GameCity 4: David Braben, Ian Bell and other special guests shared their thoughts on what video game cult classic, Elite, means to them
Elite, the space trading game, introduced players to a vast galaxy were they could become enraptured for hours in their very own space odyssey. Its open-ended structure, moral choices and technical innovations were a marvel when it first arrived on sale in 1984 for the BBC Micro. It was then ported to numerous systems and has gone on to influence a generation of gamemakers and players alike.
To commemorate the game’s 25th anniversary, the GameCity organisations (some of whom are huge fans of the game) invited Elite’s creators, David Braben and Ian Bell, as well as some other special guests to share their thoughts on the landmark title.
Ian Bell, co-creator, said what Elite means most to him is his “affect on a lot of people’s lives, particularly children.” He stressed that games can have a profound effect on children, therefore it is important that game creators consider the possible long-term results of what they produce.
“Elite was an artistic statement really. It was doing the best we could on the platform, without letting commercial considerations compromise what we thought was the best product we could make.”
“I’m glad it isn’t Doom,” noted Bell, as he believes Elite had a positive effect on youths of the time, as opposed to the blood, guts and gore of id Software’s FPS.
David Braben, co-creator of Elite and currently chairman of Frontier Developments, said, “we were there at the right place, at the right time.”
“It was written in mostly stolen moments in between doing university work.”
Speaking about the changes since the late eighties, he said the games industry has “come so far so quickly.” Back then many publishers were looking for games that were easy to understand with a high chance of keeping the player returning, such as Defender or Galaxian. Games with more complexity, particularly new genres and technologies, were regarded with caution.
One of the first company’s Braben and Bell offered Elite to was Thorn EMI. The company decided not to pick the game up, telling the inventors it should play in 10 minutes, have a scoreboard and three lives.
Braben was shaken by this rejection and said: “In the back of my mind, I was thinking ‘oh, my god, what if they’re right?’ All the things I thought were great about it were actually the reason they didn’t want it.”
Luck soon changed for the bedroom coders though, when they approached the manufacturers behind the BBC Micro. Acornsoft were “behind it heart and soul,” he said. The first print run of Elite exceeded the former highest selling Acorn game by almost double.
Robert Holdstock*, author of the accompanying novella, The Dark Wheel, recounted how he came to be involved with the project. Following the completion of Mythago Wood in 1984, Holdstock had some downtime in his schedule. During that time he was contacted by Harry Harrison – a fellow writer who’d been approached to write the Elite novella, but was too busy – who suggested he meet with the creators. He then travelled to Cambridge to discuss the project with Ian Bell and David Braben.
Following his meeting with the creators, Holdstock realised that “it was a great opportunity to get back into something I love writing, which is science fiction.”
“It was a wonderful opportunity to use my imagination – their planets, my characters – tell a rip-roaring yarn. And it was a real pleasure to do,” said Holdstock.
Unknown to many until this event, it seems that an origami version of the Cobra spaceship had been in the works until the publisher at the time turned down the idea. A school friend of Ian Bell’s, Mark Bolitho is the man responsible for the unreleased Elite origami.
“I came back to the models that Ian and David had designed for the game and I reworked them. I put together something that I think was a nice homage to the game, because the images and the models are delightful geometric shapes and lend themselves very well to a paper construction” said Bolitho.
Specially for GameCity, Bolitho also created a whole series of origami pieces based on the 25 year-old title. Visitors were able to try their hand at a spot of paper-paraphernalia with step-by-step instructions to create spaceships and interstellar objects from the game. A range of them were displayed on a low hanging net in the main tent that attracted passersby to the GameCity Squared festival.
Later that same day, a never-to-be-repeated reading of Robert Holdstock’s sci-fi novella, The Dark Wheel, was held in the large tent. A crowd of curious onlookers and festival regulars filled the tent to hear Holdstock’s unique reading. Nottingham Trent’s choir group filled the interlude with an energetic performance of ‘The Blue Danube’ – a tune famously associated with all things cosmic.
25 years since Elite, but what will the next 25 years bring for the games industry? Making a comparison to the time it took for the film industry to find its feet, Braben said: “Our industry hasn’t yet started. We’re still doing car crashes and trains running toward cameras.”
“There is still so much further to go that our descendants will look back and say: ‘When was the industry started?’ And I think that time hasn’t happened yet.”
See more on Elite at Frontier’s website.
Aaron Lee
*Sadly, Robert Holdstock (1948-2009) pasted away on 29 November 2009, shortly after his appearance at GameCity Squared. He will be missed.
Tags: 1984, elite, gamecity, the dark wheel
