Games I Love: Elite
(Acornsoft / Firebird 1984. Played on ZX Spectrum and Atari ST)
Christmas 1985, I'm about to turn ten years old, and Father Christmas has left a 48k ZX Spectrum for me under the tree. I was delighted but a little surprised, as it wasn't something that I had asked for. Clearly it was a gift for my dad as much as me. He had bought a Spectrum over a year prior, but by getting me my own he would finally be able to use the thing without having to pry me off of it with a crowbar.
Alongside the Speccy was a large, black box with a bright yellow crest on the front and the word "Elite". This was a wonderfully tactile box of delights, containing the game on cassette, a thick manual, a novella that fleshed out the game's universe, a poster displaying all the different spaceships one might encounter, and a curious lump of plastic called a Lenslok.
Lenslok was a copy protection mechanism. When the game was loaded it would display a garbled mess of blocks and wait for an input. You would take the Lenslok and put it up to the screen. Looking through it would "unscramble" the image and allow you to read a code that, when entered, would start the actual game.
It was certainly ingenious, though its flaws were obvious. Should you lose or break it, your game would be unplayable forever unless you could somehow source a replacement. Plus, although there was an option to adjust the size of the image to better align with the plastic lens, some sizes of screen were simply incompatible with it. It was only ever used for a handful of titles and many of those scrapped it in later re-releases.
When I finally loaded up Elite and got past the copy protection... Well, I hated it. I had no idea what to do. Up until now, games had presented fairly obvious and intuitive goals. Shoot all the aliens. Collect all the keys. Here I was presented with an impenetrable maze of menus and keyboard commands. I could launch my spaceship all right, turn around, crash into the space station, but the rest seemed beyond my grasp. I fiddled with it for ten minutes that first day before putting it down and playing something more accessible. We already had a load of (mostly pirated) games. My dad didn't care for them (except for Heathrow Air Traffic Control, which seemed interminably dull to me), so they all went in my room. I do remember loading Elite up again at least once just to play the "use the Lenslok to unscramble the code" game, then turning it off again straight away.
I don't know how long it was - weeks or months - before I decided to knuckle down, read the manual, and try to figure this game out. It wasn't long before the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what a wonder Elite was. Here was a game that dropped you into a spaceship with just a single laser and 100 measly credits to your name, gave you a pat on the back, and sent you out to make your fortune and reputation as an Elite space combateer by whatever means you chose. You were free to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt and pirate. The spaceships, planets and stations were simple wireframes that moved at a single-digit framerate, but that was irrelevant. No game had ever felt so real. I wasn't controlling Miner Willy or Monty Mole. I was me. A much cooler, futuristic space-adventurer version of me.
As I played I began to get good at it. I was figuring out the best items to trade between neighboring planets of different economic types, using the profits to upgrade my ship with deadlier weapons and defensive capabilities, and honing my dogfighting skills against pirates and deadly alien Thargoids. And when I was having a shit time at school, I could run home and immerse myself in a world where I was competent, powerful, and (I imagined) respected. Even when I wasn't playing it, I would fantasize about waking up one morning to find a fueled-up Cobra Mk III conveniently parked in my back garden, waiting to take me to a new life among the stars.
I did, eventually, achieve Elite status, a feat requiring the player to defeat some 6400(!) enemies in combat. Then a few years later I upgraded to an Atari ST, and was excited to start the journey over again on my futuristic new 16-bit computer. The ST release of Elite featured solid 3D graphics and a framerate that was silky smooth compared to any of the 8-bit versions. I enjoyed the new docking and launch sequences that gave you a glimpse of a hanger inside the space station containing other parked ships, and the way the docking computer would actually fly your ship (accompanied by a chiptune rendition of Strauss The Blue Danube, a-la 2001: A Space Odyssey) rather than just teleporting you to your destination like the Speccy version. Some of the colour choices seemed a bit garish though, and I was disappointed that exploding ships seemed to just disintegrate into pieces. The Spectrum version used the simple but effective technique of drawing a solid red circle for a frame or two to simulate the flash of an explosion, which was far more satisfying. But these minor quibbles didn't stop the ST version from consuming many more hours of my teenage life, though not quite as many as the Spectrum one, and I'm not sure I ever made it to Elite.
Elite originated on the BBC Micro, but I didn't know anyone who had one of those at home. They were expensive, and seemed mainly fit for boring educational purposes, lining the walls of our high school computer lab. It received a ton of ports through the 80s and 90s though, including a surprisingly capable version for the NES. And there are the sequels, of course, but I'll come back to those. They add much but aren't as accessible as the original. If you want to try it today you can fire up an emulator for your 8- or 16-bit computer of choice and almost certainly find a port for it. (The Acorn Archimedes version is particularly well thought-of.) Or, if you prefer something with more modern graphics but the same classic gameplay, Oolite might be just the ticket. But the monochromatic slideshow of the Speccy version will always have a special place in my heart. A special place only accessible via application of an awkward, easily broken plastic lens.
