Elite was one of the most fascinatingly ahead-of-its-time games that we met in the initial mid-’80s stages of this project. Its scale and sense of freedom, the player being left to their own devices to trade and fight their way through a vast galaxy, were remarkable. In 1993, approaching a decade on, much of the rest of the medium was only just catching up with it. Repeating the achievement would be impossible. Its sequel came surprisingly close.
The high-level concept of Frontier in itself can’t be a revolution, because it hasn’t really changed from Elite. The freedom and basic mechanics of gameplay are still the same, slave-trading and all. It has its own version of the Blue Danube waltz which, despite being on clearly more advanced sound technology, is somehow even more adorably wonky than the one from the original game. But the world and how you approach it is transformed. In Elite, you moved between the space stations of fictional single world systems. Frontier sets out to recreate the Milky Way, to scale, with a set of planets, moons, and orbital bases for each star. It’s a complete change in depth and detail, and the colourful simplicity of its graphics looks lovely.
Your travels across the galaxy are transformed too. Rather than only travelling between systems in a hyperspace instant, you can go the long way to whichever planet you like. As you interact with services at ports you can now see the people of the future and their funky hats. You can look at their bulletin board and take all manner of jobs. You can journey to Alpha Centuri (in real time), a bracing experience of the vastness of space offset by the fact that you can also fast-forward time to up to 10,000 times. Oh yes, and Frontier also introduces realistic Newtonian physics. It’s a demonstration of the way that the advance of technology could mean revisiting the same idea after a matter of years resulting in a totally different experience, something especially true in the ‘90s.
The final thing to note about the technical achievement is that on top of all of that, Frontier fits everything it does on one floppy disk. The game, the galaxy, fits on a quarter of the storage space required to carry Body Blows.
When it came to actually playing it, the bracing complexity was rather a lot for me, though Frontier does offer a bit more of a helping hand with it than Elite did. Not for the first time I wish I could send a game back in time to a past child version of myself who had the time and patience to take more advantage of its world. Failing that, though, if I didn’t have the capacity to take proper advantage of this vast story-telling machine, that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy its results.
I initially turned to JimPlaysGames’s Frontier Fundamentals as tutorial to try to figure out what I needed to do for myself, but found myself enjoying it as a story in its own right, a wry and informative guided tour of the galaxy. And by coincidence, as I was starting to think about this post, along came Kimimi’s space diary, a brilliant and very funny Frontier tale of a dynasty of Commander Kimimis and their unfortunate fates. Games can facilitate people in telling great stories, and those stories can facilitate an appreciation of the game in turn. In that, Frontier not just follows Elite but succeeds anew.
Amiga chart, Edge 004, January 1994