Elite | Code Like It's 198x

In the autumn of 1984 Acornsoft took half a dozen journalists to Cambridge, locked them in a room with a BBC Micro and a game they were not allowed to take home. “It is still so secret that even I don’t have a copy!” wrote Tony Quinn in Acorn User. What he had played was Elite: a 3D space game in which you flew a trading ship between thousands of planets, bought low, sold high, fought pirates and slowly earned a combat rank. There was no score and no ending. Its authors, Ian Bell and David Braben, were two undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Fast facts

Authors: Ian Bell and David Braben.
Publisher: Acornsoft for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron; Firebird for most other home computers.
Launched: September 1984, at Thorpe Park.
Price at launch: £14.95 on cassette and £17.65 on disc for the BBC Micro, £12.95 for the Electron (Acornsoft’s advertisement).
The universe: eight galaxies of 256 star systems each, generated by the program instead of stored.
Ranks: nine, from “Harmless” to “Elite”.
Sequel: Frontier: Elite II (1993); the modern series continues with Elite Dangerous.

A universe in 22K

Elite puts you in the seat of a Cobra Mk III, docked at a space station above the planet Lave with 100 credits to spend. You buy a cargo, launch, and fly to another system within your seven-light-year fuel range. Food sells well on rich industrial worlds; computers sell well on poor agricultural ones. Narcotics and firearms pay better still, but trading in them brings the police. On the way there are pirates, bounty hunters and the alien Thargoids, and every kill moves your rating a little further from “Harmless”.

All of it had to fit in a 32K machine that also needed memory for its screen. Bell told Acorn Programs in December 1984, “If the BBC had more memory, we would probably still be writing it. As it is, there is not a single free byte in the program.” Braben called it the BBC’s “hideous shortage of memory”. Looking back in 2000, Bell remembered the struggle of “compressing all the data down to 22K”.

The idea started as a 3D combat game. “I wanted to follow that with a 3D simulation game and it seemed logical to set it in space,” Bell said, following his earlier Acornsoft game Freefall. “Then Braben added the trading ship scenario and things just developed from there.” Braben later explained why: flying about and shooting “felt very empty… To make it a satisfying experience we had to have some motivation. That’s where the trading game came from.”

Galaxies from a few numbers

Elite does not store its planets. Each system is described by three 16-bit numbers, six bytes in all, called seeds. The program derives the next system’s seeds from the current one with a repeated step, which Mark Moxon’s annotated edition of the source calls “twisting” and bases on the Tribonacci series (a relative of the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the three before it). Bits of each seed then become the system’s name, position on the chart, economy, government and technology level. The same seeds always give the same system, so Lave is still Lave when you come back, and each galaxy costs almost no memory.

Acornsoft’s advertisements promised “2,000 planets in eight galaxies”. The first design had many more. In 2000 Edge reported that the galaxies “originally numbered two to the power of 48”, cut to eight after Acornsoft, “not completely happy with every single design feature”, had its say. “Ridiculous numbers of galaxies,” Braben said. “I like the idea that you’re in a Douglas Adams-type universe – an insignificant dot on an insignificant dot feeling – but you don’t want too much of that sort of thing.”

Two screen modes at once

The BBC Micro version shows its space view in two colours and its dashboard in four. A BBC Micro normally shows one screen mode at a time, and the choice is set in the Video ULA’s control register (the chip that turns screen memory into pixels). Acorn’s Advanced User Guide lists the value for each mode. Mode 4 (two colours) and mode 5 (four colours, at half the horizontal resolution) use the same video clock rate, and the register value is what tells them apart: the number of characters per line and the width of each pixel.

Elite draws on a custom screen of 256 × 248 pixels based on mode 4, and changes the register while the picture is being drawn. At each vertical sync it starts a timer in the System VIA, one of the machine’s two 6522 chips, set to run out just as the television beam reaches the dashboard. The interrupt that follows switches the Video ULA from two colours per pixel to four, and the next frame begins in two colours again. The result is a sharp black-and-white space view over a coloured control panel.

Launch and the box

Acornsoft launched Elite to the press “inside Space Station Zero at Thorpe Park funfair”, Acorn Programs reported. It was the flagship of 20 Christmas titles backed by a £150,000 advertising campaign.

