Today is 25 years of David Braben and Ian Bell’s Elite video game.  This isn’t really systems or synthetic biology, but back in 1984 it was the inspiration of Cambridge students David Braben and Ian Bell that captured the imagination of a generation who spent the next 25 years carving a name for themselves in the Elite universe.  Published by AcornSoft in September 1984, Elite has long been considered one of the best video games of all time and inspired the whole “space trading” gaming genre with games such as Eve online, Freelancer, and the X series continuing the tradition.  Elite was the first video game to create an “open universe” for players to explore and follow their own path as they chose, creating the concept of “sandbox” gaming popularized by the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind decades later.  Long before the “RPG” scene emerged from dungeons and dragons with class based character development Elite enabled players to choose their own path as explorer, trader, pirate, bounty hunter, mercenary pilot, or all of the above literally doing as they pleased within a dynamic universe.  Players could upgrade their ships to haul more cargo across the galaxy or more effectively vaporize the competition on their quest for “Elite” combat status.  Explorers could roam over 2000 worlds across 8 galaxies, while budding entrepreneurs could chose to find lucrative trade lanes between planets trading between industrial and agricultural economies slowly making their fortune.  Meanwhile more nefarious players could become bandits and pirates, stalking rich systems for cargo laden traders, living as a fugitive from deadly Viper police patrols, seeking refuge in anarchic systems dealing in contraband narcotics and slaves.  Whatever your persuasion, Elite had a corner of the galaxy for you.

Many of the aspects of Elite sound routine in 2009, with the likes of Eve online, World of Warcraft, and Starwars Galaxies, but all this was available 25 years ago on an 8bit home computer with 32kb of memory and no internet and was an enormous computing achievement.  Elite contained 8 galaxies, each with 256 planets which had to be procedurally generated.  A single seed number was run through a fixed algorithm the appropriate number of times and created a sequence of numbers determining each planet’s complete composition (position in the galaxy, prices of commodities, and even name and local details — text strings are chosen numerically from a lookup table and assembled to produce unique descriptions for each planet). This means that no extra memory is needed to store the characteristics of each planet, yet each is unique and has fixed properties. Each galaxy is also procedurally generated from the first.  Elite was a technical masterpiece of it’s time and remains unbeaten in it’s achievements and success.

For those who have never experienced the Elite way of life check out the 25th Anniversary website, or for those who fancy dusting off their old combat skills Oolite continues the legacy of Elite with community maintained content and development

… at least while a generation awaits Elite IV.