A lingering frustration for the games industry is that it has never quite shaken off an image that is decades out of date. In the earliest years, games meant the arcade machines found in pubs and chip shops, and they were bad ambassadors – simple, noisy and coarse. Some unwelcome ideas sunk in: that games were harsh black arenas for tiny bug-like creatures to crawl over, shooting each other to the noise of electronic sirens; that games were played for a few minutes’ diversion before becoming impossibly hard; that they were samey, repetitive and quick. The impression lives on, so that even now one of the most common icons for gaming is a forty pixel image of a space invader.
But by the heyday of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, these ideas were already anachronisms. Games had evolved energetically since Imagine launched itself with Arcadia, and clones of Space Invaders and Pac-Man rarely troubled the Gallup charts after 1985. The early machines were being put to rich and varied use, but some constraints were hard to overcome. The hardware lent itself to particular kinds of display: pictures could be bright and detailed (the ZX Spectrum’s colour clash excepted), but if an 8-bit processor was to have them moving, they had to be fairly small – an inch or so in each direction was a typical limit if more than half a dozen entities were in play at once. Some games managed more – one developer, Don Priestley, carved himself a niche by animating characters large enough to satisfy the franchise holders of Popeye and popular animated kids show The Trap Door – but his innovations were treated as technological and marketing coups, and the tricks he used were jealously guarded.
Flat, two-dimensional graphics were emblematic of the era, pushed around the screen by the two standard 8-bit processors that all the computers depended upon. These chips could be cajoled into marvellous performances by experts, but at heart they were pathetically simple: they could add and subtract easily enough, but anything more complicated required long-hand maths such as a school child might try. Moving a picture sideways was easy – you could simply add numbers to change co-ordinates. But give the computer any real thinking to do, and you just had to wait.
And the memory, of course, was tiny. The very most a home computer possessed was 64 kilobytes, enough for a handful of small animations, backgrounds and sounds. Games designers used their graphics like a flexible jigsaw, jumbling up and reusing the pieces to make new pictures and screen configurations, but even the cleverest attempts betrayed their essential repetitiveness.
So while the public perception of games was behind the times, it was only by a step. Having escaped the artistic rut of arcade titles, home computers were now imprisoned by their technical limitations. Games were making brilliant, creative use of flat, recycled images and heroes the size of a stamp, because they had to.
But it was a young industry, built on the experimentation of isolated creators. While there was no natural forum for developers, ideas spread through small, imperfect conduits: articles in magazines, type-in listings and local programming clubs. And most hardware hadn’t yet been pushed to the boundary of its capabilities. Working alone from their living rooms and bedrooms, game developers didn’t know what couldn’t be done. What if you wanted to show a road undulating into the distance, or admire a sunset? What if you wanted to see animals play, or wander through verdant landscapes? What if you wanted to explore galaxies?
For such a broad and far-reaching club, bedroom coding is full of small knots of people with intertwined histories. One such set started in an A-level maths class at St Albans School, where Ian Bell sat next to Peter Irvin, who was good friends with Jeremy Smith. They all had BBC Micros, and all left school with an inkling that they could write games.
Peter Irvin had success with the 1983 release of Starship Command, a quirky shoot-em-up with a clever rotation mechanic, which earned him respect and a little bit of cash. Much later, Jeremy Smith created a game called Thrust, a gentle yet addictive depiction of a spaceship fighting gravity using occasional boosts from its rockets. It was more successful than Irvin’s effort, becoming a mainstay of Superior Software and Firebird’s back catalogue and a fan favourite.
Ian Bell beat them both to publication, however, with an interpretation of the tabletop game Othello called Reversi. It was a good place for a good mathematician to start: the board game format was graphically straightforward, but exposed itself quickly if the computer’s artificial intelligence wasn’t up to scratch. Though Othello is far simpler than chess, the game’s computer opponent still needed to project multiple turns into the future, guessing at the player’s strategies and plotting its own. The teenaged Bell worked through these puzzles alone, and folded them all into a small but very efficient program that could fit in the lesser version of a BBC Micro. It ran so quickly that Bell included a pause routine, to give the impression that the computer was thinking hard about its choices.
By the time he had arrived at Cambridge University to read maths, Bell was already an established games writer – he had followed Reversi with a graphically intense arcade game called Free Fall, which had been published by Acornsoft. He was at Jesus College, a fully fledged idyll of academe, awash with precocious undergraduates, not many of whom were familiar with computer games. But Bell found a fellow obsessive, someone who was interested in science fiction and had tried writing a game or two. His name was David Braben.
Acorn’s computers were both complex and simple. They were complex in that they were teeming with expensive hardware that could connect with teletext readers, printers and robot arms. But they were simple in the way that most computers were – so that all a hardcore user really needed to know how to program was a single chip, the 6502. So when Essex sixth former David Braben received an Acorn Atom as a Christmas present in 1981, his computer shared plenty of DNA with the new BBC Micros that were selling for three times the price. It didn’t come close to the wish list of the BBC’s education department, but it did feature a version of Sophie Wilson’s BASIC and assembler and Steve Furber’s memory design, and it was somewhere in the same league graphically. Braben was resourceful, too: he started tinkering with his machine, adding memory and augmenting the innards. Within a few months, he had rebuilt his Atom until it had become something of a Frankenstein’s BBC Micro.
And with no money to buy games, he had a go at writing his own. The computer came with a comprehensive manual, and the Atom boasted a blossoming programming scene, amply supported by magazines and their type-in listings. He jumped in enthusiastically, recalling, ‘The atmosphere was great and it was very easy to write simple games at the time. Most of the machines fired up in a programming language, like the Atom, so it was really straightforward.’
Even before he had bought his computer, Braben had been fascinated with 3D graphics. The received wisdom at the time was that they couldn’t be done, at least by a novice, but he was a smart teenager on his way to Cambridge, and was convinced that they couldn’t be that hard. Working in BASIC, he started playing with ideas that showed 3D movement, at first drawing a ‘star field’: a sprinkling of dots that rushed past the viewpoint of the screen.
