Acornsoft

Acornsoft was Acorn Computers’ in-house software label — the first-party publisher for the BBC Micro and the Electron, in the way that a console manufacturer publishes for its own machine.

It is remembered for one game, and reasonably so. Elite (1984), by David Braben and Ian Bell, came out under the Acornsoft label and did more for the BBC Micro than any hardware revision.

Fast facts

Parent: Acorn Computers, Cambridge.
Platforms: BBC Micro, Acorn Electron.
Best known for: Elite (1984).
Also published: Planetoid, Meteors, Snapper, Aviator, Revs, Sphinx Adventure — first-party conversions of the arcade canon, plus originals.
Prices, per Acorn User’s charts: Elite at £14.95 cassette, £17.95 on disc — though Acornsoft’s own advertisement in the same issue asks £17.65 for the disc. See Elite for the disagreement.

What Elite was, as the period judged it

ACE’s all-time-greats feature of March 1991 gives the fullest contemporary assessment, and its first clause is the commercial claim:

Elite — Acornsoft (BBC B). Probably responsible for selling many BBCs, this archetypical space fighting-and-trading game has been much imitated but (many would argue) never surpassed. The intergalactic action, depicted in wireframe 3D, provided the immediate pull-you-in thrills, but the trading at space stations, plus possible mission assignments, added the depth needed to make this an all-time Great.

“Probably responsible for selling many BBCs” is the part worth holding onto. Acorn’s machine was bought for education and specified for it; the thing that moved units was a first-party game about smuggling.

The month before, ACE’s readers had voted it second in an all-time list — the magazine’s comment on the entry ran to four words: “we couldn’t agree more” — above Alien 8, Atic Atac, Kick Off and Stunt Car Racer.

The technical claim, stated carefully

Elite is routinely called the first free-roaming 3D game, and a 2002 retrospective puts the claim in the form that survives scrutiny: it was probably the first vector-graphics 3D game in which the player could move entirely freely in three dimensions — where Battlezone and Tempest, for all their vector graphics, confined movement to two.

The same piece records the detail that made the title mean something: Elite was the highest attainable rank, universally coveted, and reaching it required destroying around 6,400 opponents.

⚠ Both points come from a retrospective rather than contemporary reporting, and the second is a single source. Treat the rank threshold as reported rather than verified.

The argument Elite was used to make

The most interesting Acornsoft citation in this library is not a review. It is a reader writing to ACE in September 1989 about what the industry had become, using Elite as the measure of what it had lost:

I have a horrible suspicion that unless a game can be coded [in a] compiled language like ‘C’ it doesn’t get past the accountant. Games no longer seem to sell by repute [without] very expensive promotion and release on the first few available formats. On this basis the original Acornsoft version of Elite would have died at birth.

Five years after release, Elite had become the standard example of a game that the publishing model of 1989 could no longer have produced: hand-written assembly, on a minority machine, from two students, selling on word of mouth.

That is an argument this Vault makes repeatedly from the other direction — see the bedroom coder for Sinclair User reporting the same door closing in 1985, four years earlier.

Aviator, and who wrote it

The catalogue below lists Aviator without an author. It was Geoff Crammond — later of Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix — and it was his first real simulator. He told Retro Gamer:

I bought one of the first BBC Micros. Months earlier I had an idea about writing some sort of flight simulator in 3D just for my own enjoyment… I developed Aviator expecting it to be published by Acornsoft rather than just doing it as a hobby — in the end it took me a year to complete. It was my first experience of writing real-time simulator code, and I also had to learn about the principles of flight.

Two things worth drawing out. He wrote it speculatively, expecting Acornsoft to take it — the label was a credible destination for an unsolicited year of work, which is what a first-party publisher on a minority platform could be. And the man who spent the next fifteen years defining the racing simulator learned real-time simulation on a BBC Micro, for Acorn’s own label.

⚠ Crammond had already been published before Aviator: he took an earlier game to a publisher who released it as Super Invaders.

The rest of the catalogue

Acornsoft’s other output is first-party work in the ordinary sense: arcade conversions and originals commissioned to give the machine a library. ACE singles out Planetoid as “the definitive Defender” — high praise for a clone, and a fair indication that Acorn’s own label was competent well beyond Elite.

⚠ Coverage note. This library’s contemporary Acorn holdings are thin — Acorn User, Acorn Programs, Micro User and Electron User — so first-run reviews of much of the Acornsoft catalogue are not available here. Retrospective coverage is now much better: Retro Gamer runs an “Acorn Archives” strand and carries interviews with the people involved. Treat the 1980s reviewing record as partial and the later reconstruction as reasonably solid.

The label that published Elite