Elite – “The Universe will open up before you”

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which, for the sake of a quiet life, most people tend to ignore. […] Which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it undoubtedly is. For when you are put in the Vortex, you are given just one, momentary glimpse of the size of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation along with a tiny little marker saying, “You are here”. – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

When Ian Bell and David Braben initially built their space-based game Elite, they gave it 2⁴⁸ galaxies which you could travel to and do trade in. That is, 281,474,976,710,656 galaxies. They were eventually persuaded against this by their publishers, not because this Total Perspective Vortex of their own would be the experience of horror described in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but because the sheer abundance would give away the artificiality of Elite’s creation. They revised it down a bit, to eight galaxies. As Braben later reflected, “I like the idea that you’re in a Douglas Adams-type universe – an insignificant dot on an insignificant dot feeling – but you don’t want too much of that sort of thing.” Ultimately, they landed on exactly the right amount of that sort of thing, and made a lasting impact on games history in the UK and beyond.

The story of Elite has been told a lot of times, and Ian Bell and particularly David Braben have contributed to many of those tellings. As teenagers in Hertfordshire and Essex respectively, they each independently got Acorn Atom computers and started programming their own games for them. Braben has talked about overclocking his Atom to perform more like Acorn’s newer BBC Micro, and learning programming from Atomic Theory and Practice. That was a book-length manual which started with the concept of programming via the analogy of baking a cake, and got to assembler programming by page 95. Braben and Bell each learned fast and felt that their own games were better than the commercial offerings for the Atom.

David Braben talked to Thorn EMI about the possibility of publishing his games. They were unwilling to, because the Acorn was passé, but instead offered him a job. He turned that down because he had already been accepted to study physics at Cambridge University, a choice that must have been somewhat easier to make at a time before tuition fees at British universities. It was at Jesus College, Cambridge, that he met Bell, who was studying maths, and they discovered their common interests in both science fiction and in playing and programming computer games.

One of the games they enjoyed was Peter Irvin’s Starship Command, a 2D space combat game for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro published by Acorn’s own Acornsoft. In Starship Command, players pilot different ships through many missions, and can use an escape capsule to eject from danger. Bell and Braben saw the possibility of doing something similar in 3D on the BBC Micro, and managed to get a prototype working, the beginning of a flickering wireframe wonder. Rather than allowing a full range of motion and realistic fight, Bell decided on giving the player access to rotation around left/right and front-back axes (pitch and roll) but not up-down (yaw), to make the ships fly in more dramatic ways and give more of an aeroplane dogfighting feel. This worked very well.

Elite doesn’t just let you fly a spaceship and shoot other ships, though, but gives you a whole universe to explore and to trade with. The way its creators have frequently told the story of this aspect of Elite is that they were tired of all games playing out in the same way, with repetition, increasing difficulty, and an extra life at 10,000 points. They wanted to give players a choice of their rewards, and more choice in general. In one interview in 2000 David Braben went as far as to suggest that Elite was “perhaps the first game not to have a score”. Even among the most mainstream of games, the ones I am writing about, this is obviously not true. To pick three earlier examples, Flight Simulation, Valhalla and The Lords of Midnight all did not keep track of a score for the player.

When Bell and Braben started to work together, it’s true that arcade games were rather more in the ascendancy. Their success with Elite, though, was not in striking out alone with a completely different concept, but in going in the same direction as the zeitgeist, further and faster. For instance, all of the games that Ultimate had been dominating the charts with did have scores, but those scores were becoming increasingly vestigial as their gameplay moved towards more complex exploration. Ultimate’s move into 3D with Knight Lore, released within a month of Elite, would do away with a score counter altogether, although it would display a completion percentage after each defeat.

Braben and Bell took things rather further than Ultimate, putting their action elements into an elaborate game where you could travel huge distances and gradually build up the capabilities of your character’s ship. In this they were inspired in part by tabletop RPGs, especially Traveller, a space-themed game from which they took the default name of your character, Commander Jameson. Out of necessity, they had Elite make use of a save capability, players recording their progress onto cassette. One of the displays you can choose right from the start is a “galactic chart” – a screen full of white dots showing the massive scale of the galaxy. It doesn’t have a literal “you are here” like the Total Perspective Vortex, but the starting position of a tiny little crosshair comes pretty close. 

