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.<p>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.<p>edit: original manual at internet archive: <a href="https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up</a><p>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!<p>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'd also recommend Oolite if you want to play what is basically a free version of this (but improved and with hundreds of community-build extensions).<p><a href="https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page</a>
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.
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 (<a href="https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind">https://github.com/fesh0r/newkind</a>). 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.<p>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 <i>ONE FLOPPY DISK!!!</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
"Now let's look at the game itself..." <a href="https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I?t=12m30s</a>
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.<p>The talk is online; if you're interested in old school video games it's worth a look: <a href="https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmorte...</a>
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.<p>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.