Apparently there's an exhibition at the Science museum in London on the BBC Micro that I should really go see. How this computer came about is an interesting story in itself and the article covers some of the basics, but there's one overriding thing that came out of this very old and underpowered system. Two men called David Braben and Ian Bell decided to write a game that has had me hooked it it's sequels and spiritual successors ever since: Elite.
Yeah yeah, everybody knows about it but the BBC keep mentioning it so I'm just spreading the joy! They've interviewed Braben about the machine and he's right on a lot of those points, but they're mainly technical so I'll save you from a rant on console effect on the number of programmers nowadays.
I wonder if my BBCs still work. I've got a couple squirreled away somewhere but I don't have a copy of Elite on a disk that'll fit. I still remember the first time I saw Elite and the hours I'd spend playing it on my Spectrum, getting in a few minutes at lunchtime on a BBC at school and then Elite Plus on the PC (a fine version!). I wonder if the NES version will ever make it to Virtual Console on the wii?
Since I'm guessing all my readers play Eve at least as obsessively as me so it's with pointing out a CVG article from last September where Braben is interviewed and mentions Elite and Eve. Whenever he's interviewed he always seems sort of positive about Eve, but his plans for an online version of Elite still seem to be burning away in the background. Of course this could never really work nowadays as the target player base are all playing Eve already and it falls into the same problem that any game that is trying to displace World of Warcraft has, you're not going to get those players to shift.
When it comes to the single player game he mentions, on the other hand, he has a guaranteed sale from me if he ever finishes it.
posted @ Thursday, March 20, 2008 11:52 AM