Elite: The Definitive Review

Cobra-dee, cobra-da

In a previous piece I wrote about my unending obsession with Paul Woakes’ Mercenary, I made reasonable mention of Braben and Bell’s Elite but given the game’s status as one of few internationally-recognised icons of the Britsoft era, it seems fair to give it a full Affectionate Discourse waffle treatment. Elite’s reputation is wholly justified and cannot be overstated: it’s a colossus amongst the foundational 8-bit titles that the contemporary culture stands upon. Its influence is as deep and as wide as the horizons of possibility it stretched on release.¹ Elite singlehandedly defines horizonal redefinition, of the idea that games can arrive that profoundly expand the scope of what videogames can be. Those are the rarest of gems, the few that qualify as a true [10]. Between its virtuous trifecta of real-time wireframes (with hidden line removal, no less),² open exploration with open-ended play, and filling its interactive space with procedural generation, Elite lays down a formalism that can be re-cast into a million games of sparkling modernity. Its parsimony is one thing - the whole thing fits into such a tiny footprint that it paradoxically seems more miraculous today than it did 42 years ago - but its sheer efficiency is something else. The gameplay loop is fabulously tight, and yet despite its relatively minimal systome, feels like it offers something so much richer than anything that had come before - and as such, was unassailed for years afterward.

Elite first entered my life in 1985, in a conversation with a friend at primary school. Wide eyed, he described seeing a friend’s older brother flying a spaceship he’d upgraded with special weapons, fighting off space pirates and salvaging goods from them. It seemed so outlandish a description that it couldn’t possibly be real. He was talking about the Spectrum version. Another friend was able to borrow a copy and after reaching a feverish level of excitement during loading, we were tragically betrayed by the misery of LensLok. Unable to pass the notoriously shit copy protection, Elite remained out of reach until the next year, when we reached secondary school and had lunchtime access to a room full of BBC Model Bs, with plenty a copy of Elite running alongside the other BBC mainstay, Repton.³ Here is where I probably first did the classic Elite dance of leaving the Coriolis station at Lave, turning around to shoot it, then watching police ships fly out and engaging in a futile dogfight. For Elite, this was as universal an 8-bit experience as the ‘print + goto’ BASIC jape to fill the screen with obscenities. It was only much later, when I had a Commodore 128, that I had my own tape copy, although thanks to a suspicious extra cassette in the box, I was able to leapfrog the notoriously steep learning curve thanks to a savegame from the previous owner that kitted me out with a fully-upgraded Cobra. This left me with a much more leisurely cruise around the first galaxy, free to trade and battle my way around the place. It can’t be overstated how absolutely magical it was to have relatively fluid real-time wireframe dogfights in this era. Managing lasers while firing off missiles and engaging your own ECM against incoming enemy projectiles, the sense of a complex, plausibly realistic space battle was tangible. It was thrilling to engage in, feeling a step beyond the gloriously slick and smooth vectors of Atari’s Star Wars arcade cabinet, where despite the fireworks and graphical splendour, the fighting wasn’t exactly fraught or complex. Elite brought a richer sense of genuine battle, out in the depths of space, with desperate choices being made whether to break away and limp for a friendly station or to battle on to the bitter end, potentially reaping rewards in the process.

