The making of Elite | Hacker News Reader

The making of Elite

theguardian.com

106 pointscallum8556 comments

Those of us that wasted whole summers playing Elite were in for a shock when PC's came along - no games were anywhere near as good as Elite! We had been brought up on the good stuff and nothing that came along subsequently was anywhere near as compelling. Even the licensed versions of Elite on other platforms were a pale imitation. Because of this I gave games a wide birth, probably until the Playstation came along a generation later.

What Bell and Braben were able to achieve was tantamount to magic in many areas. As explained in the article the 8 galaxies with 256 stars was quite amazing. We all knew there were only so many banks of 16K RAM so how was this possible? The display was also quite incredible, even if you thought you knew a lot about the display modes. The top 3/4 was hi-resolution black and white and the lower dashboard was chunkier 4 colour. Swapping display mode mid-screen-refresh was truly out there. As for the 3D graphics, there was no openGL back then. Anyone that has had a go with openGL knows it is hard enough as it is. Bell + Braben did 3D with no library and in pure assembly language, hidden line removal included. The game may not have been networked however that was not a problem, there was plenty to talk about. This word of mouth aspect meant that a lot of Elite gameplay (such as the missions, getting stuck in hyperspace, mining asteroids and the consequences of trading in contraband) was part myth. There was no knowing what extent the gameplay really involved, friends could tell you things they found and you might not be able to find out for yourself.

There were plenty of other BBC micro games that were excellent, obviously not to the same degree as Elite, however, Elite did captivate a whole generation for months at a time. I wonder what the opportunity cost of this was. Instead of moving up from 'mostly harmless' to 'elite' we could have had a lot else done by the likes of myself during that time.

I spent so many months playing this game. Loved it.

Regardless of the technical achievements of the developers, it also captured the imagination like no other game.

I'm anxiously waiting for the Kickstarter funded release of Elite Deadly.

I wasn't aware of that. It's called Elite: Dangerous now :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous

Should we expect future sequels called Elite: Competent and Elite: Above Average?

Just wait for the collector's edition. Elite: Elite.

Here - go waste another season :) http://oolite.org/

Or if you want a similar experience plus modern detailed graphics plus the ability to land and explore planets plus more http://pioneerspacesim.net/

And it was so hard! It wasn't until "Elite Cheat" came out (they had reverse engineered the game-save format) that I encountered most of the purchasable weaponry, etc.

My first experience of Elite was on a PC. It truly deserves its reputation as one of the best games ever made, not only from pure gameplay, but also because technology-wise it was just in another league for its time.

I always felt oddly cheated that some of the massive spaceships mentioned in the booklet that described the galaxy never appeared in the actual game.

The Acorn Archimedes version of Elite was excellent. It was essentially a clone of the original BBC elite, but with superior graphics and AI.

The archimedes version even had a 6502 emulator built in so that the original procedural generation routines could be directly run on the acorn, to produce the exact same universe. Very impressive for the time.

I don't know how I missed that! I think I missed out though!

There was some hardware genius in the original Archimedes and there was this game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

Written by Braben - of all people!

On 16-bit, Carrier Command was not as amazing as Elite but it was definitely a worthy successor.

I had a BBC Model B, and was 10 when Acornsoft published Elite. I persuaded my parents to buy me the game, but we were on holiday that weekend, so I had all weekend to peruse the game box's contents without a computer to play it on.

For the time, the box that the game came in was also revolutionary. http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acornsoft-Elite-... It has a big thick manual, a novel, posters. I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. It was mind blowing, and hilarious - written as if you had just bought a Cobra Mark III and it was explaining the details of your new ship to you. Some parts of it had flashes of Douglas-Adams style humour.

Loading up the game and playing it was also mindblowing. There were so many different keys and controls. You could switch to side or rear view cameras from your ship - even just watching the parallax stars float by was amazing. The solar system you were flying around in was bewilderingly huge, with a planet and a distant sun that you could actually fly to. On my first go I mistook the space station for a Thargon (I had really taken the manual to heart) and fired on it. Big mistake. The police were launched and they shot me to pieces. The 3D combat felt very realistic, and the clever 3D radar made everything understandable. The fact that I could launch a homing missle and it would use its own AI to fly to its target was incredible.

And it was a _hard_ game. Trading was hard. Docking was hard, until you learnt how to line up properly from a good perpendicular angle. Getting more than a few systems away from your start point was hard. Flying to anywhere but the safest systems was very dangerous. It was hard to build up money and buy new kit or fuel. The manual said there were 8 galaxies with hundreds of systems in each galaxy, but it was hard to survive more than a few hops.

This was running in 32K of RAM. The game loaded from a floppy disk that had I think 100K of space on it.

