[content warning: discussion of slavery and colonialism]
Elite was a year old by the time its Spectrum version hit #1, a conversion developed as a result of its massive success on the more expensive and less popular BBC Micro computer. Yet even for 1985 it still feels preposterously ahead of its time. As with many other games I’m writing about here, I first played it in the early 90s, and its wireframe monochrome 3D spaceflight still felt high-tech and futuristic. Like the map in The Crystal Maze! As recently as 2016, one of the year’s most anticipated new games got there essentially on the promise of an updated execution of Elite’s concepts (I’m scheduled to talk about that one in five years’ time). Elite is a game which did the previously unimaginable and it had a lasting impact.
It’s a game about space travel and trading. You start out on the planet Lave with a triangular-ish Cobra Mk III spaceship and some credits to buy some stuff before you set out into the universe. Pick a destination, hyperspace there via a flashy space tunnel visual effect, and see another planet in front of you. Move around it to its geometric space station, line yourself up with an entrance slot, and you can dock into another planet’s market to buy and sell and upgrade and do it over again.
Well, I make that sound simple, but the space station docking is an incredibly difficult stage to get past. Things can get harder yet later on with pirates or police or aggressive aliens, but the required feat of flight technique is a heavy barrier of its own. I have memories of getting deeper into Elite, of being enthralled by its progression, and I know that 7-year-old me was much more patient with games than me now, but I’m not 100% convinced I ever got past that starting point. My happy memories might be of watching my dad play it. I’m not sure it matters all that much.
Just conceptually, Elite offers so much more than the basic actions of its gameplay. What form it takes is subject to an incredible degree of freedom. 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 – combat, trade, not having to do the docking waltz yourself any more. Everywhere you go you see other ships going about their business, and 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 the strongest we’ve seen so far. Of course Elite is built for the player’s benefit too, but it doesn’t remind you of that in-world, where you are just one more of many and it’s possible to imagine the universe carrying on without your tiny contribution and not even noticing. It’s not quite the Total Perspective Vortex, but it’s an experience with a very different flavour to a lot of games where you play as the chosen one.
Elite’s world is one rich in detail. It uses procedural generation – templates filled in with details based on random number 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”. 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 some familiar topics for those familiar with similar fictional settings. Elite gets in references to Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy early and often – you start off rated as “Harmless” and the first progression on your path to the ultimate rank of “Elite” is of course to “Mostly Harmless” – and has a nod to 2001 in the delightful version of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz that plays while your expensively bought docking computer does its thing. (Well, the Commodore 64 version I remember had the last one, anyway; the Spectrum’s crap sound strikes again.) It even came packaged with its own sci-fi novella.
The indication is that Elite’s aspiration is to make the player feel like they’re in the kind of sci-fi story they’re hopefully familiar with, the better for them to fill in details that the game doesn’t have. The high level of incidental background detail, copied with the relatively low level of detail on your actions make for the perfect opportunity to do that construction of additional narrative, on your own, or with others, as described in a lovely post on GameTripper. And that narrative outsourcing is a great move. All the filling in, informed by other science fiction or otherwise, or otherwise, comes easily and offers an even bigger range of possibilities than even such a groundbreaking game could on its own.
For all the freedom, though, players work along some lines set by the developers. And the confines of those lines are revealing. You can’t, at least within actions shown directly by the game, operate as a space Robin Hood and give anything you take from the rich away to the poor. You can’t run your ship as a passenger transport. But you can trade in slaves. The possibility is presented every time you look at the list of a planet’s available commodities, quantities chillingly listed in tonnes alongside computers and minerals and “alien items”.
There is an in-game punishment of sorts if you trade in slaves or firearms or narcotics, a strong possibility that the space police will come after you. But they’re lucrative trades, you can fight the police, and that’s also a new set of possibilities to act as an incentive to the player to make those choices. The gameplay consequences of making the choice might actually be more fun. The two Cambridge students who made this game where players aspire to be the Elite decided that as part of their entertainment those players should be facilitated to imagine owning other people as property. Any thoughts on other reasons not to carry out such an atrocity are another thing left completely to the player.
It makes sense to look at those decisions in the context other games of the era we’ve seen, too. There was Frank Bruno’s Boxing and its vintage racism. Sabreman, the character we’ve seen lead three #1 games already, did so in colonial chic headgear. Fantastical worlds are always mirrors of our own, intentionally or otherwise, and in Elite’s time the British Empire (which 44% of British people surveyed were still proud of in 2016) wasn’t far behind us at all. Elite has you as a lone trader, rather than a representative of the East Galactia Company, but the prospect of travelling to far-flung locations and shooting down their defences to foist your narcotics onto their population can’t help but resonate, too.
It’s not just the experience of playing this game that those resonances matter for. Elite was as loved as it was successful and sets the scene for what is to come, its ideas traceable through to very different future games. Championship Manager would go on to turn its perspective vortex and largely player-outsourced narrative into a magical football story machine. And some other Brits would take Elite’s freedom to go anywhere and do anything as the model for the even more successful Grand Theft Auto, with the lack of morality not only built in as a given but made the whole point. The path towards a particular type of power fantasy dominating games doesn’t start here, but it’s a beautifully built trading post along the way.