Putting that together with open-ended gameplay meant a lot of freedom to explore. Go where you like, trade what you want to, attack other ships and salvage from their wrecks, upgrade your ship as you see fit based on your own priorities. That might be being deadlier in combat, having greater trade capacity, or just not having to do the complex docking waltz required at every space station before you can begin trading. Everywhere you go, you see other ships going about their business. In the absence of anything telling you what to do, the sense of the game presenting a world and the player just existing as one tiny part of it is a strong one. Compared to its peers with their worlds which more obviously existed solely for the player’s benefit, this kind of partial perspective vortex is one of Elite’s most striking elements.

Bell and Braben’s first attempt to sell Elite was to Thorn EMI, who did not see their vision and wondered why anyone would want to play a computer game where it took so long to do anything and you would have to spend even more money on cassettes to save your game. They instead found a home for Elite at Acornsoft, a company which they saw as being run by developers, who got what they were doing right away. Acornsoft helped add even further to the sense of a wider world, commissioning a novella to be packaged with Elite. 

There is an illustrative contrast to be drawn with The Lords of Midnight. That game’s novella was written by developer Mike Singleton himself, and introduced the main characters who would appear in the game and their significance. Elite’s novella, The Dark Wheel, was written by established science fiction and fantasy author Robert Holdstock. Its main characters Alex Ryder and Elyssia Fields engage with many elements of Elite’s world but are very much not the main characters of the game.

Elite’s world, in game as in the novella, is one rich in detail. It uses procedural generation to create a far bigger universe than would otherwise have been possible with the computers of the time. You can browse a huge galactic map of (eventually) accessible places, and a local one of nearby stars and associated planets, each with their own details to read about. The planet Tionisla is notable for its inhabitants’ ingrained shyness, Leesti is known for Zero-G Cricket and Leestian Evil Juice, while for rich industrial corporate state Zaonce the info screen just notes “this planet is a tedious place”. Most of these details make no real difference to any of the choices available to the player, and yet they bring being in the world of Elite to life. 

The details also provide many a way in for those with similar tastes in science fiction to Elite’s creators. In particular, Elite gets in references to the sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy early and often. Its writer Douglas Adams had also attended Cambridge a decade earlier, and in its original radio format The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had, like Elite, started on the BBC. It’s not just the imposing scale of its Total Perspective Vortex that Braben and Bell had in mind for Elite. You start off rated as “Harmless” and the first progression on your path to the ultimate rank of “Elite” is to “Mostly Harmless”, the description of Earth in the titular guide.

Elite’s high level of incidental background detail like that combines with the relatively low level of narrative detail on your actions, to make for the perfect opportunity for players to construct their own additional narrative based on the stories they’re familiar with. That’s something which accompanying novella The Dark Wheel gives some helpful pointers for too. 

In The Dark Wheel, Alex Ryder wants to avenge his father, a trader shot down and killed with little warning or reason. The process of doing so involves a lot of building up profit and upgrading the ship he and Elyssia Fields are flying, seeking to give it an ‘iron ass’. They take on dangerous and dubious trades along the way, setting up the stakes of doing similar in-game. The book ends with a familiar kind of appeal to sense of scale, Alex Ryder being told that on becoming Elite “the Universe will open up before you in a way you never imagined possible”.

For all the remarkable freedom Elite gives to players, though, there are only certain kinds of trading you can do. You can’t trade in medicine or run your ship as a passenger transport. But you can trade in slaves. The possibility is frequently presented when you look at the list of a planet’s available commodities, slaves chillingly listed as a quantity in tonnes alongside computers and minerals and “alien items”. 

There is an in-game punishment of sorts if you trade in slaves or weapons or narcotics, a strong possibility that the space police will come after you. You can fight the police, though, and that’s also a new set of possibilities to act as an incentive to the player to make those choices. In a game made by two white Cambridge students in which players aspire to be the Elite, they are facilitated to imagine owning other people as property. When Elite was rejected by Thorn EMI, their rejection letter stated concerns over the trade in drugs and firearms, but apparently not the slavery.

