Elite turns 25

September 2009 marks the 25th birthday of Elite, the completion-less space combat/trading sim developed by Ian Bell and David Braben.



It appears Braben's setup a dedication webpage with some wallpapers and other stuff, and is looking to collect old battle tales. He'll probably also be lurking the forums to look out for any fan-made Elite clones and issue them cease-and-decists, cos he's a dick like that.

Anyway, check it out: http://elite.frontier.co.uk/home/

If you're an Elite fan, the game Oolite is also definitely worth a look, it's like the GZDoom of Elite.

I wore out a few joysticks playing that game on the C64, got as far as "Deadly" before the game became a grind.

Blimey, I'm only one year it's senior.

I highly recommend Oolite. In addition to being a faithful remake of the 1984 classic, it's also got a decent modding scene which has a wiki here.

I recommend Realistic Shipyards which requires Assassins Guild, Commies,Hotrods, IonicsAmen Brick's Pirate Clan One: The Blitzspears, Vector and Zz-Oo-Haul which should give you enough new content to keep you happy. The Black Monks and Your Ad Here also add some funky stuff.

Still got my copy for the NES, but sadly the little battery that powers the memory died, so I've lost my save game.

I've been keeping an eye on this game as development progresses. Looks awesome, but unfortunately I think they're probably taking the paid subscription route, which means I won't be playing it because subscriptions are fucking retarded.

The NES version is Ian Bell's favorite. He has the ROM for legal download on his homepage: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/

I love the controls of NES Elite, it's amazing what they did with 2 buttons and a D-pad. Pretty much anything will emulate NES so it's good for portable Elite too :)

And Elite-based MMORPG would be interesting, though difficult to balance and keep simple. I think it would end up something like EVE Online very quickly, and would probably need to, to keep ongoing player interest.

Then again, there is increasing talk of interest in "casual MMORPGs", the business models I've seen mentioned are ad-supported but mostly funded by another paid service the same company runs.

I would totally buy an Elite MMO, provided they didn't try too hard to modernize it.

I love Elite and still play it on my Archimedes (best version IMO).

I had it on the BBC but could never get into it. Then again i was 5 going on 6 and had no clue what i was doing or even what the controls were.

My brother got a demo of some "modern Elite" a few years back which looked pretty. I understand modern games that try to do the same thing have all failed by over complexifying it, though?

Actually come to think of it somebody at secondary school had an Elite-mad phase for a while, and kept going on about it.