Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
They first approached Thorn EMI; the company's rejection letter stated that the game was too complicated and needed to be finishable in 10 minutes with three lives.
Braben said, "The Elite logo took a while to get right.
The original Acornsoft version of The Dark Wheel promised on its back cover that "[a] sequel to the novella is planned for publication in 1985", but no direct sequel was ever written.
The first version of the game was released for the BBC Micro, model B on tape and disk and "about a month or two later" the Acorn Electron tape version was released.
When the docking computer is activated in the Commodore 64 version and some other versions, a musical rendition of "The Blue Danube" Waltz is played, as a nod to a space docking sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In his review of the game for Beebug Magazine in 1984, David Fell called Elite "the best game ever" for the BBC Micro.
In Personal Computer Games Shingo Sugiura said "Elite is vast, complex and very, very absorbing.
John Cook wrote in the December 1984 issue of Micro Adventurer "A masterpiece such as this is difficult to describe within existing parameters" and "By any standards, Elite is an excellent game, certainly in the Top Three this year.
Crash magazine said about the Spectrum version "Elite is one of the most imaginative ever to be designed to run on a home computer" and gave it a score of 92%, while at the same time it was a best-seller in the Gallup charts.
The game was number 16 in the Your Sinclair "Top 100 Speccy Games" in 1992, was voted number 7 in the Your Sinclair "Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time" in 1993 and was voted the 9th best game of all time by the readers of Retro Gamer Magazine for an article that was scheduled to be in a special Your Sinclair tribute issue.
Similarly Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 97%, stating that it was "a brilliant game of blasting and trading and is certainly the best game I've seen this year" in 1985 and the Amiga version 98% in 1989.
In 1984, Elite received the Golden Joystick Award for "Best Original Game".
In 1985 the game was awarded the "Best Game Overall" for that year by readers of Crash magazine, and "Game of the Year" by Computer Gamer.
In a 1992 survey of science fiction games, Computer Gaming World gave the title two of five stars, stating that its "popularity was largely a result of being one of the first space games with a 'large' universe to explore".
It was ranked #14 top game of all time by Next Generation in 1996, #12 on IGN's 2000 "Top 25 PC Games of All Time" list, the #3 most influential video game ever by the Times Online in 2007, #6 "Greatest Game" by Stuff magazine in 2008, #1 "Top Retro Game" by Retro Gamer in 2004, and #1 "best game of the 1980s" by Next Generation in 2008.
The first game was followed by the sequels Frontier: Elite II in 1993, and Frontier: First Encounters in 1995, which introduced Newtonian physics, realistic star systems, and seamless freeform planetary landings.
Non-Acorn versions were each first published by Firebird and Imagineer.
They first approached Thorn EMI; the company's rejection letter stated that the game was too complicated and needed to be finishable in 10 minutes with three lives.
The first version of the game was released for the BBC Micro, model B on tape and disk and "about a month or two later" the Acorn Electron tape version was released.
In a 1992 survey of science fiction games, Computer Gaming World gave the title two of five stars, stating that its "popularity was largely a result of being one of the first space games with a 'large' universe to explore".
In 2015, Guinness World Records awarded Elite (1984) as the first game to feature a procedurally generated world.
According to the lead programmer of the 16 bit Amiga/Atari ST and the MSX conversions Rob Nicholson, he did not have access to the source code because of contractual issues and had to write them "blind".
However, many players found gameplay difficult and unfamiliar; the game was so controversial that The Micro User devoted its April 1985 letter column to readers debating it.
John Cook wrote in the December 1984 issue of Micro Adventurer "A masterpiece such as this is difficult to describe within existing parameters" and "By any standards, Elite is an excellent game, certainly in the Top Three this year.
The game was number 16 in the Your Sinclair "Top 100 Speccy Games" in 1992, was voted number 7 in the Your Sinclair "Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time" in 1993 and was voted the 9th best game of all time by the readers of Retro Gamer Magazine for an article that was scheduled to be in a special Your Sinclair tribute issue.
Elite received very positive reviews on its launch and the BBC Micro version eventually sold 107,898 copies.
Bell estimates that approximately 600,000 copies were eventually sold for all platforms combined, while Frontier Developments' Elite page states that the numbers are around a million units.
Crash magazine said about the Spectrum version "Elite is one of the most imaginative ever to be designed to run on a home computer" and gave it a score of 92%, while at the same time it was a best-seller in the Gallup charts.
Similarly Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 97%, stating that it was "a brilliant game of blasting and trading and is certainly the best game I've seen this year" in 1985 and the Amiga version 98% in 1989.
However, many players found gameplay difficult and unfamiliar; the game was so controversial that The Micro User devoted its April 1985 letter column to readers debating it.
John Cook wrote in the December 1984 issue of Micro Adventurer "A masterpiece such as this is difficult to describe within existing parameters" and "By any standards, Elite is an excellent game, certainly in the Top Three this year.
It was written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell and was originally published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro computer in September 1984.
Versions for 32X and Sega Mega Drive were in development but cancelled due to Sony backing out of the project and lack of publisher.
Elite was Firebird's best-selling Commodore game as of late 1987.
The passages quoted on this page are taken verbatim from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles.Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) — reusable under those terms. They are the work of the people who wrote them.