My first encounter with any type of electronic thinking machine was when my primary school bought a BBC Micro B computer. This would have been back in about 1983/84. It wasn’t until I got to my secondary school that I was introduced to the legendary game of Elite.

Elite was an open ended, sandbox type space-simulation game. The player would start as Commander Jameson with a paltry sum of 100 credits and his trusty Cobra Mk III spacecraft. From there he could engage in trading, bounty hunting or pirating in order to make more money and upgrade the components on his ship (although you could never trade in the ship itself). Destroying other ships earned you ranks with the ultimate one being, appropriately, Elite. While it wasn’t the first game of it’s kind, Elite was the forefather of just about every subsequent space trading game developed since 1984.

I can’t remember what it was that appealed to me most about this game but I know that I lost a lot of time to it. I say “lost” like it was a bad thing - I loved playing it. Being limited to merely 32k of RAM, the game was minimal at best: the vector graphics were simplistic and the star field was made up of white dots on a black screen. Today’s games feature space-dust, nebulas, lens flare, fully animated planets and so on, but Elite was bare minimum of information. In some ways it provoked your imagination a lot more. However, while the graphics were basic, the game play was anything but. You decided how you wanted to play and you could do anything you liked. If you became a pirate and hunted trading ships, you could destroy them, collect their cargo and trade it. Of course, this meant you became a criminal and if your criminal rating was too high, the police would come after you in their tough-as-nails Vipers. They also wouldn’t be too happy if you started trading in Firearms, Narcotics or Slaves.

Alternatively, if trading wasn’t your thing, you could always become a bounty hunter and hunt down pirates for a reward (and lower your criminal rating). Trading was the way to go though if you wanted to make serious money. That was the beauty of the game - the universe was yours. You started off as a nothing and built yourself up to become rich and powerful and riding in a pimped-up ship with military grade hardware. There wasn’t any easy path either. For example, although you could buy a Docking Computer which let you dock at the space stations automatically, it was quite an expensive piece of hardware. When you started out, you would have to manually dock which meant aligning yourself with the space stations entrance and flying slowly in. The downside is that you had to not only be perfectly aligned, but the station would be constantly rotating so you’d have to match the rotation as well. Docking is one of the aspects of the game that old Elite alumni remember well, not least for the synthesized rendition of Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz that played during dociking in a nod towards Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In many ways, space trading games have come a long way since 1984 - in other ways, not so much. A little while back I started playing X3: Reunion by Egosoft which is a gorgeous looking game and has so much depth. Again, you start with a bare minimum and work your way up to running an empire but unlike the 20+ year old Elite, you can buy different ships, including freighters, passenger ships, heavy fighters, destroyers and capital ships that, in turn, can carry a fleet of smallers ships. You can own factories and space stations and even buy your own solar system. There are several different factions you can trade with or piss off as you wish and at least two invading alien races you need to be wary of (similar to Elite’s Thargoids). It’s a very complex and involved game and yet it’s still possible to see echoes of Elites pervasive legacy throughout the game.

I seriously loved this game (but not in a questionable way - I was only 12 for crying out loud) although I never made it to Elite status.¹ I think I wrote my first ever piece of fan-fiction because of it - a short story about a daring pilot getting ambushed by Thargoids in Witchspace. No idea where it is now. My ideal set up would have been to have a cabinet like the sit down version of the Star Wars arcade which would be rigged up to play nothing but Elite. I even drew out the plans for it - I remember trying to include a couple of extra monitors that would show the side views to give a truly immersive experience. It’s probably for this reason alone that I have such fond memories of the game - it reminds me of my childhood and of a time when I had far less worries and responsibilities than I do know.

Halcyon days, my friends, halcyon days!

¹The Elite ranking needed a player go get 6400 kills in total. I certainly managed the third highest ranking of Dangerous but that only needed 512 kills. The second highest was Deadly - 2560 kills required for that and less than half of what you needed for Elite. Players who did become Elite were, well, truly elite! And possibly a little pasty skinned and aneamic having never been out in the daylight.