After Elite, Braben and Bell never made a game together again. Bell ducked out midway through an 8-bit sequel that they never finished, and Braben continued working on more advanced sequels which I will eventually get to. The two ended up on the kind of terms that saw Braben issue Bell with a high court libel writ in 1995. Ian Bell’s website has a “stereotypical classification” description of himself which leads off with “vegetarian anarchist”. At one point, he worked with the charity Oxfam on an (unreleased) game which he described as being about “the outrageous behaviour of the USA, which is basically a force for evil in the developing world”. Unsurprisingly with that context, he has also commented on how much of a pro-capitalist game they ended up making in Elite.

David Braben, when asked about this, has not given such consistent responses as about some other elements of creating Elite. Interviewed by Gamasutra in 2008, he said that Elite “was never intended as a pro-capitalist game in any way. I think it might have captured a bit of the zeitgeist almost collaterally.” Speaking as part of BBC documentary Games Britannia the following year, he took a different direction. “Thatcher was in government, so I thought “Well, OK, it has to be money, doesn’t it?” And the idea that you spend your money on other things to improve your spaceship.” For all its emphasis on capitalistic individual freedom, it’s worth noting Elite owes more of its success to government intervention than any other game I’ve written about so far.

The BBC Micro’s status as the third most popular format for computer games in the UK, behind the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, was built in no small part on the fact that it was a BBC Micro rather than an Acorn Micro. The events which led to that had emerged from government concerns about keeping up with developments in technology and the impact they might have on people’s lives and work. In 1979, the Department of Employment’s Manpower Services Commission published a report on the subject literally called Something Must Be Done. The Commission was among the government organisations that worked together with public broadcaster the BBC to devise a Computer Literacy Project.

The form this eventually took included tendering for a company to make a BBC-branded computer which could be used in TV programs and other resources. Out of six bids, Acorn’s was the winner. Millions of people watched the programs the BBC made that used it, and the BBC Micro ended up in a lot of British schools, backed up by a Department of Industry scheme that offered subsidies of 50% for purchases of the computer. That helped the spread of the BBC Micro despite its high price, and put Acorn in position to give Elite its big promotional push with novella, theme park launch event, and all. 

David Braben would later describe the BBC Micro as a “high-end Rolls-Royce-expensive machine that a lot of people didn’t have.” Elite was very successful on it, in a way which no other BBC Micro game would ever compare with. Soon after its release, Beebug magazine described it as “a masterpiece of programming” and said that “Elite has already firmly established itself as a cult game for the Beeb that seems to create its own self-perpetuating fame”. As a sheer consequence of scale, though, the majority of Elite’s eventual sales came on other formats.

Bell and Braben worked on many of its ports themselves, including a challenging one for the NES that they were particularly proud of. The two biggest ones in the UK were, of course, the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions. Braben and Bell made the C64 one, and took advantage of that computer’s extra memory to add music, in the form of a delightful version of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, à la 2001: A Space Odyssey. They handed the Spectrum version over to a Torus team led by Ricardo Pinto, after seeing their 3D maze game Gyron.

On Elite’s original BBC Micro release, it became the #1 game in the UK non-arcade charts for five weeks running up towards the end of 1984. When the Commodore 64 version came out in July 1985, Elite went back up to #1 in Gallup’s new combined formats chart. When the Spectrum version made it out in November 1985, it became #1 for another two weeks. By that point a year old, it still looked ahead of its time, and was still in demand with new audiences. As Crash magazine put it, “Elite is one of the most imaginative games ever to be designed to run on a home computer and Spectrum owners should be pretty chuffed that they’ve got a superb version.” 

The C64 and Spectrum versions were not published by Acornsoft. When Bell and Braben had negotiated their original deal for the BBC Micro release, they had perceptively insisted on retaining the rights for other formats, as well as movie rights. As a result, once Elite’s success was clear, they were able to auction those rights to publishers. The winner was even more emblematic of 1980s Britain.

Telecoms in the UK became a nationalised monopoly under the Telephone Transfer Act of 1911, placed under the control of the Post Office. Seventy years later, Margaret Thatcher’s government passed the British Telecommunications Act 1981 to set up the reverse process, the first of its wave of privatisations of national industry. The government sold the majority of its shares in the resultant British Telecom organisation, which would become widely known as BT, on 3 December 1984. 

