Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 20:15 +0100 (BST) From: iancgbell@clara.co.uk (Ian Bell) Subject: Re: PC Zone magazine To: onlineeditor@pczone.co.uk [snipped] > What came first, the partnership or the idea? How did the idea for Elite > come about and how did you and David Braben meet? The idea was sort of around and obvious in our circle. David was developing 3D graphics on an Acorn Atom. Peter Irvin who had just written 2D spacegame "Starship Command" was talking about writing a 3D one. I met David at dinner at Jesus College as undergraduates. > How did you get into games development and what had you worked on prior > to Elite? I wrote games as a hobby on a range of early machines. First published game was "Reversi", the "Free Fall". > Do you consider the period you were developing Elite a special time, or > was it a complete nightmare? It was fun. I was in the first and second years of a maths degree and in the first year particularly i was keeping up with the work really easily so had plenty of free time. > Did you ever think, either before or during development, that you might > have bitten off more than you could chew? No. Once feasibility of graphics was established it all went fairly well. The problem was having too little room to do what we wanted, not that what we wanted was too hard, > Today's games go through a lengthy pre-production and design process > before > work is done on programming. How different was it back in 1983/84 - did > you > just get stuck in and hope for the best? Yes. We discussed and planned a little but pretty much just wrote the code. > How long did it take to complete Elite and what were the milestones you > reached along the way? Getting some ships rotating and flying was the prime milestone. After that, things just slotted in. > What influenced you more in those early days; other games, sci-fi > films/books, or the technical challenge? How many times did you watch > Hitchhikers and 2001: Space Odyssey during development? I can't remember listening to HHGTTG or seeing 2001 during development but they were certainly influences. I read Larry Niven, Harry Harrison and Keith Laumer as a kid. > Developing a freeform game is pretty radical these days, more so back in > 1983/84? Why did you go down such a route - what was wrong with another > Defender clone? Clones are boring. > It's hard to imagine fitting such a game into just a few KB of memory? > What > were the technical difficulties you faced and how easy was it to > overcome > them? It was lack of RAM all the way. It was the cassette version that was hard, the BBC disk version had bags of room in comparison. I would have been possible to do a complete rewrite and save a lot of memory but that would have taken too long so we had to refine endlessly on a small scale. Wasting hours staring at code trying to find byte savings. It meant the code was pretty sound though. > At the time only text adventures boasted the same depth of backstory. > How > did the idea for the story, The Dark Wheel, come about? What > involvement did > you have with the story and how important do you think it was to the > success > of the game? I think it helped the game, but the game would have been big without it. Rob pretty much did his own thing with "Dark Wheel". Acornsoft commissioned him, a novella was their idea. I mentioned to Rob that i usually found the grizzled veteran guiding the novice heros far more interesting than the heros themselves in such works. > Even the manual was quite radical. How did Robert Holdstock become > involved > and did he have any influence on the actual game? [[I don't suppose you > have Robert Holdstock's email address?]] I can't remember him having any influence on the core game. Some of the stuff added to disk elite attempted to implement his fiction but not very much. "Rock hermits" - ships hidden inside asteroids - was a very nice idea, since it slotted into the framework so well, and that came from him. > Did you consider Elite to be ground-breaking while you were working on > it? Yes. > How do you view the game today? Are you proud or do you ever wish people > would just shut up about it and let you get on with new projects? I'm proud of it. I like hearing how much of an effect it had on people's lives. Thats partly why i'm so concerned about modern adrenaline snuff fest computer games. Games effect kids' minds. > What do you wish you had been able to include in the original game that > had to be removed during development? Nothing had to be removed during development that i can recall. Everything survived into the disk version that we wanted to keep. I was sad to have no mining and so few ships in the cassette version and in my view the secret missions, though few, did round the disk version out nicely. There was no music in the BBC versions of course but users can usually choose their own music. > What input did you have on the various conversions that were made? What > was your favourite version and why? I had very little input on the conversions we did not do ourselves. My favourite version is NES Elite. I like the icon strip control replacing the keyboard. Its was finely polished and technically by far the most challenging hardware. > How do you view the PC version of Elite? What was your particular role > on > that particular version and how do you think it stands