BigKid.com.au

Elite Game Developers

Masters of their universe appeared in the Guardian Weekend magazine last Saturday and covers the conception and development of old-skool space sim Elite by its programmers David Braben and Ian Bell.

I have a real soft-spot for Elite, having played it for many nights on a BBC micro. But like many who played and loved it, I had no real idea of how absolutely ground-breaking it was until much much later. To think that the publisher initially thought the game might be risky to take on because more than one person had coded it! This was after a rejection from another publisher who balked at the idea that a computer game would take longer than 10 minutes to play.

The article is an excerpt from an upcoming book - Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin - and provides a fascinating glimpse of how far game development has come. Now if only someone would do an OpenGL version I’d be hooked once more.

  posted by bruce · at 7:09 am · filed under News