Released in 1984, the space trading and exploration game Elite created a new genre while selling hundreds of thousands of copies. The work of British programmers David Braben and Ian Bell, its use of clever coding techniques to suggest a vast and deep universe of worlds to visit was revolutionary—even when it was warning that "this planet is a tedious place" en route to Zaonce. At Scanline Artifacts, Sasha McAuliffe posted a 40-year retrospective that touches on other unusual lore-building devised to build an open-world classic and its unique mystique.
Not only did you get the game, but you also received a ship recognition chart and three manuals, one of them a novella, The Dark Wheel, penned by Robert Holstock. … The Dark Wheel is a wonderful worldbuilding fluff book, evoking images in your head of this distant future galaxy to fill in the gaps where primitive wireframe graphics fall short. One detail of this iteration of the Elite universe that would be retconned by the time of the sequel, Frontier: Elite II, is that space traders are not commonly allowed on other worlds and are restricted to the orbital stations. Why? Because they're living worlds in their own right, not tourist attractions to be gawked at. It also neatly provides a lore reason for why you can't actually land on planets in Elite. This coupled with the sheer effort of managing multi-vector, three-dimensional space traffic and the perilous nature of hyperspace travel lends spaceflight in the original Elite 'verse an exotic, almost mystical flavour. None of this actually comes through in the game itself, you simply push the hyperspace jump key, but it's appreciated all the same for that flavour.
I recently played its modern sequel, Elite: Dangerous, though it's a cold hard game and No Man's Sky is a much cuddlier proc-gen space-em-up. There was something magical about the transmedia marketing trickery used to elaborate upon the extreme restrictions of 8-bit games in the early 80s. Typical Xennial that I am, I feel like I just missed out on it.
Here's a six-minute promo video for Elite. That voiceover!