In the run-up to that planned sale, BT had set up a games publisher called Telecomsoft, which would use their size and backing to get into the world of bulk-selling games at budget prices. It launched an expensive advertising campaign to back up that move. Telecomsoft and its labels would also have a full-price line. And so, the same month as BT became a company outside of the government, its Firebird label won the bidding for Elite rights, paying a six-figure advance. Firebird and Telecomsoft would continue to operate from BT’s offices for the next couple of years before being moved away in search of their own sell-off. 

The success of Elite, on a British Broadcasting Corporation branded computer and then with the backing of British Telecom, left quite a legacy on games in Britain and more widely. When DMA Design came up with Grand Theft Auto, with its expansive setting and open-ended gameplay, it was Elite and its descendants like Mercenary that DMA had in mind. DMA emphasised the perspective vortex a bit less, and the anarchic elements of freedom a bit more, and put Elite’s underlying lack of morality front and centre as a selling point. Huge numbers of other games flowed from there. Elite’s methods made it into many other places, too. To pick one example, Sports Interactive’s victory over all comers in the world of football management sims came from its Championship Manager (and then Football Manager) series best harnessing the storytelling power of making the player one tiny dot in a vast living world.

Much more direct successors to Elite have also survived in the games mainstream a lot closer to the present day than for any of 1984’s other UK #1 games. In 2014, David Braben’s Frontier Developments raised more than £1 million through Kickstarter for sequel Elite: Dangerous. They have since given it numerous expansions, and when they released the PlayStation 4 version in June 2017, it reached #7 in the UK charts, sitting in between Overwatch and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. 

In 2016, Hello Games did better still with No Man’s Sky. That became a UK #1 bestseller on, essentially, the promise of a modernised version of Elite, and has also continued to be updated and played since. To keep up with technological advances and evolving expectations with regards to vastness, Hello Games went for a larger number of galaxies than Elite’s eventual 8. Not quite 2⁴⁸, but 2⁸: 256 galaxies. PlayStation versions of No Man’s Sky have a set of trophies which includes a platinum trophy, the ultimate accolade its most elite players can earn by completing all other trophy requirements in the game. The platinum trophy for No Man’s Sky is called Total Perspective Vortex.

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Sources:

• Britsoft: An Oral History, Alex Wiltshire, Read Only Memory, 2015
• Elite (or, The Universe on 32 K Per Day), Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2013
• Elite [1984], Ara Maybury, Arcade Idea, 2021
• The Making of Elite, Edge, 2003, accessed via Wayback Machine
• The History of Elite, Darran Jones, Retro Gamer No. 47, February 2008
• Elite: 30 Year Special, David Crookes, Retro Gamer No. 136, December 2014
• Elite Ultimate Guide, Rory Milne, Retro Gamer No. 236, August 2022
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Eighth, Douglas Adams, BBC Radio 4, 1980, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Atomic Theory and Practice, David Johnson Davies, Acorn, 1980, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Next-Gen Narrative: The David Braben Interview, Brandon Boyer, Gamasutra, 2008
• Email used for Ian Bell interview in PC Zone, 2002, accessed via Ian C G Bell’s Home Page
• Elite – Revolutionary 3D space adventure sets new standards, transcript from Games Britannia, BBC, 2009
• The Ian Bell Interview, Michael McCarthy, Games Domain, 1997, accessed via Ian C G Bell’s Home Page
• Email used for Ian Bell interview in Game World Navigator, 2001, accessed via Ian C G Bell’s Home Page
• Elite Interview Part One, transcript from Bits, Channel 4, 2000, accessed via Wayback Machine
• The Dark Wheel, Robert Holdstock, Acornsoft, 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Elite FAQ, Ian Bell, 1999, accessed via Ian C G Bell’s Home Page
• Now the Chips are Down: The BBC Micro, Alison Gazzard, MIT Press, 2016
• The Legacy of the BBC Micro: effecting change in the UK’s cultures of computing, Tilly Blyth, Nesta, 2012
• Elite – an outstanding new game from Acornsoft, David Fell, Beebug Vol. 3 No. 6, November 1984
• Elite, Crash No. 22, November 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• The Privatisation of British Telecom (1984), Institute for Government, 2013
• 3 December 1984: BT is sold off in a gamble over privatisation, Chris Carter, Money Week, 2019
• Firebird/Telecomsoft, Sham Mountebank, Where Were They Now?, 2021 
• UK software top 40 for week ending 1 July 2017, accessed via Wayback Machine and Retro Game Charts

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