against the > others, > gameplay-wise? We were not involved, which was probably a mistake. At the time i felt that such a game was bound to be implementable easily on such powerful machines and it would be best to just let the programmers who know the machine get the most from it. I've not played PC Elite much. I don't like playing other peoples conversions. Its a real pity the first PC version wasn't speed governed. I don't really want to get into comparing the conversions. With my website I've tried to keep every version available via emulation so people can pick their own favourite and recapture their own childhood. > Why is it, do you think, that no-one has managed to better Elite? What > games > today would you consider to be closest in spirit to the game and what > space > combat/trading games are you a fan of or are looking forward to? I've not looked at games much and certainly no space games except just recently when i checked out the demo for Iwar and thought it was somewhat lacking. Why has no one bettered it? Because good game design is not easy i suspect. Perhaps the companies concerned should have spent less money on pregen videos and employed me as a gameplay consultant. > Space combat games are dying breed these days. Why do you think this is > and > where do you think the future for the genre lies? It has a future definitely. There are attractors out there in gamespace waiting to be found. I think publishers are locked into a market dynamic that is more likely to produce dross than quality. Breakthroughs need vision and vision is seldom quantifiable. Its a matter of faith, not greed. There is a certain moral responsibility of organisations with high capital to speculate on blue skies stuff - because if they don't who will? - but they seldom do. Society only really works if people seek to contribute to it rather than just seeking to benefit /from/ it. > How did you feel when Elite was finished; tired, depressed, elated.? > Did you have any idea about this monster you created? It was never really finished because one version followed another. Publication was a worry because because that was the big responsibility to provide final bugfree code. Which we didn't because the first disk release had asteroids disabled [my bug] and consequently more traders. > When did you find out about how successful the game was? How did you > feel > about that? What was the feedback like at the time? The reviews were all ecstatic so we knew we'd made it creatively, which was important to us. We were very pleased to have made so much money so quickly, though by today's standards it was modest wealth. Feedback was almost all positive apart from some maliciously gleeful crackers. Some people objected to the unrealism of dust-not-stars and massively fast planet rotations but that didn't bother me at all since i knew realism would have played worse. > After Elite, how difficult was it for you - creatively - to pick > yourself up > and get on with a sequel? Did you even want to do a sequel? Oh yes. We were fully underway on 6502 Elite 2 and contrary to recent public allegations by certain parties i put a lot of work into that. Only when it became clear that 6502 was not the future and we had to jump to 68000 did I bail. > You've had a very public bust-up with Davidsince, but looking back do > you > think that without the other, Elite would have ever been the game that > it > was? What was it that you both brought to the project that made it > special? > What were your respective strengths and weaknesses and the roles that > you > each had? David was a competent and industrious coder. He was also more "business minded" as the saying goes. We were both creative individuals and both became expert in BBC 6502. He was coming at programming from an electronics direction and was stronger on hardware issues. I came at it from a mathematical direction and handled most of the speed critical stuff. > What one aesthetic or technical achievement in Elite are you most proud > of? NES Elite's selftiming productive code and other mechanisms to provide vector graphics on a sprite machine is my favourite code achievement. Aesthetically, the BBC Elite rotating Cobra III title page. That one image defined the game for me. > How do you view the subsequent Elite sequels? I've not played them. What i've heard is not good, though i respect the attempt to simulate the real physical universe i think it was a mistake. > What have you been up to since Elite (it's been a while, I know)? > > What was the brief for Elite Plus and what was your input as to it's > design? > Is there anything you'd like to have added but couldn't? > Where there any technical difficulties working on Elite Plus? > > How do you view Elite Plus today and the Elite series as a whole? See above re PC Elite. > Why is it, do you think, that no-one has managed to better Elite? What > games > today would you consider to be closest in spirit to the game and what > space > combat/trading games are you a fan of or are looking forward to? Why has no one bettered it? I don't know because given the resources others have, i am sure *i* could. It may be the publisher dynamic i mentioned previously. I don't follow the genre at all beyond checking out the unofficial Elite versions. I want to keep a clear perspective incase i do a follow up space game. ian b - www.ibell.co.uk