Elite - 30th Anniversary
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ก.ย. 2014
- In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of Elite I have a go at the original version on an emulated BBC Model B and discuss some of the underlying technology designed with a mind to fitting the game into the 32k of memory.
- เกม
Normal sequels:
Some new things.
Upgraded graphics
Other goodies
Elite’s sequel:
HOLY SHIT
Both.
It's like a dropped pebble creating a tsunami.
Casually drops the whole damn galaxy into a game
I work at the national museum of computing here in England and I must say among all the classic games people might try to imagine this is the one that makes grown men suddenly turn into teenagers again and reminisce.
Quite often people sit down at the BBC's and other people come over and they chat and give advice about this thirty year old game as if it was a modern game. It really is so impressive to me to see what effect it has on people.
I am so old :(
I'm too young to know started on elite dangerous but it is amazing to me that the original came out in 1984 ten years before my birth I've been playing elite dangerous since 2016 when I discovered it
Yes, I have fond memories of this masterpiece, Also: Ikari Warriors, 1942, and R-type. 😁
:) The first PC game I ever played, on an army buddies rig in the late '80s... It was an easier time.
extremely impressed with what they managed 30 years ago :o
Made 36 years ago...
Still looks fun today.
They did this with just 22kb of memory. It's astounding.
I first came across this in June 1988 when I was 12 during a school activities week. It blew my mind. We got an Amiga A500+ in Christmas 1991. I saw Elite and got it in April 1992 and have been playing it since. I got an Amiga A600 in April 1994. I was impressed they used the Fibonacci series to generate the planets, very clever. Good use of maths. I help run a Code Club and thrilled my kids like programming. Use my Raspberry Pi to run my business. I understand David Braben was one of the supporters of the Pi. Elite really got me into all this.
We had this on the BBC B when I was very young. The first time I saw it my jaw dropped. I was like nothing I'd ever seen. To think now it was all running in 32K! For me this is the greatest game of all time...
Oh the memories that comes with this game. So many hours just spent flying around space, ferrying cargo, shooting pirates and all but one time crashing as I was trying to do dock with a station.
You really did get the bang for your buck with this game.
Ah, one person flying, one on the keyboard and selecting music on the stereo (Hawkwind, Ozric Tentacles, Oroonies , The Orb to name e few soundtracks to our adventures)and one person making pots of tea and rolling joints. Loved this game.
I have a feeling that processing the sound of Scott Manley's voice would take more power than the original Elite.
lol probably
***** you sure? his picture is only 20KB, full size
If I remember correctly, just the *screen* that Elite used on the BBC Micro used 10kB of RAM, leaving 22kB. And the BBC OS occupied another 4kB, leaving a grand total of 18kB for both the code and game workspace.
(Plus, they also developed an awesome trick to change screen modes half-way down the screen, which is why the top is high-res B&W and the bottom is low-res. The psychedelic colours during hyperspace was done by replaying the launch animation, but with this system turned off, so you got to see the B&W framebuffer in colour.)
I had this on my Commador 64, then on the Omega. I loved it and couldn't wait till school was over so I would rush home and play this for hours. Thanks for bringing back memories of an unbelievably wonderful childhood.
A great little look back into a game that inspired so many of us as kids. Nice job, Scott, and happy 30th to Elite :D
Thanks for this Scott. I was lucky enough to play test this all those years ago. I worked at a computer company back in the day right next door to the Acorn North West HQ. They gave us the game to test as we had all the various devices the BBC could have attached.
We could get the ship to do a full stop with the Bit Stick and found that it would run no matter what you had attached.
Great game, great times!
P.S. Gratz on the Anniversary!
You are forever popping up with Videos of things I'm interested in and have been for years and years now. Keep creating!
Thanks for the flashback, and making me feel old! I played a lot of Elite on the Commodore 64 when I was a kid too. Really loving your reviews of the Elite Dangerous development. it has the stuff we loved about the original game with all the beautiful updates that technology adds today. Happy Anniversary to you as well!
The Acorn Archimedes version was also considered as one of the best ports. I can confirm this as I spent ages on it!