The package was part of the appeal. For its money the buyer got a flight training manual, a poster of the ships, and The Dark Wheel, a novella by the science fiction writer Robert Holdstock that opens with the trading ship Avalonia leaving its berth above Lave. There was also an entry card for a competition: players who reached the rank of “Competent” could send in a code from the game for a certificate and a chance of a prize. Braben later told Edge that people bought the game just to enter. “Did you buy the game?” he asked them. “‘Erm, no,’ they said, ‘but when I realised I was in with a chance I thought, right, I can do better than that’. They went out and bought the game just to get the entry card.”

The price was not settled even in the launch issue of Acorn User: Acornsoft’s advertisement asked £14.95 on cassette, £17.65 on disc and £12.95 for the Electron, while the review, written from the preview, printed £14.95, £17.95 and £14.95.

Sales

Two months after launch Acorn Programs reported 13,000 copies sold in two weeks and forecast Christmas sales “in the region of 100,000 — more than double those of any other Acornsoft game so far”. Later figures come from the authors and vary: Edge put the total at 750,000 copies in 1994, and in 2000 reported that Bell “estimates that some 600,000 copies were eventually sold”, with a first production run of 50,000. No audited total has been published. When the Gallup software chart began, ST Format recalled in 1989, Elite was its first number one.

Firebird and the other versions

Bell and Braben had given Acornsoft the rights only for Acorn’s own machines, the BBC Micro and the Electron. “They didn’t realise we were serious about it,” Braben told Edge. The rest went to British Telecom’s label Firebird, for what ZZAP!64’s first issue called, on rumour, “a six-figure sum”.

Commodore 64 (Firebird, spring 1985): converted by Bell and Braben themselves while they studied for their finals, according to ZZAP!64, which made it the Gold Medal game of its first issue in May 1985. The 64’s larger memory held the whole game at once, where the BBC cassette version had “certain features trimmed”, and the conversion added the Trumbles: “cute little furry guys” that breed in your cargo bay with “a cacophony of breeding squeaks”.
ZX Spectrum (Firebird, late 1985): converted by Torus, the team behind Gyron, and arrived “a mere three months late”, in CRASH’s words. CRASH gave it 92% and noted that it was the first major release protected by Lenslok, a plastic lens needed to read a code off the screen. Many buyers struggled with it.
Amstrad CPC (Firebird): an Amstrad Action Mastergame in February 1986.
MSX and IBM PC (Firebird): the PC version, by the Leeds company Real Time, let players choose solid-filled ships instead of wireframes.
Atari ST and Amiga: the ST version was reviewed by ACE in November 1988, and the Amiga version was on sale from Firebird at £24.95 by August 1989.
Nintendo Entertainment System (Imagineer): Total! scored it 96% and called it “probably the best space flight sim ever”.

By 2000 Edge counted 17 formats.

Reputation

When ACE chose its all-time greats in March 1991, it summed Elite up in its first clause: “Probably responsible for selling many BBCs”. It called the game “the archetypical space fighting-and-trading game which has been much imitated but (many would argue) never surpassed”. Braben told Edge in 2000 that people still stopped him to say they had failed their exams because of it, “but more say, ‘I got into the industry because of you’”.

From Frontier to Elite Dangerous

The 1984 game began a series which kept asking what it would mean to live in space. Frontier: Elite II (1993) took that idea onto the Amiga, Atari ST and PC with solid ships, a model of the Milky Way, planetary landings and a much stronger commitment to Newtonian flight. Direction and velocity became separate concerns: turning the ship did not instantly turn its journey. Trading remained, alongside passenger work, contracts and the chance to replace the ship itself.

Frontier: First Encounters (1995) added a stronger authored story to that open working life. Its in-game journals offered competing editorial perspectives on events. Manda Scott and Braben received the story credit, with a wider group writing its news and fiction. The troubled release is part of the history too: Braben later described the release as botched, rather than presenting the game’s ambitions as proof of a successful result.

Elite Dangerous arrived on 16 December 2014, backed through crowdfunding and published by Frontier Developments. Its shared Milky Way made another commander potentially another person. Solo and private-group play offered other ways to participate in that universe; Solo did not mean an offline galaxy. Horizons began adding planetary landings in 2015, and Odyssey added on-foot exploration and missions on PC in 2021.

