Elite, BBC Micro

The classic Elite originated on the BBC Micro. David Braben and Ian Bell‘s classic space combat/trading game was first released by Acornsoft in 1984.

It allowed 3D space travel between stars, planets – and even galaxies – at a very early stage in video gaming history, and is remembered as one of the grand forefathers of the space combat genre.

The basic aim of Elite is to earn money by completing missions (piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting or asteroid mining), and to complete missions you need to stay alive. Which isn’t easy. You have Thargoid aliens on your heels; the police always watching; and pirates wanting to steal your goods. Keeping them all at bay takes patience and skill.

A number of different versions of BBC Elite were released including an enhanced 128K disk version by Superior Software, which took advantage of any extra memory or processing power, and with coloured 3D graphics. I’m showing grabs of both the original version and the enhanced version here.

Different versions of Elite on The King of Grabs:
BBC Micro (original version), Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, PC MS-DOS, NES, and Archimedes.