FYI you made 490 credits trading profit on your booze cruise and checking the prices, booze was the best option (along with slaves, also 14 credit profit/tonne). You could have also made a little bit extra on the precious metals and gemstones tho :) The big question though is don't I have anything better to do?
Happy anniversary to you, and to elite! Thanks for sharing.
Happy Anniversary, Scott! Also happy wedding anniversary!
"Our sun is going nova! Will you save us?"
Happy anniversary! Love your content
Glorious.
Always great to look at the Beeb version - especially after putting way too much time into a series on the C64 one (and boy, did I have a lot of fun hunting down that blasted Constrictor).
Would love to see your take on that mission sometime :)
Happy Anniversary Scott!!
Happy Anniversary, Scott!
Elite was/is just mind blowing.. It will be looked back on in 200, 300+ years in the same way we admire old works of art and literature now.
Happy anniversary, Scott! Have fun with your vacation!
Shouldn't you have said "Have fun with your wife." ?
Happy Anniversary, Scott.
Great Vid !! Oh the Nostalgia. I first played this on my friends BBC then got it when it came out on my c64 (also played on friends spectrum), then elite plus - pc,still playing it ( on my pc last few years Elite TNK), now Elite Dangerous.
Without Elite, computer gaming would not be what it is today. The innovation & new way of thinking about how games could be played, a hell of a lot is owed to this game & the ppl who made it. So Many ppl will never realise just how much !!
Happy Wedding Anniversary, Scott!
Happy Anniversary! Have a nice holiday
Your almost at 1 mill my guy, congrats. Your subs say 999k for me rn
Interesting factoid: all the objects in the original elite were so-called "convex objects"--in other words, they were designed in such a way that the lines making up the edges were either entirely visible or entirely hidden, so the game engine only had to check the endpoints of the line to decide if it should draw it or not. Didn't work if two ships overlapped each other, but that was a rare enough occurrence they could get away with it!
Love this vid, just hunted it down so I could add it to my playlist on my new channel for others to find.
WoW this video brings back soooo many good memories of playing this wayyy back in the day. sighhhhh
Congrats on your anniversary by the way!
The nostalgia! I played this when I was around 10 on the ZX Spectrum 48k
Congrats to you and Mrs. Manley!
Awesome ... thank you ..... and now we actually sit in the cockpit in VR. I've died and gone to heaven !!
BBC Micro was my first PC, nostalgia attack.
Happy Anniversary!
I could run Elite on my Arduino...
This is some potential.
Happy annaversary to you and Elite.
For some reason, I never got my hands on Elite back in the day. But the one that was inspirational to me, and got me started similarly to what you described, was Starflight.
I remember this game...and at the time I found the graphics awesome...lol
Because of this game i went later to wing commander...and sequals
Now i am in elite dangerous
+razorlord2 I played WC and more than that, Privateer! ;)
Thanks for this, Scott. Unfortunately, I never got to experience the original!
I had the NES version. I had a special technique to deal with the Thargoids(?) the aliens. Fly in close proximity, release a missile before they can EMP. I used to do bounty hunting with a bit of commerce on the side. The initial part before you buy a better laser is a chore but then the reward is great.
What a jewel of a game.
David Braben and Ian Bell were the developers if I remember correctly. I bought it as soon as it came out on the Electron. It was damn hard to get hold of. I never made it to Elite (deadly or dangerous I think)but it was incredible at the time 👏👏👏
I had the Spectrum version back in 1985. I'm not surprised they there were so many pirates. The world you hyperspaced to was Multi-Government which was one above Feudal. With that amount of money you could've bought military lasers which were the best which you need for that mission. The Archimedes is supposed to be the best version. As soon as a I find a working emaultor, I'm gonna try that version of Elite on it.
I played this in High School, it was so fun
Loved it! Thanks for that. Playing Elite Dangerous Beta now. It's really going to be a great game. It's got the complete *feel* of Elite.
Mr Manley, thanks for sharing this!
I "missed" Elite, but I had Frontier: Elite II...
.. and I'd not been paying attention, so I managed to miss E:D launch!