It was in that complexity of experience that Elite really shone. Star Wars was ultimately a shooting gallery, but here it felt so much more real. You were a genuine spaceship commander, and the metagame surrounding the basic spaceflight simulation added more layers of complexity to the role. Your ship was yours to customise, to improve, to invest in. The reward for your work was the classic acquisition curve of modern levelling, where time spent equalled currency earned which equalled easier transit. The min/max, risk/reward estimations you’d have to make when looking for trade routes felt entirely new and perhaps more importantly, more adult than anything I’d played before. I’d never had to temper my lust for more money with the wisdom that Riedquat’s anarchy might bring huge profits for the right goods, but you’re definitely going to have to kill your way to the station in order to sell anything. Maybe it is best to stay on that old, reliable Lave-Diso thoroughfare, after all. These were choices I’d never had to make before, in a gaming culture increasingly dominated by arcade conversions or arcade-informed action games. Here, we’re closer to the logic puzzles of text adventures or the traversal considerations of embryonic RPGs like Ultima IV. In a wild quirk, I’d already exhausted my time with Mercenary before getting into Elite, but Mercenary was a game of exploration and escape instead of a full simulation of interstellar trading and piloting. Both had real-time wireframes, and both showed where the future of videogaming could go. But for all its critical acclaim and astonishing advancement, Mercenary remained a cult hit instead of a universally-renowned icon. That’s in part thanks to Elite arriving first, and in it transitioning to the 16-bits with flat-shaded polygons and much smoother framerates, despite making few changes to its fundamental gameplay. Elite Plus kept the brand present as more and more flat-poly sci-fi adventures joined it. Paul Woakes’ Mercenary sequel, Damocles introduced interplanetary flying, and games like Starglider 2 or Epic would carry a similar spacefaring torch, if forgetting that a critical part of Elite was the sense of ownership and improvement of your Cobra. Damocles remained distinct thanks to its startlingly complete proto-ImSim design, but Elite’s template couldn’t be bettered. Gremlin’s Federation of Free Traders seemed to be the first challenger to Elite’s crown, but was always destined to be a clone. It was only David Braben’s direct sequel, Frontier, that made Elite feel old.

I remember the first time I saw Frontier running on a friend’s dad’s PC as clear as day. There was something so timelessly foundational about Elite’s undocking sequence, a canned anim you’d see hundreds of times in those stark wireframes. The concentric shapes to denote an exit tunnel, referencing the ship-launching shots from Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, the emergence into space and the arcing curve of the planet before you. In the Frontier save I watched my friend play, there were suddenly attendant ships and cargo stores of a far richer polygonal complexity. Space was now blue for some reason, but the leap forward was tangible. You could sense it immediately - this game was so much more, such an expansion of what Elite had started. Braben had taken full command of the Elite proposition and his radical continuation was seemingly insane - a 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way, with a database of 30,000 real stars and procedurally-generated planetary systems. This was a fascinating development - Braben had made the choice to move closer to galactic simulation as well as hugely expanding the player’s scope. Players could purchase different ships with different capabilities and hence different focuses - some were bulk haulers, others combat-oriented piracy specials. You could land on planet surfaces, and Braben’s new engine went as far as modelling cities, terrain and clouds. He’d also populated our native solar system with every celestial body then known. As mentioned as far back as my Starfield pieces, I have an enduring memory of flying to Saturn, landing on a moon (Mimas, the Death Star one) and watching the distant sun rise though Saturn’s rings. That you could do this within a game like Frontier was stunning. And I think it’s that leap, that astonishing expansion of everything between Elite and Frontier, its leapfrogging of all the wannabes that sat in between them, that cements my belief in what a progressive sequel should be. And once again, here was proof that when properly harnessed, procedural content generation is far more powerful than we give it credit.

I absolutely commend David Braben for his steadfast dedication to Newtonian physics when it came to Frontier’s spaceflight simulation, but I have to admit that here, admirable rigour produced a less engaging and fun experience than Elite’s fantasy dogfighting. Frontier would let you play with gravitational slingshotting and all sorts, but that didn’t cast quite the same spell as those bitter fights for survival and frantic keyboard-prodding multi-tasked slices of fraught peril. Frontier’s battling was far more graceful, oddly, and I recall everything boiling down to oddly diagonal oppositions and straking beams chipping away at hulls and shields. Combat had become as balletic as Elite’s automated docking sequences. And yet, I really put the time in on the PC copy I played. I think because of the guilt from unearned ownership from hijacking that C64 Elite savegame. Ultimately the altered combat didn’t matter - I had X-Wing and Tie Fighter for that. Instead it was the sense of fulfilling sci-fi dreams of spacecraft ownership and flying amongst the stars. Frontier had so much to explore, so many juicy trade routes to find and plenty of ambitions to fulfil. A few well-upgraded craft and one giant hauler later, I was pretty much finished and suitably satisfied. The disastrous launch of the semi-sequel, First Contact seemed to taint Elite as the 90s wore on. I bought it nonetheless, but it would be the last space-trading sim I’d play for quite some time. It wouldn’t be until brief forays with X - Beyond The Frontier (surely a deliberate pun) and eventually Freelancer that I’d get that groove back on. Beautifully, both obviously owe so much to Elite that they serve as real tributes to the Braben and Bell pioneer. In the vacuum left after First Contact, it was no surprise that others would step in to fill Elite’s shoes.