This was not one uninterrupted march towards greater realism. Frontier’s flight, Dangerous’s Flight Assist and supercruise, and the move from a saved solo career to a shared galaxy each made different demands on the player. Even the old risk of running out of fuel acquired another possibility: player groups such as the Fuel Rats organised to rescue stranded commanders.

The whole-game study follows these changes across the decades, while the separate Dangerous and studio entries cover their subjects in more detail.

Sources

Acorn User issue 27, October 1984: Acornsoft advertisement (contents of the package, 2,000 planets in eight galaxies, nine ranks, the “Competent” competition, prices); Tony Quinn, “Star status”, review, pp. 164–165 (the locked-room preview, prices as printed, “the launch this month”).
Acorn Programs, November 1984, news pages: the Thorpe Park launch, 20 titles and the £150,000 campaign.
Nicole Segre, “Limitless horizons for the Elite team”, Acorn Programs, December 1984: Jesus College, Freefall, the origin of the game, the memory quotes, 13,000 copies in two weeks and the Christmas forecast, the opening of The Dark Wheel.
ZZAP!64 issue 1, May 1985, pp. 14–17: C64 review (Firebird, £14.95), 100 credits, the seven-light-year range, Trumbles, the Dark Wheel credit, the conversion by Bell and Braben and the Firebird rights.
Sinclair User issue 44, November 1985: Spectrum review, The Dark Wheel “by Robert Holdstock, a noted science fiction writer”.
CRASH issue 22, November 1985, pp. 28–30: Spectrum review (Firebird, conversion by Torus, Lenslok, 92%).
Amstrad Action issue 5, February 1986: Mastergame.
ACE issue 2, November 1987: preview of the PC version by Real Time.
Zzap! (Italy) issue 24, June 1988, review index: Elite, Firebird, MSX, PC and C64.
ACE issue 14, November 1988, p. 52: Atari ST review.
Amiga Format issue 1, August 1989: Amiga version, Firebird, £24.95.
ST Format issue 3, October 1989: the first Gallup chart.
ACE issue 42, March 1991: all-time greats.
Total! 1993 special, buyer’s guide: NES version (Imagineer, 96%, first reviewed in issue 11).
Edge issue 5, February 1994: interview with David Braben (750,000 copies).
“The making of Elite”, Edge issue 88, September 2000, pp. 152–155: 22K, the empty combat game, 2⁴⁸ galaxies, the rights, the competition, 600,000 copies and the 50,000 first run, 17 formats.
Acorn Computers, BBC Microcomputer Advanced User Guide, chapter 19, “The video ULA”: the video control register and its values for each mode.
Ian Bell and David Braben, original BBC Micro cassette Elite text sources, ELITED, BASIC lines 1460–1470 and 4392: the 256-system chart loop and eight-galaxy cycle. Source archive mirrored by Mark Moxon: https://github.com/markmoxon/elite-source-code-bbc-micro-cassette/blob/6ba1c7f633926501e687d9f1acfe76606e9467d7/1-source-files/original-sources/text-sources/ELITED.txt
Mark Moxon, Elite on the 6502, annotated source of BBC Micro Elite (web, secondary): “The split-screen mode in BBC Micro Elite” (custom screen, System VIA timer, Video ULA switch) and “Galaxy and system seeds” (three 16-bit seeds, twisting, the Tribonacci series). https://elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/
Frontier: Elite II, original ship manual, French edition (GameTek, 1993): navigation, planetary travel, careers and David Braben’s technical-flight appendix, printed pp. 91–93. Preserved scan.
Frontier: First Encounters manual (1995), pp. 10–11 and 126, in Franke Scheper’s February 2000 Word/WWW adaptation: journals and credited story/writing contributors. Preserved reproduction.
David Braben, Frontier Elite FAQ, archived 12 March 2002: retrospective account of the First Encounters release. Author-site archive.
Frontier Developments plc, RNS 9578Z, 16 December 2014: original Dangerous release, crowdfunding and self-publication. Company statement.
Frontier Developments, Elite Dangerous Players Guide, V2.40, printed pp. 16–17 and 46–47: Horizons year, play modes, Flight Assist; travel sections distinguish supercruise/hyperspace. Publisher manual.
Frontier Developments, official Odyssey Steam page: 19 May 2021 PC release and on-foot activities. The Fuel Rats’ participant history: player-organised refuelling and rescue.