Elite (video Game) - Influences, Development and Launch

Influences, Development and Launch

According to Braben and Bell, Elite was inspired by a range of sources. Much of the game's content is derived from the Traveller tabletop role-playing game, including the default commander name Jameson. The developers also cite 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the original Battlestar Galactica as influences. Braben also cites the works of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert L. Forward, Isaac Asimov and Orson Scott Card as influences.

When the developers met at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bell was already working on a game for Acornsoft called Freefall. Braben had started writing a game called Fighter, but had not yet completed it. The two projects were sufficiently similar that Braben and Bell compared notes, and after seeing Star Raiders on the Atari 800 they decided to collaborate to produce what eventually became Elite. The project was initially offered to Thorn EMI, with whom Braben already had a contract, but was rejected. The developers went to Acornsoft instead; although a project such as Elite was very different from the company's usual fare, Acornsoft's managing director David Johnson-Davies agreed to publish it.

The game took two years to write and was written in machine code, allowing much tighter control of memory usage than using a compiler, as their computer had only about 14 kilobytes of memory. Much care was given to maximum compactness of code. The last part added was the 3D radar display fitted into the last few unused bytes in their computer.

Elite received very good reviews on its launch and sales of the BBC Micro version eventually reached 150,000 sold copies.The game's popularity became a national phenomenon in the UK, with reports airing on Channel 4 and elsewhere. The great commercial success of the BBC Micro version prompted a bidding war for the rights to publish Elite in other formats, with British Telecom's software arm, Telecomsoft, eventually winning the rights. It was eventually ported to virtually every contemporary home computer system and even to the NES console. Bell estimates that approximately 600,000 copies were eventually sold for all platforms combined.

In 1999/2000, a dispute occurred between Ian Bell and David Braben regarding the former's decision to make available all versions of the original Elite. The dispute has now ended; the various versions are available on Bell's site. The two Frontier games are available for download from Braben's Elite Club website.