ULTIMATE GUIDE: ELITE

It’s little wonder that Elite was a revelation on its release in the autumn of 1984. Shoot-’em-ups tended to be simple pleasures, whereas Acornsoft’s title incorporated trading and character development more associated with RPGs. Its open-world gameplay gave you the freedom to make your own decisions, instead of being goal-orientated and mission-based. Piloting its Cobra Mk III spacecraft felt more like running a flight simulator than playing a videogame, and perhaps most importantly, its universe was depicted in three dimensions rather than two, using wireframe vector graphics in place of sprites or bitmaps.

But was entirely original? Well yes and no. It certainly presented certain concepts in new ways, but at the same time those ideas had first appeared elsewhere. ’s 3D space faring and planetary trading seemed unique, but the university-based PLATO network game had attempted the same feat in 1974, albeit much less convincingly. ’s combat mechanics weren’t completely fresh either, in that they weren’t a million miles from those in the 1979 Atari 8-bit title . It’s ironic, then, that two tabletop RPGs were cited as the main influences on ’s design, more specifically, Ian Bell was playing 1977’s prior to making the space epic while David Braben was playing 1980’s .