The overall impression was a mindbendingly huge game of so much depth and diffuculty. The state of the art in those days was supposed to be Arcade machines, but they had nothing to compare to this - because Arcade machines were based on people playing for a couple of minutes. This was a game that could keep you busy for years. Nothing like that had existed before.

I didn't have an experience like Elite again until I played X3 for the first time.

It's an upscaled Elite with modern graphics and all the improvements you would hope for (and a ridiculously intricate universe, stock markets, shifting alliances, side missions).

I don't think I even visited all the systems in the first one before the mods.

The scope of Elite was so impressive - and the novella that came with it added so much to how big the universe felt. What sticks in my mind is that the only way to make any real money, quickly - was trading in either narcotics or slaves, and hoping that you could outshoot the police :). Of course, as a 7-year old I didn't really know what narcotics were, only that for some reason they were very cheap on Leesti...

Ian Bell's site has the source code and various disk images for your perusal: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/bbc/index.htm#src

Though having the source code is only very very marginally better than looking at the raw machine code. It's very terse and written for a quirky assembler.

It's always great to get some behind the scenes into how a great piece of software was built.

Last night I finished the book about id Software.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146.Masters_of_Doom

Any other great recommendations?

Masters of Doom is a fantastic book, really enjoyed reading that.

From that I then also read the Making of the Prince of Persia[1]. This is Jordan Mechner's journal from his time during the making of this game. Not just about the game but about some of his life in general too. Not as riveting as the Masters of Doom, but still a very interesting little read.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Prince-Persia-Journals/dp/1...

Edit. Oh yes, just remembered. For a real trip down memory lane you might want to check out Speccy Nation[2] too. It took me about an hour to flick through but it was so much fun, afterwards I had to call up my best friend from the time (another ZX Spectrum addict) and tell him to buy a copy!

[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Speccy-Nation-ebook/dp/B0096BFBSA

Take a look at Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, which tells the story of the Atari VCS (2600).

While not a book, and quite a bit more technical, there's also Fabien Sanglard's website (http://fabiensanglard.net/). It contains great technical analyses of the code of historically important games.

  But while they were still sorting out the mechanics of combat and docking, they 
  started to worry about the adequacy of what they'd be giving the player (whom they
  imagined, of course, as a hypercritical consumer like themselves, bored with Space
  Invaders after the first brief rapture). It wasn't too hard to come up with a 
  solution. They could keep the player interested by letting them upgrade the weapons
  on their ship to ones that made bigger bangs and allowed you to use different
  tactics. But this little alteration perturbed the universe of the game. The classic 
  action game of the early 1980s - Defender, Pac Man - was set in a perpetual present
  tense, a sort of arcade Eden in which there were always enemies to zap or gobble,
  but nothing ever changed apart from the score. By letting the player tool up with
  better guns, Bell and Braben were introducing a whole new dimension, the dimension
  of time. They were saying they wanted the player to hope, to scheme, to plan. Also,
  to play for much longer than a slam-bang 10 minutes. And that was only the 
  beginning. The solution threw up a further problem, as each of their solutions
  would. How would the player get a bigger gun? They should earn it, Bell and Braben
  decided. No free lunches in this universe. But that implied money, in a set-up that
  a moment before had existed quite happily as an economy of pure explosions. "We put
  a bountyon the pirates. Then we thought even that would become quite samey..." They
  kept following the implications of each invention until they arrived at another
  invention. A money economy with more sources of income than just bounty for shooting
  pirates implied trading. Suddenly, the player's spaceship wasn't just a nimble 3D
  firing platform: it was a cargo hauler as well. And trading implied places in which
  to trade. The game needed serious three-dimensional geography. And things to trade.
  And prices. And markets... The new wishes multiplied. They kept going.

I played Elite and Frontier on my Atari ST as a child but looking back I don't have much of a sense of what the rest of the games market looked like. Does anyone have a feeling of just how original and innovative this sort of open-world RPG style game was back then?

I do.

It was a total game changer in every way. Partly, the 3D; mostly, the scale.

If it wasn't for the discovery of the Mandelbrot set around the same time it would have been denounced as totally ridiculous. But, as Fractals were just becoming popular around then, it fitted neatly into the Zeitgeist.

As for the 3D the only time you saw it on a home computer before Elite it was 'fake' e.g. in a basic maze game like 3D Monster Maze (think Wolfenstein but with only 4 straight-on views, no guns and a badly drawn pixelsaurus to run away from) or as an isometric game: Ant Attack springs to mind. As I recall Ant Attack[2] was also amazing for it's shear scale, if you look at the full 3D map[3] it's amazing to see how far we've come!