Braben found that his star field barely animated fast enough to deserve the name – the dots were visibly re-plotting, like paint spots being splattered onto canvas. So he abandoned BASIC and learnt to code with assembler to reach right down to the 6502 processor. The effect was dramatic: the dots stormed past, and suddenly there was a sensation of movement. His new skill also opened the door to grander graphics, and soon he had wireframe models of spaceships whizzing around the speckles of light. He knew that he was onto something: by the time Braben went up to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, he had the workings of a 3D flight game.
Braben and Bell first met in their college dining hall, and they quickly learnt that they were both writing games on Acorn machines. For Braben, with his underpowered, over-stretched Atom, there was a practical advantage to linking up with Bell: ‘He had a BBC Micro and I didn’t!’ Braben showed Bell his embryonic space game, and Bell immediately latched on to it, finding ways to make the graphics run faster and make more than one spaceship appear on screen at any one time. Bell was impressed by the images he had created – this was something that he had never seen in a computer game before.
They started developing it as a team. ‘We each had loads of great ideas and it seemed logical to work together,’ recalls Braben. ‘We discussed how we could make it into the sort of game we would both want to play.’ Shooting and combat were added first: the game let the player fire at spaceships, later destroying them in a blaze of particle effects lifted from Bell’s Free Fall. In itself this was an innovation: although 3D combat had been seen in Atari’s tank game Battlezone, space combat was more fluid and freeform, and excitingly mimicked the dogfights seen in the Star Wars films.
Their creation also mimicked the form of the arcade games. Braben was fond of arcade machines – Defender in particular was a favourite – but the approach didn’t suit their game: destroying ships for its own sake wasn’t enough to be satisfying, and nor was earning points. ‘The banality of having a score felt wrong,’ he says.
Arcades had been designed to keep the turnover of games high. Players were given three lives and a high score to beat for a quick, repetitive fix, designed to encourage another 10p to drop into the machine within a few minutes. Longevity was a product of addictiveness, rather than the content of the game, which had to draw players back, and then throw them off as quickly as possible. To Braben and Bell, this seemed a bizarre design choice in the home environment where there were no coins to collect.
It was boring, too. The score increased, but Braben found the motivation didn’t: it was an abstraction, occasionally incentivised with a reward. ‘Many games at the time had a tradition of an additional “life” every 10,000 score, and something else extra at 15,000,’ he says. Their game might have fallen into this trap, but the two young programmers were unwilling to follow the convention.
It was the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s first government and, as Braben put it, ‘she wasn’t best liked in university circles’. Already the touchstones of her premiership – individualism, entrepreneurship – were becoming apparent, and Braben and Bell, with some sense of the irony of their choice, put these concepts at the heart of their game. Instead of increasing their score by shooting spaceships, players would earn money.
‘The score-as-money was the obvious way forwards,’ says Braben. ‘It seemed appropriately ironic at the time with the whole “greed is good” mantra and the anti-Thatcher protests.’ With this idea set, others naturally followed: that the player could buy more and better weapons; that the points awarded for destroying the ships were payments from an omniscient power. It was decided that the enemy ships should be villainous, and pirates fitted the role. And if they were pirates, what were they pirating? Goods that they could drop once destroyed, which the player could pick up for cash. And if pirates dropped cargo, why not have innocent, unaggressive ships do the same thing? But shooting these ships would be morally wrong, so the player must risk punishment for doing it – by earning the ire of a galactic police force that would send their ships after wrongdoers. The ideas were spun, developed and refined as Braben and Bell created a universe with internal rules, motives and choices.
One decision in particular cemented the tone of the game: the cargo, a reason for pirates and player alike to shoot at other ships, should be available to be bought and sold. The pair developed the idea that players would travel across a galaxy where each star system had different characteristics – there would be industrial, agricultural and anarchic planets. And each type of world would set a different price for different goods. A space pilot could make a fortune buying cheap and selling dear, judging who would pay the best price for the food or minerals he or she had picked up for a song on an impoverished world. Like a fleet of virtual Thatcher’s children, the players could become traders.
But they didn’t have to. Instead, they could hang around wealthy star systems, gunning down trading ships for their cargo and scarpering when the police showed up. Or they could visit dodgy, anarchic planets and kill villains for profit. Or they could shoot at police ships leaving a space station, capture their escape pods and sell them as slaves. And they didn’t have to limit themselves to any one of these scenarios – the gameplay could be mixed and matched at the player’s whim. It was a freedom that ran throughout the game: ‘We wanted the player to be able to choose,’ says Braben.
And gamers were given a vast playground in which to make their choices. They would have thousands of star systems to explore, reaching across hundreds of galaxies. They could name their pilot, whose odyssey would last far longer than a single playing session – as with adventure games, their progress could be saved to tape or disc and picked up later. And as with MUD, pilots would have ranks to note the kills notched up on their consoles. Braben and Bell both appreciated Douglas Adams, and they borrowed the first two levels from his Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy: Harmless, and Mostly Harmless. The highest level was their own creation, and gave their groundbreaking game its name. Every player started out as Harmless, but after weeks of play and 6,400 kills, a pilot could achieve the very highest accolade: Elite.
The design was all encompassing, the appearance completely immersive, and the universe they were creating was vast. But throughout the development of the game, Braben and Bell’s problem was that they had to show all of this – planets, spaceships, space stations – using the power of a modest 6502 processor. And they had to fit it all into a BBC Micro’s 32 kilobytes of memory.
A layman’s measure of the progress of computing power is to look at the growth in a typical computer’s memory. It’s not an ideal charting tool – only one yardstick amongst dozens – and the division between memory for running programs and storage is often blurred. But nonetheless it makes the rapid advance of the home computer astonishingly plain: a modern PC, or even a smart phone, contains easily a million times the memory found in the machines available in the eighties. For modern systems, memory constraints are still a boundary, but also something of a moveable goal, as a compromise can usually be found somewhere – in the number of colours, the quality of the sound, how blurred a texture looks close up.
But as memory becomes tinier, the choices become harder. Fewer bytes stops meaning a less detailed experience, and starts to cut into what can be done at all. When a computer has only 32 kilobytes to play with, data becomes more and more precious, until eventually each tiny tweak of memory will be carefully planned, designed and tested. It’s not simply a case of doing less with less memory – the challenge is qualitatively different.
