Back in the mists of time, nearly 30 years ago, it was the 80s Some people regard this as a golden age of video gaming, where you couldn’t sell a game on looks alone and playability was everything. To be honest this is rose tinted glasses thinking most of the time, many games were simple, on occasion addictive but ultimately disposable, requiring far less commitment than the modern equivalent. Elite wasn’t one of these, it was miles ahead of its time and did amazing things with the very limited resources of the BBC micro. Elite was one of the first “sandbox” games. The premise, you are someone with a spaceship; it has some weapons, a cargo hold and an engine, keep it flying and earn credits to buy add-ons and extras. How you earned money, up to you, you could mine asteroids, hunt pirates, raid other ships, trade legitimately or trade in contraband. Best of all you could switch as the mood took you, although another nice touch was that piracy and smuggling tended to get the attention of the space police which could make your life far more difficult.
After seeing a few documentaries about Elite, I decided to try and find an emulated version to play. The Easiest to find was Elite: The New kind, seemingly a port of the PC version, featuring solid 3D shapes as opposed to the wireframes. There is an old adage of never meeting your heroes, particularly when they’ve aged over 20 years. Elite, I’m proud to say is not this sort of game. Despite the lack of a premise, Goal or score beyond your credits it instantly draws you in. Controls are simple although the keymapping of this particular version isn’t particularly intuitive and you find your hand having to shift between setting speed and firing when a better layout it could have done both. Gameplay is repetitive, but no more than some modern MMOs, you jump to a system, fly to the planet, avoiding/fighting anyone who tries to rob you on the way, dock with the space station and take on fuel/cargo/upgrades as required. Once you get the fuel scoop buying fuel can be replaced with skimming the sun in the system. The look of the game, the lack of any in game music helps the atmosphere, silence as you fly towards a planet broken up by the noise of lasers if you get attacked.
I generally find I play as a trader/bounty hunter, since carrying cargo of any value attracts pirates and fighting them off can sometimes be more lucrative than the cargo run.
It is odd how you get drawn in to such a simple world, you feel genuine joy when you manage a steal on some cargo (Finding something dirt cheap somewhere and selling for huge profit) and similarly the relief when a hard fight ends and you’re left waiting for your power cells to recharge.
The funny thing is, it is truly sandbox, you can (Within the limits of what the game actually contains) do anything, where as modern sandbox games sometimes try to hold a narrative (GTA, I’m looking at you) for progress, in Elite the universe is there, you just have to spend the time exploring it.
I hear that if I like Elite I’d love EVE on line, essentially modern Elite as an MMO, and indeed I can see how well it would work as one, but I encourage any readers to give Elite a go.