In the arcade we had 'real' vector 3D: Battlezone and later on Star Wars[5], the latter being the first I remember being in colour. I am sure these were an influence.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack

[3] http://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=AntAttack

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(1983_video_game)

It really was one of a kind in its time. Most of the individual elements existed in other places (sometimes in similar forms) but the 3D stuff only existde in demos for the most part and the whole combination was definitely something new and very much pushed the limits of what the 8-bit platforms were capable of (if you ignore the "master enhanced" edition it all had to fit in 32Kb of memory, 10Kb of which was consumed by the screen buffer).

People playing the PC port (on an 8086 (16-bit) with 640Kb RAM) were impressed enough and the only real extra it added was solid 3D shapes rather than wire-frame - imagine how people playing it on a BBC model B (6502 (8-bit) with 32Kb) felt!

"But back then it seemed disturbingly complicated, perhaps a recipe for chaos, to have the plan for a game shared between two brains." :D

The nice thing about the hard parts of the game is that there was a sense of accomplishment once they were mastered.

Docking used to drive me to tears. First get in line with the dock. Then start to rotate in sync with it. Only to fail. Even after I got the hang of it I'd blow it once in a while. Still remember playing with friends and having one who was the best "docker" step in at the critical moment.

Similarly when I got my Acorn Risc Machine/Archimedes, the bundled Lander game was also hard but it was a satisfying challenge, and the best demo of the new machine.

I remember thinking at the time that Braben was brilliant and wondering where his life would take him. I'm glad that he has now put his brilliance to use with the Rasberry Pi.

Braben's presentation from Game Developers Conference (2011): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

The article is from 2003 (not a criticism, just trying to get someone to add that to the title).

I was wondering why there was no mention of elite dangerous.

I played the C64 version a while ago and it really hasn't aged well. If you want to play it (again) you should go straight with the MSDOS (plus) version.

Is there a reason I wouldn't want to fire up the original BBC version?

Also, surely there must be a js/canvas port by now.

EDIT: the author apparently recommends the NES version: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/nes/index.htm

Well, Archie or Amiga versions might be worth a look. Bell does say "regarded by many as the best ever version" about the Archie version on the page: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/game.htm

Though I was on an Amiga (and the then-poor PC with CGA or EGA in school, bleh), have never tried the Archie version:

Amiga Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsuWgLEQBxM

Archie Elite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRBuTU9ovP8

There's also Frontier: Elite II. By that stage, high-end PCs were beginning to outperform low-end Amigas at some brute-force processing tasks including software 3D rendering, so the graphics are arguably better on the PC version (limited texture mapping, edit - though OTOH it sort of looks out of place looking at it now, the amiga version with no textures is more consistent and clean visually if perhaps less technically impressive), you needed a pretty-much PC-priced-anyway high-end/accelerated Amiga model to run at the frame rate shown in the video:

Amiga Elite II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzEj4Gq7fT4

PC Elite II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjoMq-H3b8o

The Commodore 64 was my first home computer, and Elite was hands-down one of the jewels on that platform when it came out. Yes, it hasn't aged well....but when it was new, it was breathtaking.

This book "Backroom Boys" is thoroughly enjoyable.

Agreed. Very well researched book, covering a number of topics that would be of interest to the HN audience - all joined by the theme of smart people - 'hackers' really - struggling to realize their ambitions in the context of a declining world power. While some of the projects covered are well known - Concorde, Beagle 2 - others are much less studied, like the Vodafone signal modelling project, and I found the overall mix of topics covered fascinating. And the full Elite chapter is an excellent look at the 'bedroom coding' phenomenon of 1980s British 8-bit game development.

From the cover of the book:

"Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit."

Great book - if slightly depressing.

It's very sad. At LinuxCon last night we went to the National Museum of Scotland and saw the original Black Knight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_%28rocket%29

why depressing? I've never understood this fascination some have with spending billions going on a fun trip to mars.

That sort of thing should be funded by rich people or corporations who see market value in doing it. Not paid for by taxes.

We have enough problems to solve here that will actually benefit people.

This is the saddest comment to appear on HN for a while.

Amazing that you don't think space exploration will benefit people. What other problems would you rather focus instead? I bet most, if not all of them, are caused by poor wealth distribution, not lack of money.

This comment happens quite often, on HN and elsewhere.

It's probably due to the decades it takes for space research invention to spread into consumer products (and even then, people don't realize it). You can find the same kind of comments about theoretical physics being useless, for the same reason (but even worse).

The amount of research done for putting people in space that end up "actually benefiting people" in tremendous. The current research for extreme water purification for the ISS alone is worth it, given the renewed importance of clean water now and in the next century(ies).

He'd rather see millions of VC money being put into the next SnapChat, which has obviously much more benefit to humanity than space exploration!

Certainly not. I'd rather see taxes lowered, so people can make their own decisions about how they want to spend their own money.