The first lesson a BBC Micro developer learnt was that the memory they had to use was already rather smaller than 32 kilobytes. The image held on the screen took up a vast chunk of it: a third, or two-thirds for really high-resolution or colourful graphics. Bell and Braben chose a high-resolution two-colour mode, which immediately bumped their available memory down to 22 kilobytes. And into this, they squeezed eight galaxies, each with hundreds of stars, planets and civilisations.
They used an elegant mathematical technique. Each aspect of a solar system and its society could be represented by a number: its co-ordinates, the prices it charged for goods, its political and economic type, and even, using a lookup table of syllables, its name. And there are some calculation processes that can generate a string of numbers that appear to be random, but are in fact entirely predictable: the same set of numbers is produced every time the routine is run. Combining these two concepts allowed Bell and Braben to create unlimited galactic data from a tiny amount of memory.
Of course, even pseudo-random numbers aren’t always convenient. The co-ordinates produced could leave some stars completely unreachable, so Bell and Braben wrote a program to discard any galaxy where this happened. The prices might also be wildly askew, so an algorithm was written to tie them to the economy of the planet. And the names could throw up some unfortunate combinations. Bell and Braben held a ‘beauty parade’ to weed out obscenities: they decided that it was just about okay to have the planet ‘Arse’ deep in the depths of space, but nothing ruder awaited a blushing space pirate.
The galactic milieu offered players months, or even years of gameplay. They might have had an inkling that such scale wouldn’t have been possible if each element had been handcrafted, but that didn’t need explaining – it only added to the wonder of an unexplored universe.
The visuals, on the other hand, were an unmissable technical marvel. Planets, bright white stars, dogfighting spacecraft and orbiting space stations all rotated and whizzed past as the player’s ship manoeuvred amongst them. It was magnificent, in an absurdly better league than anything else seen on a home computer at the time. The two creators spent eighteen months, working between their university studies, to make Braben’s primitive demonstration into a cockpit’s eye view of a living science fiction universe, and it paid off. Elite looked astonishing.
Under the bonnet, it was, if anything, even more inspired. When Braben had heard that 3D on a home computer wasn’t possible, he wasn’t being misled: it was a slow, cumbersome process to work through the sums required for perspective calculation and rotation, and a home processor, built around simple addition, never seemed up to the job. The most basic building block for 3D graphics required processor-intense ‘floating point’ division, and rotation needed a huge amount of intricate maths to be applied to every single line and dot. Even in machine code, calculating and drawing a typical Elite image using conventional programming would take an achingly long time.
But the pair weren’t conventionally trained programmers. Every program they had written so far had flowed from self-taught puzzle solving, and to bright and motivated science undergraduates, making the impossible happen was another chance to flaunt their skills. And they did: the word ‘optimisation’ wasn’t really in use at the time, but even if it had been, it wouldn’t quite capture Braben and Bell’s catalogue of groundbreaking techniques. Every aspect of maths, hardware and graphics, no matter how fundamental, was challenged.
By far the slowest computational chore was drawing lines on the screen. The BBC Micro’s hardware featured a built-in line drawing routine, but Braben and Bell found that this used a slow technique designed to capture any possible line. So they replaced it with their own: a set of routines that could draw one ‘type’ of line very fast: a short, nearly horizontal line, a long vertical line, and so on. When rendering a scene, the program looked at each line’s length and angle, and chose the fastest method. The speed of the game shot up.
They were using an 8-bit processor, which can use numbers up to 256 quickly, but ties itself in cumbersome knots for anything even slightly higher. So they set the drawing area resolution to be precisely 256 by 256 pixels, so that their drawing routine would always fall within the golden parameters. The draw rate was boosted by a fifth, and it meant that the overall screen could be narrowed – another memory-saving tweak.
And for the frame-rate-killing rotation calculations, the students came up with a cunning trick that used simple estimations to stand in place of precise, time-consuming calculations. For fast-moving scenes like space combat, these pseudo-answers were good enough, but over a few seconds the tiny inaccuracies from these shortcuts piled on top of each other, and ships could start to look ‘wobbly’. The game kept track, and used a full calculation to tidy it all up whenever it found some spare processor time. Overall, it was another speed jump.
When Braben and Bell analysed the rotation calculations for a single spaceship, they found that they were full of repetition – where co-ordinates were mirrored, the same sums were performed twice. Or, in the minds of time-ravenous programmers, half the calculations for symmetrical shapes were ‘free’. All of the ships became symmetrical.
Three-dimensional maths is famously intensive, but one of the reasons it was slow was that it was full of redundant calculations: a typical object might have lots of intricate lines, but most of them would never be seen. Elite’s ships were all deliberately made to be simple to render: like a cube or a block of cheese, every side could either be seen or not, but would never be partially hidden by another part of the ship.
And by figuring out how best to take advantage of this, Bell and Braben hit upon a technique that would become a staple of game technology a decade later. The most time-consuming calculations would be gauged with a vague test before any were undertaken properly, and by the time the whole scene had been assessed, plenty of calculations were found to be unnecessary, or to cancel each other out. For instance, a routine could work out quickly which sides of a ship never needed to be thought about, because they faced away from the screen. This technique is now called ‘lazy evaluation’ – back in 1983 it was simply the routine that made the whole game nearly twice as fast.
They had one final trick. On the BBC Micro, colour came at a cost of either resolution, or memory and speed, and one of the first decisions that a designer needed to make was whether it was worth that trade-off. Not Bell and Braben – they found a way to both have and eat their cake: the spaceship visuals, which needed to be fast and precise, were in hi-res black and white; then two-thirds of the way down the screen, the computer was wrenched out of that mode and into low-res colour ideal for the radar and flight information. It was a handy and quite harmless abuse of the hardware, which still earns them praise from the very highest source: the BBC Micro design team.
‘Elite is the program that couldn’t have been written,’ says Sophie Wilson. ‘David Braben came up with the trick of reprogramming the video controller halfway down the screen, squashing more into the machine than was possible.’
