Unreleased Games | Elite [SNES, Genesis, GameBoy]

Elite was a revolutionary game, that changed the way simulations were played. Released on muliple platforms, it was then discovered Acornsoft had plans for a SNES, and gameboy version which was leaked.

Ian Bell's Website

[GregsGameRoom]

I first learned of Elite when I got Frontier: Elite II for the Atari ST. Amazing game and I ended up becoming a pirate and hoarding as much credits as I could. Then I eagerly awaited Elite: Dangerous and that game is incredible! Very complex though. Anyway, as amazing as it is, I'm surprised more people don't know about it. Oh, also the portal area at the end of TRON: Legacy looks exactly like the Elite logo. Coincidence?

[attackofthecopyrightbots]

i left for 7 months and came back to see some new uploads eyy

[paperclip]

9:33 i think you've mistaken that statement. Elite never been an mmorpg game until Dangerous which came out in 2014. Maybe the more accurate is the godfather of 'space sim' genre, because in a sense it really is. The sequel, Elite Frontier in 93 pretty much set the bar for the whole genre by featuring planetary landing and 1:1 galaxy map, decades before No Man's Sky existed. Otherwise, great video!

[lurkerrekrul]

I would debate that the 80s were the best time in video game history. Each new system that came out was a marked improvement on what came before and many games broke new ground. By the time the SNES and Genesis came out, most games were a variation on an established genre, just with better graphics. As your video notes, Elite came out in 1984 and was a pioneering game that broke new ground in the space simulation genre. While many games of this era WERE simply high score chasers, there were also many more involved games, such as Sid Meier's Pirates! or Hacker. Granted most of these were computer games, but even on consoles, you had games like Sub Hunt for the Intellivision, or Solaris for the Atari 2600.

As for Elite...

The C64 version may not have been the fastest of the 8-bit versions, but it had a second type of space station, and played The Blue Danube when the docking computer was activated. All of the 8-bit versions were fairly well done. On the other hand, while the Amiga and Atari ST versions were faster, smoother and more colorful, they felt empty in comparison. The only other ships you ever encounter are pirates, so it feels less like a living world and more like a shooting gallery. Elite Plus for MD-DOS looks nice, but I'm not sure what speed it's supposed to run at. If you speed up DOSBos so that the animation is smooth, the game plays too fast. If you slow it down so that the game is playable, the animation gets choppy. Also, they removed all the keyboard controls in favor of a clunky, mouse-drive icon system. The Acorn Archimedes version is regarded as the best version because of the fact that the player is no longer the center of attention. Other ships will go about their business and sometimes pick fights with each other.

David Braben wrote the sequel, Frontier by himself. It's an impressive tech demo, but I think it's a crappy game. It's full of bugs, combat is reduced to jousting matches, since there's no way to slow to maneuvering speed during a fight, the realistic planet movement makes it EXTREMELY difficult to get anywhere by flying manually, while the autopilot has a bad habit of crashing you into planets.

He also wrote Frontier: First Encounters, which I've never played. I just remember that it was panned upon release for the numerous bugs it shipped with.

I've never played Elite Dangerous. Aside from the fact that I don't have a sufficiently new enough system to run it, I have a moral objection to the fact that there's no offline single player mode. You need to be connected to play the game at all.

As for alternatives, Christian Pinder took the source code to the original version of Elite and ported it to Windows with improved graphics and sounds as Elite: The New Kind. And if you want something more modern looking, check out Oolite, that is basically Elite v3.0. Although the author(s) claim it's not a clone of Elite, it's totally a clone of Elite. Same ships, same planets, same ship upgrades (mostly), same options (mostly), but with vastly updated graphics and new mechanics, such as having to request permission to dock, being able to follow other ships through their hyperspace wormholes, etc. It can also be easily expanded by dropping mods into the add-ons directory. It can be unfair at times though. It's not unusual to get jumped by a swarm of 10-20 pirates, and the one time I encountered a Thargoid ship, it was just continuous laser fire until I was dead.

Elite was a popular game that still has a devoted following.

[HebegoiN]

there is no rom for the SNES version of Elite on Ian Belle's website. Where are you getting it?

[attackofthecopyrightbots]

back 6 months later
sad to see no new upload but like before, expect my return in half a year

[susanfit]

Can you do more of those Unreleased Games?

[attackofthecopyrightbots]

well, I did not renege on my promise, I have come back half a year later bro

[ColossalKilla]

Your statement about the mid 90's being a revolutionary time for video games is most definitely not debatable.

[virtuafighter]

The C64 version is not much superior to the BBC micro disc version. The tape version on the BBC has some cut parts.