In 2006, I was tasked with helping the Science Museum with PR for its run of Game On, the touring videogame history exhibition that had previously been at the Barbican. Part of this involved the press launch, wherein a bunch of UK games industry luminaries were invited to lend a sense of occasion and provide ample photo opportunities for the media. In the warm up to this, I was introduced to none other than David Braben himself, and got to chat to him in my own quixotic way about Elite. I asked him about what he was most proud of. For him, it was the NES version! But only because they’d managed to get all the controls onto the gamepad. I even asked him about Frontier’s blue void. He admitted he didn’t have a decent answer, and that it was probably because he was bored of black and blue was quite soothing on the eyes. Finally, I asked him if he’d ever do a sequel. I remember so clearly that he said he’d do that only when the technology was up to what he wanted to do. I was therefore delighted when Elite: Dangerous emerged, fully formed, as the contemporary answer to Elite’s original question, and doing it so well that the game thrives to this day. In Braben there’s a figure from the original 80s Britsoft years that seemed to have always done it right. Despite the publisher woes of First Contact, which were very much down to the publisher, Braben’s trajectory for Elite remains practically immaculate. The expansions, the complexifications, all fitting in line with a curve of progress we can only wish other games, other genres even, could follow. The tussles and legals between Braben and Bell over Elite’s ownership may hint at grubbier machinations under the surface,⁴ but the games themselves are shining examples of how to develop a systome and a concept over successive generations and build a series that all by itself, utterly defines the values of a genre while redefining the horizons of its possibilities.

Back in my childhood, Elite laid out a future of possible videogames to hope for. The total immersion in sci-fi imagery that we grew up in found its skeleton of sorts in Elite and with Elite: Dangerous, we find the modern realisation of those dreams. But Elite’s touch is far deeper than its sequels. No Man’s Sky and Starfield both share something of Elite’s bare fundamentals of interplanetary adventuring, be that in the structures to follow or in the gaps to fill in. It’s crazy to think that the realtime 3D space trading game is over 40 years old, and yet it seems few games can match Elite’s ambition or its success in fulfilling it, particularly in the way that ambition unfolded decade-by-decade, and how the sequels seemed to make the most of the technologies available to them. Elite: Dangerous of course enjoying the leap into modern VR with remarkable success. In the more surface appraisals of Elite’s place in history, we find it mentioned as inspiration for just about anything spacey or anything free-roaming touched by UK developer hands. Yes, that includes Grand Theft Auto, but as I constantly decry, that series doesn’t seem to have learned the deeper lessons from Elite’s sequels. Elite’s status is earned through that depth of exploring the form, and from that urge to embody progress for the sake of finding out what’s possible. And in its daringness to approximate the cosmos, to take on the unmakeable and fit it into 32 kilobytes while maintaining the cosmic grandeur. The boldness of that endeavour is something we miss in the modern context. As I wrote in the opening paragraph, the feat of Elite seems more miraculous today than it did 42 years ago, and with that I wonder where the modern miracles are, or if anything new that arrives today could ever hope to broaden our horizons to quite the same degree.

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1. If you had to pick two titles to define Britsoft, it’d likely be Manic Miner and Elite. Both embody a particular bedroom-coded spirit and both have more than enough hints of humour, but only one sets a standard that’s still followed today.

2. How do you outmatch Battlezone and Star Wars Arcade? Hidden Line Removal. Elite doing this is still a bit of a coup, IMO.

3. Repton, amusingly a clone of Boulderdash based on reading a review of it rather than playing it, isn’t something I’d write about despite a pang of nostalgia thinking about its bright colourscheme and chimey music. Boulderdash, on the other hand, is something I should absolutely get on with. A forgotten relic of a more noble age.

4. One pointed example was when Braben gave a lecture as part of the Science Museum's Game On run, a journalist found their post-lecture interview immediately cut short at the mere mention of Ian Bell's name. I suppose David Braben was in the midst of wrestling the rights so he could embark on Elite: Dangerous, but nonetheless I was stunned by how immediate his termination was. I certainly got the message, even if the journalist seemed to not quite get what had happened.