Steve Furber agrees: ‘What David Braben managed to do on a computer with no memory and no computer power – Elite had the BBC design team staggered. It was one of the most astonishing games.’
Bell and Braben were bounding ahead of every game available, but they couldn’t know for sure that there weren’t rivals with similar ideas somewhere in the country, on the verge of publication. They had a couple of scares in 1982: Malcolm Evan’s 3D Monster Maze game sounded like it might be steps ahead of theirs, with its solid walls and lumbering monsters. It was with some relief that they found it to be minimalist and rotationless, using the ZX81’s limitations for atmosphere rather than overcoming them. They also hunted down a demonstration of a rotating 3D house that Acorn itself had put together. It wasn’t as fast as their own 3D models and, they found out, didn’t rely on real-time calculations at all. The Acorn team had created it to show how fast data could be loaded off their new hard drive – after all, no computer could genuinely calculate 3D maths at that speed, could it?
But Elite’s creators were still secretive, and very cautious about approaching publishers. It was 1983, with the game in an advanced, playable state, before they dared show it to anyone outside their narrow circle. Braben had a contact at Thorn EMI, so they started there. The publisher was an almost absurdly stereotypical corporate behemoth: Bell and Braben found themselves presenting their game in a gleaming London office, where music executives were plotting hits on another floor. It was a company that understood the entertainment business; it knew how to make pop stars smile and how to fill record shops with their products.
In EMI’s world, entertainment arrived in three-minute consumable chunks, and it saw computer games in the same way. So Elite, years in the making and taking months to play, presented by students from the geekier end of an intellectual world, seemed to these confident media men like a category error. It was a fantastic technical demonstration, they told Bell and Braben, but games needed three lives and a ten-minute playing time. They needed a score, and objectives, and an appeal to casual users. They needed to be like arcade games.
It was a dispiriting moment for the two students. Working on their own, looking only to each other for assurance, all they had was their own instinct that Elite was worth playing. Were they wrong? But they had other industry contacts through Bell’s earlier games, and so they tried the nearest of those: Acornsoft.
The company could hardly have been more different from Thorn EMI. Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry were frantically busy with the success of the BBC Micro, and in any case were not really games people, so David Johnson-Davies had been given a free hand. When the two developers took him their game – Braben later recalled that he was working out of an office at the end of ‘a valley of bins’ – Johnson-Davies was enthusiastic, as astonished by the graphics as everyone else, but also mesmerised by the breadth of the game. He had some reservations: he thought the scale should be reined in to make the universe look like a handful of vast galaxies, rather than an unconquerable mathematical formula. And the ability to trade narcotics gave him pause – that there was profit to be had from drug-dealing seemed the wrong lesson for the nation’s educational computer to be teaching.
But he didn’t hesitate to sign them up. Their relationship with Acornsoft felt natural: ‘The fact that Acorn and Acornsoft were within an easy cycle ride – walking distance even – did help’, recalls Braben. The advance was one thousand pounds each and he used some of his to buy a genuine BBC Micro.
For a further few months the pair debugged and tweaked – the galaxies were cut back, but the narcotics stayed in – until the product was bulletproof. During this time, Acornsoft published a Spitfire simulator by Geoff Crammond called Aviator, which used similar, but much more spartan, wireframe graphics. The pair appreciated it but its small environment, featuring three buildings and suspension bridge, didn’t compare with Elite. There was still nothing else like it on the market. They remained nervous that something soon would be, though, and by summer 1984 they were ready to release the product. And then Acornsoft made them wait.
Johnson-Davies could see that Elite was big, perhaps huge, and wanted to create a marketing buzz. This game used unheard-of technology and could take over players’ lives for weeks. If he managed this well, he could charge twice the going rate.
His ploy was to make the sense of depth and quality visible throughout the product. It was only a few years since games had been sold with leaflets in plastic bags, and the form now was not markedly more sophisticated: a cassette box with a paper inlay, like albums at the time. Acornsoft had already differentiated itself by packaging its software in large cardboard boxes containing a plastic moulded berth for the tape or disc, and an A5 leaflet of instructions, but for Elite, Johnson-Davies planned unprecedented luxury: the game would have a thick, illustrated manual, written in the style of a pilot’s guide within the fictional universe. The BBC Micro was portrayed in a hand-drawn picture as part of the console of the spacecraft, and the instructions were rich with mythmaking about the vast world to be explored.
Some details were real features of the game – the police, the pirates, the asteroid-mining lasers – and some were inventions that hinted at a greater universe. Players were left to wonder if there really were vast generation ships, or dredgers that ate other craft, and rumours that someone had found one would circulate playgrounds and magazines for years afterwards. And there was more: a novella written by renowned fantasy author Robert Holdstock. His story gave character to an already well-defined universe: a first for a game, and tremendously effective. The package was topped off with a poster identifying the most common ships, an aide-memoire to help untangle the complex controls, and an entry card for a competition open only to players who managed to reach ‘Elite’ status.
Such lavish packaging took time to put together, but Johnson-Davies was also holding back for an autumn release and the vital Christmas sales. In the meantime, Bell and Braben were busying themselves with thoughts of a sequel. They toyed with the idea of the player taking a role in the military, so that rather than playing free form, they would have a role in a team. One of the pair’s first jobs was to tackle the slightly confusing radar system they had developed – in Elite, it showed the battle from two planes, which the player had to co-ordinate in their head. Braben and Bell tried a revised version with a squashed 3D map of the space around the craft, and the game became instantly more playable. In a sense, it was unfortunate: they felt almost an obligation to show it to the overwhelmed Johnson-Davies, who was two weeks from going to press.
Despite the enormous disruption it would cause, he agreed that the new radar should go in, but the work to make this happen landed right back on the young developers’ shoulders. They stayed up late implementing, testing, debugging, and finally reproducing screenshots for the manual, but they hit their mark, and were ready for Johnson-Davies’ planned launch in September 1984. The press were invited to Thorpe Park, then promoting a science fiction ride called the Black Hole, where they watched Bell and Braben, each a boffinish figure in a shirt and tie, launch a ship into space on a giant projection screen.
