Press Release 24/11/99

BELL MARKS 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF ELITE BY RELEASING SOURCES

This month sees the 15th anniversary of the first version of ELITE,
the game that spawned the 3D space combat and trading genre, and to 
commemorate the occasion, co-author Ian Bell has released the game's 
program sources.

The first version of Elite was for the BBC Microcomputer, and was
released in November 1984 by publisher Acornsoft. What Acornsoft
foresaw as a 'cult' game rapidly became a mainstream blockbuster,
with real-time wireframe graphics that stood out in a market
dominated by sprite-based platformers, and revolutionary gameplay
that put the player in the cockpit of a one-man spaceship, fighting, 
trading and exploring across eight galaxies while striving to raise 
their rating to the top level - 'Elite'.

The game was converted to almost all other 8 and 16-bit platforms, and 
through publisher Firebird and later Microprose achieved then-remarkable 
sales of over 500,000 units. Personal Computer World famously summed up 
Elite's appeal with the phrase: "Game? It's a way of life!", and it has 
been cited as the inspiration for many subsequent 3D space games. The 
last version was a substantial update for the Acorn Archimedes, published 
by Hybrid in 1991.

Today's release by co-author Bell of the Elite program sources follows in 
an industry tradition begun by id software with their release of the 
Wolfenstein 3D game sources in 1995. The sources allows fans of the game 
to examine the original programming to discover the inner workings and 
the programming techniques employed.

Says Bell "I've lost count over the years of how many have asked me how 
it was possible to fit the game in the 20K of program memory available on 
the original BBC Microcomputer. What awed most seemed to be the eight 
galaxies with 2000-odd star systems, each with unique name and 
description etc. In fact these were algorithmically generated on 
the fly rather than stored, but such synthetic generation of game content 
had not been seen before at the time. Others asked about the maths 
required to implement the fully 3D gameplay, which was unprecedented, on 
an 8-bit 2MHz CPU. I hope that releasing the program sources will satisfy 
those still curious to discover how we accomplished what we did on a 
computer with about a thousandth of the power of the modern PC."

The Elite sources are available from Ian Bell's Elite Home Page, at 
www.bigfoot.com/~elite0 ('elite zero').

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Photo of authors Ian Bell and David Braben at the 1984 launch of Elite: 
http://www.bigfoot.com/~elite0/press/brabbell.gif

Screen shot of BBC Microcomputer Elite:
http://www.bigfoot.com/~elite0/press/bbcelite.gif

Photo of Ian Bell today:
http://www.bigfoot.com/~elite0/press/icgbell.jpg

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NOTE: Ian Bell's Elite Home Page (www.bigfoot.com/~elite0) is a 
repository of information relating to the Elite games, and contains over 
a dozen commercially-defunct versions of the games plus links to 
emulators that allow them to be enjoyed on modern PCs.

NOTE: Elite was written by Ian Bell and David Braben, begun which they 
were students of Mathematics and Natural Sciences respectively at the 
University of Cambridge.

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