Elite 7300

Elite is a seminal space trading computer game, originally published by Acornsoft in 1984 for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of 'Elite'. more...

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It was written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, who had met while both were undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge. Non-Acorn versions of the game were published by Firebird.

Elite was one of the first home computer games to utilise wireframe 3D graphics. Another novelty was the inclusion of The Dark Wheel, a novella by Robert Holdstock which influenced new players with insight into the moral and legal codes which they might aspire to. It elevated the technically complicated software beyond the pigeon-hole of "game".

Elite's open ended game model, advanced game engine and revolutionary 3D graphics ensured that it was ported to virtually every contemporary home computer system, and earned it a place as a classic and a genre maker in gaming history. Even now, over 20 years after it was published, Elite is frequently used as a yardstick by which any new space trading game is measured. It has often been said that "Elite has been imitated but never bettered". While this is perhaps somewhat hyperbolic, it is certainly true to say that Elite is by far the most original and creatively successful space trading game ever made. The game had a huge impact on many other games, in many other genres.

Gameplay

Elite is often credited with inventing the space trading genre, though it was preceded by a number of space trader games, including the original Star Trader from 1974. This genre melds space-borne combat with a "buy low, sell high" freight transport system; the profits are usually used to purchase ship upgrades. Much of the game's content is derived from the Traveller RPG, including the default commander name of Jameson.

The universe contains eight galaxies, each galaxy containing 256 planets to explore. Due to the limited capabilities of 8-bit computers, these worlds are procedurally generated: A single seed number run through a fixed algorithm the appropriate number of times and creates a sequence of numbers determining each planet's complete composition (position in the galaxy, prices of commodities, and even name and local details--text strings are chosen numerically from a lookup table and assembled to produce unique descriptions for each planet). This means no extra memory is needed to store the characteristics of each world, yet each world is unique and has fixed properties. Each galaxy is also procedurally generated from the first.

Since there is no memory overhead for creating extra worlds, the game was originally intended to contain 2⁴⁸ (approximately 282,000,000,000,000) galaxies. However, the number was limited to eight when Acornsoft noted that such a gigantic number would make the artificiality of the game universe evident to the player. The player, initially Commander Jameson, starts at Lave Station with 100 Credits and a lightly armed trading ship, a Cobra Mark III. Most of the ships that the player encounters are similarly named after snakes, or other reptiles. Credits can be accumulated through a number of means. These include piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and the mining of asteroids. The money generated by these enterprises allows the player to upgrade their ship with such enhancements as better weapons, shields, increased cargo capacity, an automated docking system, and more.

Read more at Wikipedia.org