The response was rapturous. Every magazine and newspaper that covered the launch glowed with praise. Some missed its scope – they had only an afternoon to play a game that takes an age, after all – but the graphical leap was applauded, and the sight of eight galaxies of hundreds of planets made the scale clear, even if the variety on offer wasn’t quite understood.
And consumers burned with anticipation. In an era well before television review shows or YouTube promos, the descriptions of this incredible game seemed tantalising, even too good to be true. Could these screenshots be real? Did these space ships really fly out of the screen, or was there some trick?
The game became the nation’s best-seller as soon as it was released. Johnson-Davies was right to risk the higher price point – the size of the package made buying it feel very special. As it happened, Acornsoft had neglected to take into account the extra space folded paper needs, and the box was a couple of millimetres too small for the content. The distributors managed to squeeze it in, so when consumers ripped the polythene off, they found the box literally bursting with goodies.
There’s a popular story that the game sold as many copies as there were BBC Micros in the world: around 150,000 of each. In fact this comparison takes a generous view of the timeline – by the time the sales of Elite had reached this figure, the BBC Micro was well into its lifecycle, during which it sold 1.5 million units. But the tone of the story is right. Children without their own BBC Micros did buy copies of the game to play in school at lunchtime, and the competition cards that were packed into the game became much sought-after – players with pirated copies of Elite often wound up buying the genuine article to acquire one. To enter the competition required reaching Elite status, which meant hundreds of hours of gameplay. As sacks full of cards arrived at the publisher, it was clear the game wasn’t simply a success at the till, it was using up millions of hours of British leisure time.
It was certainly Acorn’s flagship game. If a home user, especially a games player, had a BBC Micro, it was assumed that they also had Elite. For a year, until conversions appeared on other machines, gamers with the dowdier, teacher-friendly computer could hold their head high in the playground.
Almost by accident, Elite advanced the professionalisation of the games industry in Britain. While negotiating with Johnson-Davies, Bell and Braben had retained the rights to release Elite on computers other than the BBC Micro. In the modern games industry, Acorn might have tried to make the game exclusive, to boost sales of its computers. But it was a hardware manufacturer trying to meet demand, and its thoughts were about product and production. It was only long after the contract was signed that Chris Curry thought of Elite as a means to promote the Micro.
‘The thing that really brought home the importance of games in the BBC computer time was when David Braben designed a watershed game: Elite,’ Curry says. ‘It gave you this wonderful combination of manual dexterity, trading and planning and fighting, which all needed fast graphics, and the BBC computer really was the only one around that could do it properly . . . it really didn’t work anything like as well on anything else.’
However it came about, the two developers found themselves in the happy position of owning the rights to publish the country’s best-selling game on its most widely owned computers. ‘The BBC Micro was not the biggest market at the time,’ says Braben, ‘but it meant we held on to the rights to the game – something that proved very wise!’
Elite became one of the first games to be sold to British publishers via representation. Jacqui Lyons was a literary agent, acting for authors of books, and in radio, television and film, when this new industry began to enter the public consciousness. ‘Computers fascinated me, though I couldn’t program,’ she says. ‘I recognised it as a completely new form of entertainment which was bound to grow as the public became more computer literate. I thought computer authorship was an extension of authorship.’
She negotiated on behalf of Bell and Braben with an industry hungry for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions of their masterwork, and eventually rights were sold to Telecomsoft, to publish under its Firebird label. The pair hadn’t done badly out of the Acorn deal, but this was a different order of income for the 20-year-olds. ‘I had a six-figure income and was thoroughly enjoying it,’ says Braben.
The conversion work introduced them to other programmers, as well. They brought in Jez San, who had built a ‘Programmer’s Development System’ that allowed a Commodore 64 to be programmed remotely from a BBC Micro. Meanwhile, a young man called Peter Molyneux tried, and failed, to win the contract to convert the game to the ZX Spectrum.
Although Bell and Braben both stayed on at Cambridge, their world had changed. There were plenty of games that earned their writers a wage while at school or college. There were even some writers with fast cars and businesses. But Elite was a tidal wave that carried everyone with it. ‘When I went to university, writing games was my hobby and the university was my work,’ says Braben. ‘By the time I left, the university was my hobby and writing games my work.’
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Elite in British gaming history. It changed the expectations, and probably the economics, of being a games developer. The list of its innovations is a catalogue of game-design touchstones, some of which took decades to reproduce: open-world gameplay, freeform objectives, optional missions, wanted levels, player rankings.
Elite was the product of its authors’ vision. Under the closer direction of a publisher, it might have been released earlier, with less ambition. It’s hard to believe that anyone other than hobbyist developers could have created it at all: the incredible tricks that they relied upon, the inspired innovations, and the time they took would all be impossible under commission.
There was a case where Acornsoft came close to demanding impossibly pioneering work, though. When it secured a sponsorship deal with a Formula Three team, David Johnson-Davies approached Geoff Crammond, and asked him to do what he could to make a simulation of it. And what he could do was revolutionary.
The racing genre was just starting to develop a form in the industry. Arcade games like Pole Position used various tricks to give the illusion of movement with a full-colour screen. A flat black road would be shown disappearing towards a vanishing point on the horizon between green fields and a blue sky. Small background details would give the feeling of movement, while video tricks would swing the ‘point’ of the road from side to side to give the impression of turning corners. It was in no way a simulation, or even particularly realistic, but it did a good job of evoking a speedy 3D racetrack.
The Acornsoft deal had secured them the services of David Hunt, the younger brother of the seventies Formula 1 World Champion James Hunt. In the hands of some publishers, Hunt’s endorsement might have meant a photograph slapped onto the box of a standard racer. But Acornsoft offered Crammond a working relationship with a genuine racing team based at Silverstone, and a trip around the track as Hunt’s passenger. Crammond quit his job at Marconi and went to work on his new project: Revs.
It was a perfect project to bring Crammond’s skills, stubbornness and tenacious finesse to the fore. Unlike any racer before it, it was designed like a proper simulation – it had a three-dimensional racetrack, complete with banked corners, undulations and genuine bends that you could see in the distance. Whereas previous racers simply couldn’t accurately show the road beyond a corner, Revs included accurate S-bends, a first-person view of spinning off the tarmac and even, if you wanted to experiment, driving backwards around the track.
