Dave Braben and Ian Bell created one of the true milestones of videogames history when they wrote Elite. Elite was, and still is, one of the most emersive and atmospheric gaming experiences you could ever have. From the early days on the BBC through numerous incarnations on other platforms Elite's innovations have captured the hearts of gamers and although some have tried no one has yet recaptured that incredible sense of open ended freeform game design. The open source Galileo Project is an attempt to do just that, only this time the developers are trying to create a fully breathing online multi-player universe..
You can play the original game here through your web browser..
And you can buy the T-Shirt here..
3 comments
Worth noting that the t-shirt is actually a Need To Know t-shirt, subtly co-opting those beautiful Elite vectors for their own twisted three-one-three-three-seven purposes.
Wouldn't want you advertising them unintentionally.
Posted by Anonymous on 7 Jul 2001 at 05:10 PM
Do you reckon they'll let us have Tarbit's Landing in the Galileo Project if we ask nicely? :)
Posted by Anonymous on 7 Jul 2001 at 09:18 PM
That David Braben site is fantastic, especially the section on Frontier..
Notable excerpts:
"It was made up of in the region of 250,000 lines of 68000 assembler, and as such was one of the largest (and last) commercial programs to be written entirely in assembler"
"It was the first game to have real-sized planets, where cities could be viewed from orbit, it was the first to use curved surfaces ... , the only game to do a palette-fit every frame to get best use of colours ... , and ... is the only piece of software ... that attempts to simulate our entire galaxy."
I don't know about anyone else but for me it brings to mind Republic: The Revolution in terms of it's technical scope and striving for realism. Speaking of which, there's a load of new screenshots up on Elixirs site since last time I looked if anyone's interested.
You can download a shareware version of Frontier from this fan site.
Posted by Anonymous on 7 Jul 2001 at 09:31 PM