A few months ago I opened Spotify and went to listen to one of my favourite musical projects from last year, Jens Lekman and Annika Norlin’s Correspondence, and found that it had changed. Its songs had suddenly acquired new string arrangements. It was a weird feeling that something I knew and loved was suddenly a slightly different thing. As we move into the streaming future, this kind of thing is presumably only going to get more common – Kanye West tweaking his final mixes past release date, Netflix belatedly acting on the fact that depicting suicide isn’t such a good idea, and so on. Media will no longer be completed and fixed in form. Games got there earlier, and for good reason. If someone hits a badly mixed bit of your album it’s not going to force them out of it completely. If your game crashes, it may well do.
Elite II: Frontier was released nearly a decade after the original Elite, with a huge technological leap forward to go with it. Frontier: First Encounters came less than two years afterwards, and with an apologetic title that makes it sound like a mere expansion pack, but it is in fact Elite III. The lack of a similar leap forward is the least of the troubles in its quick release, because its initial form – the one which topped the charts – was infamously full of bugs and derided as half-finished. You couldn’t get away with that sort of thing as easily as in the days of Jet Set Willy, but you could release patches to fix the issues, and with the expanding internet at least some of your players would get them. This is a subject that I’ll be returning to, as the question of what a game is versus what it was on release will eventually become trickier and trickier.
Assuming that you could play it, First Encounters did offer some changes from Frontier. It looks different, in a way which raises again the Rise of the Robots technically impressive vs actually good to look at question. Moving seamlessly from planet surface to outer space with detailed textures of the planet slowly getting more distant is some feat. This far on it just doesn’t look anything like as magical as Frontier’s elegant minimalism, which was freer from being reduced to clumsy by the space-dreamer progression of time.
The other change is a tweak to one of the fundamentals of Elite, the feature which I referred to as its perspective vortex. In short, the games’ universe is cold and uncaring and you do not get any special treatment just for being the player. Frontier started offering a bit more in the way of narrative, and First Encounters takes that on further in some very clever ways.
Its Federation and Empire split, the possibility to go either the X-Wing or TIE Fighter route in the same game, is conveyed via reading newspapers with very different editorial lines on the same events. Do the missions on offer and you can be reported on in the same manner. Ignore them and go about trading or whatever else floats your space-boat and that’s fine too. The universe might care about you after all, but you have to go out there and make it care.
Gallup compact disc chart, Computer Trade Weekly 15 May 1995 (chart for week to 6 May 1995)