To have managed this with the same wireframe that Crammond employed in Aviator would have been an achievement, but he insisted on making the graphics full, solid colour. ‘I felt that I wanted it to visually stand up against the arcade games,’ he says. ‘Doing it as a simulation meant I would be using a 3D mapped track, so I did realise that it wouldn’t be easy to get the graphics to cope.’
Working full-time was useful: ‘I was able to experiment with all sorts of ideas to get the graphics fast enough.’ Some were incredibly ahead of their time, such as his innovative self-modifying code, which meant that the program rewrote itself while the game was running to become more efficient. And he overcame the memory shortage by storing data as pixels on the screen: ordinarily this would have made the sky appear as a multi-coloured mess of spots, but he tricked the hardware into drawing all colours as blue for that part of the screen.
What the player knew was that for the first time, their speed and racing line mattered, and perfecting these to shave seconds off a lap time was utterly addictive. The bumps in the road could throw your car, and leaving the track meant spinning into the grass, rather than bumping along the side or being shoved sideways back into the centre. These things are a given for any racer now, but controlling a car with speed and traction for the first time was a revelation.
And David Hunt’s involvement did help, at least a little. Driving Crammond around Silverstone, he showed the importance of throttle to steering, and afterwards, how the brand-new tyres had worn away at a forty-five degree angle. He played the game, and gave feedback that encouraged Crammond to believe that his simulation had some realism. Modelling the car’s contact with the ground was a phenomenally complicated job for a slow processor, but Crammond refused to cut corners with his racer – players could even adjust the angle of the tail wing, and all of these features mattered. Revs elevated racing games from a mildly distracting toy to a potential obsession. Even if an observer marvelled at the graphics, they might miss the depth of the game they were watching.
The scope and ingenuity that players could expect from their games were expanding. Arcade style titles continued to dominate the home computer markets by volume, but the games that attracted admiration were the ones that stood apart from the norm. Typically they showed some technical wonder that would draw an audience in, but then reward the player’s dedication with incredible breadth of scope. Like Elite, they were the antithesis of three-minute arcade play, and a labour of love for their makers.
One such landmark game, which appeared soon after Revs, was Mike Singleton’s The Lords of Midnight for the ZX Spectrum. It was trumpeted by its manual as ‘the world’s first ever epic game’, and in those early days of unclaimed territory, this wasn’t outrageous hyperbole. The player’s eye view was of an ice-ridden landscape, with mountains, castles and forests stretching into the distance. The influence of Tolkien was transparent, but the world was well depicted, and saw the player uncovering a fantasy plot of war and stealth, and engaging in alliance or battle with thirty independent characters. But the incredible, implausible innovation was that the landscape was not decorative – the trees and buildings were features of the game world that could be found and explored. The Lords of Midnight featured nearly four thousand detailed, connected locations. Even after Elite, the scope of the game was staggering.
Like Bell and Braben, Singleton had used impressive tricks to hold an epic fantasy realm in a few tens of kilobytes of memory. The map was hand crafted, but each location only took the tiniest sliver of memory – the view was compiled from the details of neighbouring locations, near and far. The inhabitants were determined by the smallest possible unit of memory – literally a 1 or a 0. The details of who or what the player would encounter were inferred from the co-ordinates of the location.
The Lords of Midnight was another home coding odyssey. As every spare byte of memory was scraped out of the machine, the code had to be broken into parts. Each ‘version’ of the game was stored in ten separate files, which had to be meticulously adjusted in sequence for any change. Singleton became very careful about backups.
It took half a year of mostly full-time work to complete. Singleton had the backing of a publisher, but it was an agreement more than a commission – the project’s combination of fastidiousness and scale seems outside the capacity of conventional, project-managed development. As it was, Singleton’s painstaking months paid off: players and critics alike were consumed by the game. They had to be, if they were to make any headway – guiding the epic story to some kind of conclusion took an investment of weeks. Before launching his game, Singleton completed a test run, with a complete knowledge of the map and the winning strategy. It took him nine hours.
Although at first counterintuitive, in the right hands vast worlds clicked with the 8-bit generation of computers. The fixed hardware meant that coders could ferret out every last byte of power, and although the graphical tricks could be jaw-dropping, a palette of lo-fi images meant that some of the repetition needed for scale was forgiven. But they also worked because home coders enjoyed technical challenges, and for logical, creative minds, stretching the limits of home computers was a compelling pastime. For them, each new breakthrough simply goaded them on.
Peter Cooke, the teacher who had written Invincible Island, had been as impressed by Elite as everyone else, but he was really interested in playing with the technology. He found himself wondering at another game, Gyron, published by Firebird for the ZX Spectrum a year later, and written by the same team that was converting Elite for the ZX Spectrum. It was a first-person maze game – hypnotically pretty though quickly dull – but it did feature an extraordinary graphical trick: giant, solid spheres roamed the maze. Elite had included solid suns, but they had visibly slowed the frame rate. The speed at which these spheres were drawn would normally need a series of pictures stored in memory, and there was nothing like the space for that in a 48 kilobyte computer.
Cooke was keen to make ‘solid’ 3D graphics work, but it seemed that the hardware wasn’t up to the job. ‘With a 4Mhz Z80 it was impossible to do full 3D using points and surfaces with a decent frame rate,’ he says. Eventually, he hit on the idea that shapes didn’t need genuine 3D calculations, but instead used a table of pre-calculated data which was scaled up or down with the distance of the object.
Whether or not this was the trick Gyron had used, it worked, and Cooke kept extending it. ‘I tried adding a light-dark shading,’ he says. For any shape with a vertical line of symmetry, a shading effect could be dynamic. If the drawing routine changed colour a consistent fraction of the way from left to right, say at twenty per cent or fifty per cent, it would look like it was properly shaded. For a sphere, or a tower, or a giant robot shaped like a chess piece, the gradual shift in shading would look like a light source drifting around it. ‘When I first had the shading code working I took it in to show the lads in the computer club, and they were very keen,’ Cooke recalls. ‘So I could see it had potential.’
