Retro Nostalgia Review: Elite for the Commodore 64
No joke–Elite is probably my most favorite game (retro) of my childhood-if it isn’t my favorite, then it is among my favorites. I can’t tell you how many hours I put into the game and how much I’ve learned from the game based on playing it. Now, there’s a game out right now, called Elite Dangerous for modern PCs and consoles that is the “spiritual successor” to Elite, but don’t be fooled. This isn’t the Elite I’m referring to–no, no, I’m actually referring to the one, the only, and the original game published in the 1980s.
It was so popular and well known that there is an entire wiki-site dedicated to it on C64: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Elite.
This gameplay video gives a pretty good representation of what the game is like and how it plays:
From: YouTube
Space Trading
Basically, you created a pilot and took control of a star ship that was docked at a space station. While I remember a “pack-in” novellette for the game, I can’t remember exactly what the story was about, although I think it set-up what would be called today as the game’s “lore” and “world-building.” This is one of the those games that I was able to buy because I “bent” the rules and was able to successfully demonstrate the educational value of the title. And it was actually educational–I learned how the “stock market” and “futures market” worked from the trading part of this simulation.
While you could engage in combat, either as a pirate or a mercenary, right from the game’s opening moments, this was actually the harder way to play as your beginning ship had minimal weapons, shields, and almost no accessories. While you might luck up and find a juicy and slow freighter, it was far more likely that you’d find some relatively good AI ship with decent armaments and would be space debris minutes after setting out on your vigilante (or criminal) career. Far safer was the option to trade and slowly build up your credit balance in order to afford new shields and weapons and to buy handy-dandy accessories like a fuel ram scoop (for harvesting fuel from suns) or a docking computer (docking in Elite was no joke and not for the faint of heart–get it wrong, and well, space debris).
Each station, however, listed a price for certain goods. These prices fluctuated depending on the station and the goods. Just like in real life, you were always looking to buy low and sell high. When done right, you could make a “killing” just by having bought large quantities of a product at a low price in one station and selling it for a substantial markup in another (side note: this is what most retailers do when they get products from their wholesalers/distributors. I don’t know what the mark-up is for every product, but for books and magazines, there’s about a 50% mark up in price–that’s where stores make their profit). And I learned about the concept of mark-up (& buy low/sell high), not from an econ. textbook, but from this game.
Space Combat
Okay, so now that you’ve got some money (& ship upgrades) under your belt, space combat actually begins to be feasible in the game. As mentioned before, you have two main paths open: hunt bounty targets and destroy them for their bounties (while scooping up any floating cargo now that they’re space debris) or go full pirate and destroy any ship that gets into your crosshairs–which will bring the game’s version of the police down on your head.
This is a “space sim,” meaning that inertia is a thing and the ship behaves like a real ship in space would. There are dogfights, but they are more along the lines of Battlestar Galactica (new) or The Expanse rather than Star Wars. At least that’s the way I remember them. Spoilers for a very old game, but there were even a “race” of evil aliens that would attack periodically and swarm you–you basically had to have the very best weapons and shields in the game to withstand them.
You could even go to other universes, although this took a lot of money and I was only able to do this once because the grind was insane.
“Open World” Game — Before the Modern Concept of Open World
I recently discovered that there were many more “universes” programmed into the game. The Universes were modeled on our galaxy and had a ton of systems, stars and stations to explore. However, there was no real visual variety–outside of the ships, which all had names of snacks for some reason–there wasn’t much of a distinction between one system or another, or even one universe or another, outside of the different names.
Still, this level of fidelity and openness was impressive at a time when consoles still couldn’t manage a one-to-one parity with their more glamorous arcade brethren. However, the ability to point your ship in a direction and fly there/hyperspace there was incredible and gave the game and the world and openness to it that I’d never really seen before.
To say I put hundreds of hours into this game would be accurate. Unlike Starflight, which had many of the same ideas and gameplay elements (although if I remember, combat was more along the lines of Star Trek, but I could be misremembering as I did not play it much), this game really captured my imagination and I pretended that I was a starship captain and even though I have played and own Elite Dangerous, nothing has ever come as close to fulfilling my desire of being my own starship captain as much as Elite has (Star Citizen has the potential whenever it is “officially” finished and released, but right now it is really only a “promise”). Elite is easily in my Top 10 games of all time and I think it was an absolute masterpiece and I’m glad I got to play it (it was a British import to America, after all).
Sidney
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