25 Years ago the game Elite was released (Wikipedia lists it as on the 20th, but David Braben is saying it was the 23rd, so I'm either 3 days late, or exactly on time).
Elite was a truly fantastic game, with a manual and novella which drew you into a rounded galaxy which made sense to my teenage brain. The freedom of the game was truly amazing, and the stories in the manual made the game seem even larger than it was (Space Dredgers and Generation Ships, how many times in the school playground were conversations held by people claiming to have seen them, even though now we know they weren't present in the game at all).
I loved the game then, and still love it now (I'm "Dangerous" in my copy of Oolite, but haven't received the first mission yet). I even started to write a Javascript, browser based, point and click version of the game earlier this year, and if I'd know that the anniversary was coming up, I'd probably have finished it (I only implemented the control systems, range of ships and the first 255 planets in the first galaxy. You could fly around, dock with space stations, but there wasn't anyone else around, and you couldn't trade or modify your ship, so I was still a fair way from finishing it.).
We've done Elite stats before, so had to think about what we were going to do for this anniversary, so I've added today Whatt and Pritney Python Freighter, Zorgon Petterson Group Asp Mark II, Thargoid Invasion Ship to the Star Wars D/6 Starships Section of the Site. These vessels I chose, firstly because the Thargoids are the big bad's of the Elite universe, so doing their ship seemed sensible, the Asp was supposed to be the Human combat ship so also seemed a sensible choice, and finally the Python I always thought of as one of the most gorgeous vessels in the game, the way it moved was both graceful and gave an impression of size.
Anyway, that's my addition to the site for this week, I think I might start looking at actually completing my Elite clone, or then again, maybe not. . .
