I always thought this Blog would be about my two joint passions, Video games and Space geekery, but there has been little in the way of games that I’ve been motivated to write about. Just occasionally, however, something happens that reminds me of how cool the games biz is and inspires me to write about it. I’ve been at the Develop Conference in Brighton this week, and I was looking forward to seeing a session with David Braben and Dave Jones comparing their two most famous titles, Elite and GTA1 respectively. I’ve played GTA1 many times, and I appreciate it’s place in history, but Elite is the whole reason I am in the in the games industry and making games today. I was not quite prepared for just how damm emotional it was seeing it running on a BBC 32k again (well an emu, but it felt the same).
He was asked during the Q&A if we would ever see Elite again, to which he just replied ‘Yes’. Of course that’s nothing new, we’ve known for years that Elite is supposed to be in active development, but he simply won’t be drawn on any details. My first thought was that i hope he uses Eve as a graphic reference, but beats Eve into a bloody mess by putting some real ship control and combat in there, rather than eve’s lame point and click navigation and warfare. My second thought which was much sadder was that whatever he does, it’s never going to meet our expectations.
One thing that did freak me out a little was when he mentioned something that addressed a deep sense of inadequacy I’ve carried since being a child. Even friends who only dabbled with Elite were able to stumble across one or more of the mythical missions, however I never did. Despite achieving a rank of dangerous, I never had so much as a suggestion of a mission. How could I ever pretend to be worthy of my commander rank? Of course, it was obvious. I was playing on an Acorn Electron, and the missions were the bit that was chopped to shoehorn the game into the reduced memory space. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to hear that!
I’d also forgotten how painful it must of been to play, it took 20 mins to load it in by tape! This, according to Braben, allowed for a degree of forgiveness by the players for the very steep learning curve. It may have been hard to play if you were new to it, but after waiting 20mins for it to load, you’d at least give it a few mins of playing to see if you could master it. I’m sure that’s a trick being used on some PS3 games today 