Looking into HOTAS at the mo, and planning to pick up E:D before Horizons launches!
Cheers, sir. :)
Loved this game. You only have a front laser...gotta get them all around 😂 Nice vid.
I remember playing this on a Spectrum. I also played the BBC version at work good days.
Right on commander Manley and congratulations. Happy birthday Elite! Sadly no Dragon 32 version (yet) though!
Happy anniversary Scoot :3
My high school years were awesome playing Elite!
i just love this
Right on Commander !!!
I played this on the Amstrad cpc464..i was playing this at home while my friends were playing defender at the arcades...thanks for the flash back...
As a kid, I put years worth of time into this game.
P.S. Happy Wedding Anniversary!
P.P.S. Your wedding anniversary is on George RR Martin's birthday... well done.
Scott Manley Happy anaversarry to you and to your wife, have a nice one. :)
It cannot be overstated how much this game changed so many people's perspective on what computers were for and could do. Braben and Bell should have been knighted (different times of course). The efficiency of their coding was groundbreaking and has inspired so many others.
Spent many hours on a Beeb B playing this when A level revision should have taken a higher priority... Only reached Deadly status before cars, beer and women became more appealing.
Loved this game back in the 80's, I remember it was always hard to get the game started though.
This brings back some memories. I played this constanty as a kid. The trick is to mount a rear facing weapon and run away ;)
Interesting to see how far we've come in just 30 years
this is brilliant!
Aaahhh I lost a whole summer holidays playing the original elite on a bbc micro. The joys of hidden line 3d + tape loading and saving.....gosh I'm old 8O
Oddly enough, an old game I was most fond of on old computers was "The Halley Project" but it came in 1986 I think. I didnt play elite itself, but played another game which I cannot find the name anymore (tought it was starflight, but isn't). Now that I think about it, the oldest game I remember playing at a really young age was "Sea Dragon" on my father's TRS80.
At any rate, happy b-day Elite! and thank you Scott for visiting old stuff for us. I love LP's/Demo's of these old games you do every now and then.
...Starship Command... where the disposition of the 'bosses' was proportional to the progress, ahem and demise, of your last ship... suitably level-headed, you might be granted control of a replacement ship.... the lingo conveyed feedback as to whether the boot was proximal, good ol' days they was!
@@RexRioch And I digged that other game name as well.. It was "Omnitrend Universe" - complex as eff but it had a awesome setting. Wow 7 years ago... Time flies.
Fond memories of playing the Amiga port of this, though it's weird seeing it with just the wire-frame models and the minimalist graphical inputs. I remember how stern and angry all the people on the system information screens looked to my much younfer self :D
Classic Elite. Sweet sweet memories.
We had a bunch of BBC model B's in our maths classroom at school. First computer I ever used.
Loved playing this on my Micro.
Younger guys will laugh at the graphics but back then they were state of the art and the game play was addictive.
2 main games stand out in my memory this and prince of Persia.
Just bought the new elite dangerous and only playing solo mode currently but love it.
Its amazing to think how far computers have come :) This is a little before my time but I remember in the Early 90`s using an old Spectrum, then an Amiga 900 then Sega Megadrive, then onto the first Playstation.......
Could use some anti-aliasing XD
I played many hours of this on my Tandy back in the day.
I can't believe you love Elite so much you got married on Sept 20th!
Mother of God... who wishes games were still like this it looks so good!
I remember loading Elite on my Commodore 64 from cassette tape ... well worth the 20 minute wait!
Best English accent EU
He is scotlan
cheatmongul
He did an English accent during the video...
JMan Pepper oh my bad i guess i didn't notice.
cheatmongul
Admitting your mistake on youtube :O You sir are a rare breed
JMan Pepper People have a nasty habit of reading comments before watching the video, it leads to all sorts of misunderstandings.
I played the archemides version way too much... great memories, commander.
Love it
I love how this is like 99.99% the same as Elite - Dangerous lol
No, Elite Dangerous is the same as this. :)
You must be kidding me. :\
@@jackfraser1807 play the original :)
Im gaming in E3
I came here from palying X-Beyond the Frontier which was considered a modern successor of Elite in its time... really awesome :D
Never played the NES version, but surely Archimedes version is by far regarded as the best. Though NES perhaps the best 8 bit version (Archimedes being 32 bit). The original BBC B disc version is the most memorable though, given I played it so much.
