This is wild. Elite is an amazing game. The NES port is particularly impressive given the limitations, not just with respect to pushing polygons, but to how carefully they chose to adapt the controls. And it is the only game, save for a few obscure modern homebrew roms, that manages to render polygons on the NES (though many games used sprite scaling and other techniques to pull off a 3D appearance with varying degrees of success).

I wish the NTSC version (which was never shipped on cartridges) could run without graphical issues on a real NTSC NES. Instead you need a PAL NES or a PAL Emulator.

See the story about how Elite came about if you’re curious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWoF5uVgbA