Elite

I found out about Elite in late 1987 when I went to England and saw people playing that on Acorn machines. First reaction: "this looks like Starflight except you can't land". Starflight came to the Isle a couple years later... mostly pirated.

Elite was already an Old World classic by 1987. If you were an American, as I was (effectively), you found out about Elite about when I did. The sequels (Frontier) and... whatever Dangerous is, were more international in reach. But of course they are not the same.

Unlike for Starflight there exist Elite remakes. The first was Christian Pinder's 1999 "The New Kind"; an illegal reverse-engineer of the code to C. The original developers disagreed on whether to permit this piracy: David Braben disapproved, Ian Bell approved. Braben won and got TNK yanked off the Internet. Then came "Oolite", for the Mac at first, but done in object-oriented language (which C is not) as would compile for PC also. Somehow Braben was convinced not to block this version. "The New Kind" meanwhile has resurfaced, freeware as of the "30 year anniversary".

This blog cannot advise which to pick up; I never played any of these. I lean to "Oolite" on account, if you really want the TNK experience, there's probably a mod for it. Called "ODX" in their jargon.

BACKDATE 4/23