I played it on the Amiga I believe.
This game was the reason I bought a disk drive for my BBC B. And worth every penny!
The Amiga version would have been 32-bit as well. AmigaOS was a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS from day one.
Bitness is complicated, but the 68000 is a 16/32bit processor and in the peak gaming days the Amiga was talked about as 16bit though had 32bit registers, 16bit data bus and 24bit address bus. Was designed so you could write pure 32bit code so 32bit instructions and addressing and it would sort it out under the hood, but at a performance cost. As I understand it a lot of games were highly optimised to only need 16bit architecture and in particular aimed at the 24bit address bus.
Similar thing with the Archimedes. The ARM2 & ARM3 were 32bit RISC processors but again 24bit address bus. Games were written for this, which is why a lot of old games don't run on modern ARM chips, such as in the Raspberry Pi even though it can run RISC OS. At least not without the author recompiling it to pure 32bit.
Regardless though, the Archimedes Elite was a unique version that simply looked gorgeous and it played so well.
Tim Moore Only the Amiga 1000, 500, and 2000 used a 68000. The 1200 was an '020, the 3000 was an '030, and the 4000 was an '030 or '040
. Any of the 68000 Amigas could take an accelerator card and run pure 32-bit.
I can't believe how well this exact formula from 30 years ago still works today simply with prettier graphics. Amazing.
Chess are still working to...after few thousand of years :)
Good point. But you don't often see this with video games, due to how limited the tech was back then. Normally when a 10-20yo game gets revived it has changed significantly, for the better. Look at Fallout for example. This has managed to stay exactly the same *thirty* years later and still be incredible.
I remember playing this both on the commodore 64 and on the nes. This game would eat hours of your life at a time!! lol
COOL! yeah forget the wedding anniversary! lol............. we were addicted to this in '88-89 and I was often late for work as a result.
Funny to see the similarities between elite: dangerous, which I've been playing for the past 2 years, and the og elite. That game was WAY ahead of its time, I'm not sure how any computer could run it
People complain about Elite: Dangerous for this reason or that, but at the end of the day, it's basically an adaptation of the original Elite, and that's all it needs to be tbh. It's gorgeous and has expanded gameplay basically directly influenced from the original game. Mastapiece 👌
I was six when this came out, it was the first game I ever played and the reason why I am who I am today (massive gamer geek and aspiring scifi author)! I remember playing an even more basic version than this one on my acorn electron, no fancy colours or messages when you docked, seriously simple! Also the tape deck wouldn't save the game (no disk drive available) so I had to leave the little machine on for ever. I got to dangerous when a power cut turned it off. I cried!
9:23 it's not ASP Explorer, it's ASP MK2! You can clearly tell from the lack of back stabilisers.
Holy shit this is really good :O
Damn, colour me impressed. If they put this game out on steam tomorrow under a different name I might have bought it and never thought twice
5:16: Known for lethal brandy and deadly tree ants. Sounds like a good place to raise a family...
16:27: Was the Constrictor also procedurally generated?
What an awesome old game.
Have fun on your anniversary thing!
The constrictor mission was one of the scripted events. I think they appeared randomly though.
I still play this game aswell as elite dangerous to this day
Nice vid :D
WOW that game looks awsome for its time :O
What an amazing game! Those were the days when developers had to put all their coins into FUN given the limitations of technology.
Never delete this pls :)
I had this game in the mid 80's, I had it for the Commodore 64 with a tape drive, damn it use to trake a long time to load, lol
With all seriousness the gameplay and atmosphere beats the hell out of most modern releases. I do hope that it's not just those us who grew up playing games in the 80s that feel this way.
I played elite on the zx spectrum and the update solid version on the amiga. Graphics has improved since than.
I wonder why there's no lateral movement. Would it have been actually that logistically difficult to implement?
These graphics made Starfox for SNES look good.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if some inspiration was taken from this.