Elite

Elite is a seminal space trading computer game, originally published by Acornsoft in 1984 for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers and subsequently ported to many others. more...

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The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of 'Elite'.

Elite was written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell, who had met while both were undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge. Non-Acorn versions of the game were published by Firebird.

Description

Elite is often credited with inventing the space trading genre, though it was preceded by a number of space trader games, including the original Star Trader from 1974. This genre melds space-borne combat with a "buy low, sell high" freight transport system; the profits are usually used to purchase ship upgrades.

The game was originally intended to contain 2⁴⁸ (approximately 282,000,000,000,000) galaxies. However, the number was limited to eight when Acornsoft noted that such a gigantic number would make the artificiality of the game universe evident to the player. Each galaxy containing 256 planets to explore. Due to the limited capabilities of 8-bit computers, these worlds are procedurally generated. The player, initially Commander Jameson, starts at Lave Station with 100 Credits and a lightly armed trading ship, a Cobra Mark III. Most of the ships that the player encounters are similarly named after snakes, or other reptiles. Credits can be accumulated through a number of means. These include piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and the mining of asteroids. The money generated by these enterprises allows the player to upgrade their ship with such enhancements as better weapons, shields, increased cargo capacity, an automated docking system, and more.

Travel between planets is constrained to those within range of the ship's limited fuel capacity (7 light years); fuel can be replenished after docking with a space-station in orbit around a planet - a challenging task without a docking computer, as it requires matching the ship's rotation to that of the station. Players can upgrade their equipment with a fuel scoop, which allows raw fuel to be skimmed from the surface of suns - a dangerous and difficult activity - as well as collecting free-floating cargo canisters and escape capsules liberated after the destruction of other ships.

Travel amongst the 8 galaxies of the game universe is achieved through the purchase of an extremely expensive one-shot galactic hyperspace upgrade. There is little practical difference between the different galaxies, and there are a number of poorly located systems that can be reached only by galactic hyperspace - these are more than 7 light years from their nearest neighbour, thus trapping the traveller.

Read more at Wikipedia.org