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"I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading"

Elite's rating is solely a measure of the number of kills you have. No trading performance or any other metric included. Here's the table: http://www.elitehomepage.org/faq.htm#A4 As the page says, different versions had different "kill points". At a straight 1.0 on the BCC, Elite would truly be a slog.

I fetched it out of the bargain bin for about $2, probably still one of the better game purchase I've ever made, though the modern Steam sales certainly have some stiff competition. It's been a long time. I'm pretty sure I made Dangerous, I may have made Deadly, I never made Elite, and looking at that page I can see why. Even with more than one point per some kills that's a tall bar to leap without getting bored.

For enough kills you needed to upgrade your ship, which cost money.

Exactly. I never got enough credits to upgrade my ship much, so kept getting picked off by random pirates. So although the rating was only based on kills, you had to nail the trading to really get anywhere.

I seem to recall (maybe Elite Plus?) that you couldn't progress if you weren't in the first galaxy, ie. if you had used the galactic hyperspace upgrade. In any case I got stuck on Dangerous and that's what I blame.

One of the special missions requires you to start in the first galaxy. If you’ve moved beyond the first galaxy, you can’t trigger that mission. If you warped off the 8th galaxy, you returned to the first galaxy, and would then become eligible for the special mission again. But as others have noted, it's not necessary to do any of the special missions to gain Elite status.

I was slightly older but just as fascinated. I knew some programming and it blew my teenage mind how they managed to cram all those universes inside a freaking C64. Mostly I just enjoyed the game.

Docking was bloody hard indeed. Luckily you could buy a Docking computer. It took me another few years before figuring out why it would play The Blue Danube waltz by Strauss. :-)

I love this for you. I love the image of a little kid spending the weekend getting immersed in the game world and systems, before finally sitting down at the computer, at once deeply prepared for what is about to happen, but also with no idea...

In the internet age, is it still possible to have this type of experience? When the final boss is always on Youtube, and a strategy guide is a click away? Sure, maybe you don't look it up, but the cultural knowledge will seep in.

This is how I play through the Ultima series with my eight-year-old. She doesn’t have a device of her own to look up spoilers, she takes notes and draws maps on paper, and looks through them when I’m not available to play with her.

It was a little like this with tape loading games - you had 10 to 15 minutes (an eternity when you were young) to do something, and that's if you were lucky with tape head azimuth and you didn't knock the joystick controller - if there was a manual you read that every time, I even remember reading the copy protection sheets over and over again.

I wonder if the famous Interstellar's docking scene was inspired by this game mechanic. It's pretty much the same concept - you had to align yourself with the station first and then try to match the rotational speed. If the previous alignment step isn't perfect than during the rotation matching the entrance would wobble and make it impossible to dock. Docking was indeed as hard as it looks in Interstellar :)

I think the docking scene in Elite is borrowed in turn from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

> mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace

This mechanic was so interesting - it would happen to me, I'd manage to survive the assualt, and then be so far away from anywhere to refuel, and without enough fuel to jump again, that I'd be dead-in-the-water every time. It was so weird to win the battle and then.. not. But I couldn't help but always get excited when it would happen! Did anyone ever survive this?

Yes, because I figured out how to reliably force a Thargoid incursion every time I did a hyperspace jump. From memory (BBC micro model B disc version):

- Pause the game and press the ‘x’ key. You’ll hear a beep. I don’t know what this does.

- Engage hyperspace. As soon as you see the concentric hexagon animation, press and hold the ‘Ctrl’ key. You should see the animation a second time as you drop out of hyperspace surrounded by Thargoid ships.

Docking was so incredibly difficult. I got so frustrated I hex-edited the save file to give myself enough money to buy the docking computer.

Now this is a true hacker move!

That’s very similar to my experience except docking was just too hard. No matter how carefully I tried to match the rotation, 99 times out of 100 I crashed. I still don’t really understand why! So I just stayed around the starting point, which was a shame but still quite fun.