He started thinking of game scenarios that could use his new trick. Elite included three axes of rotation, but Cooke’s technique could only accommodate one. Happily, this fitted neatly with a scenario that gamers had been hoping for since Bell and Braben’s game had been published: ‘The game had to be set on a planetary surface,’ says Cooke.
It would use the lighting routine to portray a day and night cycle, so he needed a planet with a sun. He chose to invent a satellite of Tau Ceti, a real star and – in astronomical terms – a close neighbour of Earth. It gave his creation its name and as Cooke saw it, Tau Ceti was going to be another big game like Elite. The player would fly a laser-armed craft at ground level across a vast planet, studded with cities and sprinkled with enemies. There would be a mission, with puzzles, clues and an unfolding story. And it would be huge.
Bell and Braben had procedurally generated their universe, but Cooke wanted his cities to be designed by a human hand to create a compelling adventure. This was far beyond the capacity of a 48K ZX Spectrum, and Singleton’s trick of using a small amount of data for each co-ordinate simply wouldn’t be detailed enough. So Cooke used a different technique, in which the original data is mathematically squashed into a smaller space, and then unpacked when it’s needed. City by city, the planet would unfold before the player. He had literally given them a world to explore.
Games like Tau Ceti and The Lords of Midnight marked a shift in the focus of the medium. From its launch, the BBC Micro had been a better computer that cost more, the natural home of landmark achievements like Elite and Revs. Now the real developments were happening where the gamers were, on the ZX Spectrum, with the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC not far behind.
And Tau Ceti was one of the first of many games with solid, 3D graphics for the ZX Spectrum. Eventually a system called Freescape would allow complex 3D shapes and scenes – it became available for the Commodore and Amstrad machines too. But the BBC Micro was left out; its gaming market fell away as its rivals built theirs. With games like Elite, it had moments of glory. But they were only moments.
Revs, The Lords of Midnight and Tau Ceti were deep, expansive games that stretched the ambition and the state of the art of the industry. But they weren’t Elite – the overwhelming behemoth that had shaken the medium, and ballooned its scope from petty entertainment to a social-life-devouring universe. How could they be? Elite had claimed so much ground, fused so many technological and gameplay innovations, that the next step, however large, could surely never match its shockwaves.
But there was a game that might have done. Elite had captured the thrill of open world gameplay and autonomous exploration, but the core activity of besting other spacecraft in combat remained essentially the same throughout the game, even if it was blissfully rewarding.
Elite didn’t have one important feature that would become a hallmark of the open world genre: a universe filled with autonomous beings – who have rules governing their behaviour, but can also act quite independently, and most importantly, can interact with each other. As these elements are brought together they can create new situations that even the game-makers might not have considered. Later versions of Elite on more powerful platforms did feature something like this: police ships flying in formation, breaking off to attack pirates who had set upon a passing trader, all without the player’s input.
But the game that really introduced these ideas arrived in the dying years of the 8-bit era. It is often overlooked now, but revered by the gaming cognoscenti for so comprehensively realising one of the medium’s finest innovations: emergent gameplay. It’s called Exile, and it’s what the other two boys from St Albans School made, after Elite had made Ian Bell rich.
In 1985, Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith each returned from university with a game published and no interest in pursuing their studies. Smith’s expertise was in modelling physics, for which his game Thrust had gained widespread respect. Irvin, meanwhile, had been working on a 2D, side-on and rather linear portrayal of a wizard heading down a randomly generated passageway. Irvin had no idea where either the passageway or the demonstration was going to go – like many home-developed projects it was an experiment to entertain the programmer.
The two of them decided to combine Smith’s physics with Irvin’s landscape engine. Both would be rewritten endlessly over the two and half years the project would consume, but they provided a canvas, and the pair started sketching. There was no story at first, just ideas piled onto the player’s avatar and his world. He was issued with a jet pack, countered by the planet’s realistic gravity and, in the game’s first achievement of many, objects were made to collide with a momentum exchange, bouncing off in a way that felt satisfyingly genuine. ‘Exile might have been the first game with a complete physics environment engine,’ says Irvin, cautiously, but not having learnt anything to the contrary after twenty-five years.
The story came together gradually along with everything else. The player controlled Mike Finn, a jet-pack-wearing space commander on a rescue mission to an isolated planet, Phoebus, where exiled geneticist Triax is holding hostages. It sounds hammy when summarised, but it all fitted their technology rather well: a side-on adventure, a physics engine, particle weapons and an interactive environment. They also hit on an effective conceit to keep it fun for the player, and allow them to explore – Finn’s suit would detect when he had taken too much damage, and teleport him back to the last place saved by the player. Suddenly the game opened up. Any experiment in this playground was worth a punt – the worst that could happen to the player was to be yanked away from the danger.
Their first job was to create a landscape, a giant space vast enough for their plans. ‘It’s a massive map – there’s no way you could fit that into memory in the way it is normally,’ says Irvin. So, as with Elite’s galaxies, the pair let a routine feature the map. This was a more complicated proposition, though, as their map needed to feature a coherent, usable set of connected caves and tunnels. Irvin and Smith generated hundreds before settling on one that would become the obsession of the developers and players for years. It won by being coherent, and having a very large cave near the start.
But the star innovation of the project wasn’t the map, or even the physics, although both were vital. Their world was populated. It was filled with semi-intelligent creatures with their own plans and territories, ready to interact with the player, or to defend themselves. The game world was alive.
Irvin and Smith developed an emergent ecosystem, with different species that related to each other in complex ways. Birds followed the player and ate bees, bees swarmed and stung passing animals, monkeys stole objects and knocked things over, and robots pursued or protected the player according to their programming. In a sense, these things had all been programmed, but in subtle ways that, to the player’s eyes, made them seem autonomous. The animals appeared to have ongoing lives that didn’t require so much as a keystroke from the gamer.
