Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Old-school RPGs? Please. That Kickstarter trend is so a few seconds ago. Now it’s all about mind-bogglingly ambitious revivals of legendary space series that need your help in the form of several trillion dollars. OK, maybe not that much, but Star Citizen came in space, no one can hear you screaming into existence asking for $2 million, and now David Braben is trying to resurrect Elite (again) for the low, low collective price of £1,250,000 – which is basically $2 million.

That’s right – Elite is back at long, long last, in the form of Elite: Dangerous. Are you ready to remember how much rage and sorrow could be extracted from the mere process of docking? I know I am.
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I think I’ve found serenity: Minecraft creator Notch is slowly thumbing through the Big Book Of Awesome Space Things while he comes up with his next game. He told the handsome devils over at PC Gamer that he’s pondering a sandbox style Elite game, “except done right”. To clarify, he’s not saying Elite is rubbish and broken, but that no-one’s ever done it as well since. Something I’d agree with, although these guys are working on that. While he’s pondering if this is a game he wants to be the Next Thing after the monolithic Minecraft, he’s pointed out his other influence is the magnificent Firefly. How would this work?
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…if you’re reading this in Honolulu and within 35 minutes of me publishing this. Otherwise, it was released 25 years ago yesterday. On the 20th September of 1984 David Braben and Ian Bell’s Elite shocked an shy world of 8-bit videogame heads. Really, it doesn’t get more seminal than this. Frontier Development have celebrated by making a micro-site featuring assorted Elite memorabilia plus a forthcoming interview with Braben on the 23rd (Via twittering them questions). Go See! I suspect one of RPS may weaken and do a retro piece before the week’s out. But until then, here’s something that’s testament to Elite’s majesty. Ian’s Brother Aidan (with lyricist Brian Phillips) wrote a musical about it. And this is its finest number…
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Kieron and I have been expanding our minds and destroying our livers at the annual Develop conference in Brighton, Blighty for the last couple of the days. One of the highlights of the show so far has been David Braben, he of Elite fame, and Dave Jones, he of APB and GTA1 fame and their ‘designer mash-up.’ The concept – they play each other’s most iconic game, and provide retrospective commentary about their time making these two goliaths of gaming history. Some ramblomatic highlights below…
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According to reports leaking out of the GameCity event in Nottingham, UK, David Braben is still working on Elite IV. The game showed up on a slide during his presentation, with the nomenclature “PC, PS3, Xbox 360″ next to it. That suggests that the fourth freeform space epic might not be too far off.

It’s not the first time this has come up, of course, as it was first mooted back in 2000, when Braben apparently dabbled with the idea of Elite being an MMO, but shelved the notion due to fear of MMO technological immaturities. Then there was some minor Elite IV rumblings in 2006 during Braben’s first press outings for The Outsider which, damnably, is not coming out on PC. Apparently Braben’s team will be able to use what they’ve learned from the proposed 2009 release of The Outsider in the development of a fourth Elite game. Funny that, when most development teams still haven’t learned from what Elite did in 1984.

And it’s just occurred to me that most of our American readers won’t have a clue who David Braben is, or why we’re excited about Elite… will they? Hmm. Not much we can do to fix that, other than perhaps link to the OpenGL version of Frontier and say that Elite started many of us on the long road towards being the boring old nerds we are today.