Classic Elite

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Revision as of 20:00, 15 December 2020 by Cholmondely (talk | contribs) (Links: More links!)
Elite
Elite plaincover.jpg
Developer Ian Bell
David Braben
Publisher Acornsoft
Firebird
Torus
Microprose
Telecomsoft
Hybrid
Latest version Elite
Elite Plus
ArcElite
Release date(s) 1984
Platform(s) BBC Micro
Acorn Electron
Commodore 64
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Amstrad CPC
Apple ][
IBM PC
Atari ST
Amiga
MSX
Tatung Einstein
NES
Acorn Archimedes

Elite is a seminal space trading computer game, originally published by Acornsoft in 1984 for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers and subsequently ported to many others. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals to raise their combat rating from Harmless, through Mostly Harmless, Poor, Average, Above Average, Competent, Dangerous, Deadly, before reaching the exalted heights of Elite.

Elitebox.jpg

The BBC version of the game originally came on cassette in a box - this is a photograph of the front and back. The box included

Start-up screen for Classic Elite on BBC micro, Disk version (1984)
Firebird's quite original Elite ads as seen in Zzap!64

The player initially controls "Commander Jameson" and starts at the Lave orbital space station with 100 credits and a lightly armed Cobra Mark III. Most of the ships that the player encounters are named after snakes or other reptiles. Credits can be accumulated through piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and asteroid mining. This money allows the player to upgrade the ship with improved weapons, a larger cargo hold, an automated docking system, an extra energy bank and more.

The authors

For the time (1983) it was relatively unusual to have more than one author for a game, but David Braben and Ian Bell realized they were working on similar projects and collaborated whilst undergraduates at Cambridge to produce Elite.

Elite's creators at the time of launch in 1984

See how David Braben and Ian Bell created Elite, by watching the documentary Brits Who Made The Modern World.

See also


  • Legends of Elite
  • Lore - debates over what the original Elite really was (was the novel really compatible with the game?).
  • Vanilla game - the original Strict Game choice in the earlier versions of Oolite was an Elite emulator.
  • Elite stories

Links

Most of the various Elite sites have foundered over the past two decades. These still worked in 2020.


An academic stab at a history of the development of Elite by Dr Alison Gazzard of UCL

Article by Matt Barton & Bill Loguidice (Design).