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ says Irvin. ‘It wasn’t artificial that the animals had certain behaviours towards each other.’ He and Smith assign attributes to each object or creature: a type one baddy, a robotic baddy and so on. Certain groups were hardwired to hate or love other types. But separate to this, each had strategies or tactics. The program included very sophisticated – for its time – line-of-sight vision. Animals couldn’t see round corners, which was handy for the player, but they could spot one another. And from this their behaviour would emerge.
Take the bees. They were programmed to like other bees, and so would normally circle around one another. Every few seconds, though, each of them would have a rethink, and if one saw something else that it liked or wanted to attack, it might pursue it. The other bees would then follow, perhaps themselves locking onto this new object. From simple rules a complex swarm intelligence emerged, and it was uncannily realistic. ‘You start to see how the natural world might work with these very basic programming ideas,’ says Irvin.
The two creators had been rigorously rewriting and testing each other’s game code and were confident that towards the end there were no errors in it. But the adventure world they created was a different matter. It was perfectly plausible for the creatures to all obey their instructions and yet create impossible situations for the player, or for one species to become dominant over the others. The pain Smith and Irvin had saved from debugging the code would be spent on debugging the world.
Balancing the game was vital if they were to give their audience the sense of total freedom they had planned, while making sure that players couldn’t find some shortcut or way of exploiting the world. ‘You weren’t meant to feel railroaded through a route. It was: there you are, there’s your planet to explore,’ Irvin says.
The narrative worked with the game world too. Rather than filling the story with memory-hungry ‘scripts’ for the animals and robots to follow, they were instead put in situations where the game’s rules would guide them, and challenge the player. For instance, the final challenge for defeating Triax didn’t involve killing him, but trapping him between two teleports that kept the villain in an eternal loop. Even that wasn’t a watertight solution: he was intelligent enough, or at least randomly curious enough, to occasionally push his way out again.
The absence of artificial direction helped give the player a sense of freedom. ‘You weren’t quite sure whether you were doing the right thing,’ Irvin says. ‘But eventually you might open a particular door to access another area of the cavern, so you kind of knew you were succeeding.’
In 1987, after two long years of development, they were ready to approach publishers. Jacqui Lyons brokered their deal with Superior Software, which had bought out Acornsoft’s games catalogue. Its managing director Richard Hanson knew that the pair had something special. The publisher positioned Exile as a premium product: it had a pack-in novel commissioned from one of Irvin and Smith’s school friends, and a teaser campaign promoting it as a landmark title.
As if having a name with only one letter different from Elite wasn’t a strong enough signal, Superior Software pulled in David Braben for an endorsement on the box. ‘He offered it,’ says Irvin, ‘and then regretted it later, tried to pull out of it.’ Braben did keep to his word, though, and his quote appeared in a yellow splash on the advertising. It was another sign that the circle of Cambridge programmers was still very small. ‘If it hadn’t been him, it would have been Ian.’
Exile had a big launch in the autumn of 1988, and the reviews were universally positive, but to the writers it was a letdown: developers could expect little feedback from gamers at the time. The truth is that the reception was probably mixed. It was a complicated game with a steep learning curve that some players would find impossible to like. The first weapon was only found after a couple of hours gameplay, and the puzzles didn’t have smooth, clearly signed solutions – anybody looking for a quick fix would loathe it.
But to its fans, it really was a masterpiece. The combination of the physics and the wildlife was wonderfully compelling – hours could be lost fighting and strategising around the other inhabitants. Some of Exile’s greatest admirers never progressed particularly far with the game – it was enough to dive in and watch the world unfurl, occasionally tossing in a grenade to see what happened. A review for a conversion in the first issue of Amiga Power highlighted the different reactions. The main reviewer had immersed himself for days, and gave Exile 89% – as high as a title brought over from an ancient machine was ever likely to achieve. But there was also a sub-review, a small boxout from another playtester that acted as a brief sanity check. He was far more circumspect: nice physics, but can’t see what the fuss is about.
Elite is famous, but the odds were always against Exile achieving that kind of recognition. It came out at the tail end of the 8-bit era, on a computer that had lost its momentum as a gaming machine. Peter Irvin has stayed in the industry – he was one of the programmers for the Elite sequels. Jeremy Smith sadly died not long after the conversions were finished. The impetus for a sequel stopped then, and has never picked up again.
Irvin is still tremendously proud of Exile, though. He even, grudgingly, credits the punishing hardware restrictions for the success of the final game: ‘If the memory had been ten times as big, it would have been finished in a quarter of the time. And it would have been a tenth as good.’
Exile is a gamers’ game. The industry favourite magazine Edge, known for its detached scepticism, ran a special review of it more than a decade after its release, in which it was awarded a rare top score. The magazine had given out only one other retrospective ‘ten’, for Elite.
It’s almost lazy to say that brilliant programmers cajoled amazing things from tiny boxes in the 1980s. But they did – curious, restless inventiveness pulled astonishing feats from the machines and squeezed worlds of implausible size inside them. It’s partly a reflection of the way bedroom coders worked. They didn’t have the limits and pressures of corporate targets or expectations, and if they wanted to try something directionless and experimental, or monstrously time consuming, or apparently impossible, they did. It set a pattern for the British games market, where a landscape of conventional games was studded with some truly incredible ones. And those were almost always home-made titles, because games needing years of work with untested technology were not projects that a commercial developer would be inclined to commission.
But this hobbyism had a more far-reaching legacy. The scope of games changed in the hands of bedroom coders – they were in a different league, and had different ambitions to arcade titles. The pace slowed and the scale increased, and this all happened using the technology that they had, rather than waiting for a generation that would come. Rival markets using consoles, or more powerful computers with disc drives, could attract gamers with more content in conventional settings. For Brits, it was taken as a challenge to fashion giant, novel experiences using primitive tools.
A few of these games were directly inspired by Elite, but all were under its shadow. In the decades that followed, Elite would be a yardstick for technical advances, a byword for an industry changer, and a fallback answer for the most important British game. Its innovations, accompanied by some of the ideas from other games of its time, can be traced through the generations that succeeded it to some of the bestselling franchises in the world. But even in the eighties, Ian Bell and David Braben were held in a special reverence. They showed that while a legion of home coders had created an industry, individuals could revolutionise it.