Perhaps the Space Traders Flight Training Manual was to blame for the difficulty.

http://www.elitehomepage.org/manual.htm#A13

The manual was bundled with the cassette or disc, and it states in the 'Docking Procedure' section:

Approach the final moments of docking at DEAD SLOW SPEED

However this is dead wrong! If you put some speed on before entering the 'letterbox' you're actually far less likely to crash, unrealistic though this may be. It's perfectly possible to dock successfully at full speed. Try it out here:

https://www.bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=366

Oddly enough, the docking computers are also capable of crashing your ship.

And they still are, to this day in Elite Dangerous. Somethings never change.

The trick was to get perfectly perpendicular to the face of the spacestation that had the docking slot. But that was very hard to do visually. You had to fly directly away, turn around and watch the space station very carefully as it rotated to see if the rotation was symettrical from your point of view. Then approach slowly, match spin, but dont go too slow that actually made it harder. But even then would be game over one time in 20 or so.

Yes, I remember having pretty good success with this strategy.

Re:docking, if you went far away from the station, then kept it aligned in your crosshairs as you approached, you would be perpendicular to the front face of the station. Once I figured that out I could dock every time. I don’t think you needed to match the rotation of the station at all (at-least, not in BBC micro disk Elite).

That was probably it: not being quite perpendicular. Oh well!

I am a similar age to you. How do you remember so many details from then? Did you keep a diary? Or perhaps I've just got a bad memory.

I do remember docking though!

I just remember that weekend very well - "the weekend I got Elite but couldn't play it for 3 days so spent ages reading the manual"

Memory is a strange beast.. although I had, but never played Elite, I was playing Saboteur 2.

I remember on Saboteur 2 the room where your character could 'duck'and would get god-mode/full energy. And I hadn't played the game since... I'll say 1985?

I had a nostalgia phase a couple of summers ago, found it in one of the abandonwares and with DOSBOX I played it again. Yes I could remember the room!

> Docking was HARD.

Haha, I have been there too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugDMZMoUK6U

> Docking was HARD

I was lucky enough to have a pair of non-self centring graphics paddles attached to my BBC. Docking with these was easy as you'd just line up, get the rotation right and then leave the stick where it was. I was 12.

40+ year old me tried docking on an emulator using the keyboard. It didn't end well :D

It wasn't all in the game, was it? I'm sure they mention some massive super spaceship that never actually appeared.

Also - fuck docking.

Yeah some of it wasn't in the game:

in dealing with any alien life form, for the purposes of trade, there are three cardinal rules:

- Learn the body language of the alien race

- Cover up your body scent

- Beware of Carapace concealed weapons

But there were some hints about obscure functionality - It is rumoured that the Galactic Navy are designing their own remote-controlled fighter, and will pay well for Thargoid ones to study - this could be done in the game. Also there were some hints about the possibility of capturing enemy escape capsules and then selling them as slaves.

Maybe some of it was only in the disk version?

I played the Electron version, which was even more limited, as the Electron's video chip couldn't do all the tricks the BBC Micro's could. (I think you even got some of the game memory looking like random garbage on screen. But that could have been a different game.)

I don’t think the generation ships (mentioned in the manual) were in any of the original BBC micro versions, but I think they were added to a 16-bit computer version later.

They weren't.

They were though in an Edge Magazine article of Sep 2000 https://i.imgur.com/nV38XjA.png except the screenshot is fake.

As is the one on the back of the BBC Micro versions packs, actually! :)

Chris (erstwhile Acornsoft Publications Editor)

erstwhile Acornsoft Publications Editor

thats interesting, tell us more about how those fakes came to be?

I was about the same age when I played and found it equally hard.

The only way I ever got anywhere was that the Spectrum version had a bug where if you saved the game on the start screen after dying, it would save the state as if you had successfully docked at the space station in the system where you died. Do that a few times and before long you have all round military lasers and can actually survive in combat.

There was a much easier bug on the ZX Spectrum.

You would set where to hyperspace to, then trigger a hyperspace jump as you are docking. You would then land in the space station of the other system.