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MSX Elite

ay 13, 2024 We hope you die a horribly long lingering death at the hands of a slimey green lobstoid if you’re not blown to bits by our sun The above text is from the game Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell, more precisely from the MSX disk version of the game. Elite was originally an 8 bit wireframe 3D-game, the earliest predecessor of Elite:Dangerous, a game I also enjoyed, but that is for another time.

Anyone who has played Elite:Dangerous will instantly recognise the scanner in the middle of the console below the window, indicating the position of each ship, relative to the player’s. Elite was originally created for the BBC Micro, but subsequently ported to several platforms, such as Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Apple II and 16 bit machines such as the Atari ST, Amiga, and PC. The mechanism which allowed these limited platforms to consistently contain data about eight times 200 solar systems, each with a name, a position within its galaxy, an economy type, a tech level and other attributes, is called procedural generation.

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