I'm perfectly happy to live my life on Earth. If they suddenly colonise Mars, and it's fantastic, and it makes you live twice as long and have superpowers, I would still rather stay here. I'm simply not interested in it.

People often cite the technological advances - "velcro" etc but I don't think you're getting value for money if that's your aim, and again, I think it should be done in the private sector rather than forcing people who have absolutely no interest in space, to pay for it.

> I'd rather see taxes lowered

And here was I thinking "spend money on more web apps" was the nadir of human ambition on HN.

I think the ambition on HN is generally

  * Make another useless timewasting webapp
  * Sell it for billions
  * Solve world hunger, philanthropy, make the world all better again

Anecdotally, I usually hear this kind of comment from people who are deeply conservative in their beliefs (not necessarily politically Conservative with a capital C, but more...ideologs). For some people, when reality doesn't line up with their internal ideals of how the world should be, they want to incessantly scratch at that itch even long after it's become a festering wound...when walking to the store and getting some itch cream would have solved it all.

Onward, outward, forward...progress is scary stuff. Otherwise functional adults often have deep rooted terrors that cause them to want to withdraw into the known.

I do consider myself conservative. But I don't understand why some feel the need to "progress". Why not just live and enjoy your life instead of constantly wanting to progress to the future. Are you that depressed about your current life that you need to strive for technological improvements to make it bearable?

Would you still be able to live a happy fulfilled life if absolutely NO "progress" was made during it? I would.

There are two constants:

1) The world changes, progress or no. Tomorrow is different than today. Someday, something will change and that tomorrow is the one that's going to make your steady state suck. And that will be just the first of many changing tomorrows. The harder you cling onto your desire to keep yourself and everybody else's world trapped in your comfort zone, the harder it will be to catch up to the accumulated tomorrows that have occurred.

2) Your life, whatever it is and I mean this without intention of offense, stinks for me. I don't want it, and the world that makes your life comfortable makes mine unbearable or at least unbelievably irritating in some aspect somewhere. For you to have your comfortable life forever means mine has to suck somewhere and sometime.

HN is about building things and changing the future...and if you're really clever, getting paid for it. If those things aren't of interest to you, and the world you've built around yourself is just fine and you can live in that world till you die, more power to you, but you're probably in the wrong discussion forum.

(you joined HN about two months ago, telling me that your assertion that your world is happy and completely fulfilled is obviously and trivially false, or you wouldn't have bothered joining up in the first place.

Something about your life is unfulfilled, social interaction, business, technical know-how, whatever, and you sought an improvement in your life out.

The difference between what you keep saying in your comments and what you actually do is probably going to mean some hard self-evaluation before you can resolve that fundamental cognitive dissonance and be a healthy minded contributor to a place like HN.)

Lets not pretend that anything web startup related really changes the future that much. Is twitter really improving peoples lives and happiness? Probably the reverse. Has Reddit proven itself as a net gain for us, or have billions of hours of productivity been squandered laughing at the latest meme or lolcat.

I actually joined HN a few years ago, but decided to leave my old account. I would probably stop looking at when people joined as some measure of their worth if I were you.

As for your last statement. I like playing on computers. I love building fun things. But I would be equally happy if the internet didn't exist, and I was fulfilling that 'building' desire someplace else. I don't "need" it to be happy.

> you're probably in the wrong discussion forum

I correct myself. You're definitely in the wrong discussion forum.

> What other problems would you rather focus instead?

I'm not sure the grandparent's comment was about finding someplace else for their government to spend a pile of money. We do not have to centrally plan this.

I'm sure it would benefit people in a few generations time. The issue I have with it is that I don't want to be forced to pay for it by my government.

I would rather not force the public to fund scientific research.

In other words you only want to benefit yourself and damn the future generations?

Not at all.

I am happy to live now, just as happy as I would have been to live 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago.

My happiness is not tied to technological enhancement.

For those pining over the experience of Elite you can also get similar gameplay in:

Medieval flavor: Mount and Blade series (I suggest the "Mount and Blade : Warband" game).

Sci-Fi MMORPG: EVE Online

Our MMO game, Star Sonata, is also in the same sort of genre, though it's top down-ish more like Star Control, and we have a lot of economic emphasis on building colonies, stations, and automated trade slaves that run your economic empire while you're offline.

Eve Online does not really give you the same gameplay in my experience. There was something visceral about combat in elite that doesn't seem to have been replicated in any of the modern space games.

No comments on the obvious relations to the startup world?

Here we have two people on virgin territory, because they were building something to their logical conclusions and fulfilling their rare ambition of excellence.

They weren't really copying anyone else or cutting much corners.

I believe that the world is full of possibilities like that - but we somehow fail to see the whole process through.

What are the next services that will blow the mind? That will have the users say "I never knew that was possible!"

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