic hyperspace— these are more than 7 light years from their nearest neighbour, and, being low-tech, are unable to replace the galactic hyperdrive, thus trapping the traveller. Braben and Bell also checked that none of the system names were profane - removing an entire galaxy after finding a planet named "Arse".
The developers did not spend much time playing their creation, and the quality testing was mostly performed by Acornsoft's managing director David Johnson-Davies, who also planned the packaging and marketing campaign at the time.
The original "Elite" logo was created by Philip Castle. Braben said, "The Elite logo took a while to get right. The inspiration was a mix of pilot's wings and logo. The Griffin thing was Philip Castle's idea."
The original BBC Micro disk version uses a non-standard disk-format for copy protection. This relied on specific OSWORD &7F DFS opcodes in the Intel 8271 floppy-disk controller to directly access the disk, and produce a non-standard sector/track-layout. This causes issues for legitimate customers that use the Western Digital 1770 disk-controller (DFS) ROMs from third-party manufacturers such as Watford Electronics. Acorn subsequently released alternative versions of the BBC disks that are compatible with the WD1770. In addition to this, self-modifying code was used as part of the protection system, created by Rob Northen. This BBC disk-copy-protection was also used by Superior Software in its Exile game.
Marketing and release
Acornsoft set in motion a large-scale publicity campaign and commissioned a presentational package for the game that was far more elaborate than normal. Acornsoft packaged Elite in a box larger than its usual releases, complete with a novella by Robert Holdstock called The Dark Wheel, a 64-page Space Trader's Flight Training Manual, reference card and a ship identification poster. The flight training manual was written in a style that took the rookie trader through the controls and various aspects of play.
The original Acornsoft version of The Dark Wheel promised on its back cover that "[a] sequel to the novella is planned for publication in 1985", but no direct sequel was ever written. A second novella, Imprint by Andy Redman, was included with the IBM PC release of Elite Plus, but apart from being set in the same universe it is in no way connected to the original story.
Marketing activities included a £50,000 promotional budget from Acornsoft, including television advertising and a launch party at the Thorpe Park theme park (holding such an event for a video game was almost unheard of at the time) and a competition to be among the first to achieve the status of "Elite".
The Dark Wheel