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Elite: From the interior of a COBRA MK III
Keys for the Spectrum version of Elite: Front View/Launch (1); Back View/ Buy (2); Left View/Sell (3); Right View/Equip (4); Escape Pod (Q); Energy Bomb (W): ECM (E); Find Planet (R); Fire Missile (F) Target (T); Unarm (U); Galactic Chart (I); Local Chart (0); Data on System (P); Fire Laser (A); Dive/Cursor Up (5); Climb/ Cursor Down (X); Anti-clockwise Roll/Cursor Left (N); Clockwise Roll/Cursor Right (M); Distance (D); Hyperspace/ Intergalactic Jump (H); Torus Jump Drive (J); Prices (K); Status (L); Inventory (ENTER); Freeze (SHIFT); Docking Computer (C); Home Cursor (B); Save/Decelerate (SYMBOL SHIFT); Continue/Accelerate (BREAK); click here for full manual
Considering I make my living from writing games these days, I can’t say I’m a great fan of the current state of electronic gaming. For the last ten years at least, particularly in the eyes of Sony and Microsoft, computer games have been all about higher fidelity – better and better graphics and sound, an arms race for a more “realistic’ gaming experience. But perhaps this whole approach to the concept of the simulated reality is missing the point somewhat.
Firstly, games are about escapism. We have quite enough reality – it is in plentiful supply. The appeal of gaming is in exploring abstracted systems that are more logical and structured than the chaos of ordinary life, systems we can master easier than we can the complexity of reality. As a core principle this is the appeal of all games from Sudoku to World of Warcraft.
Secondly, creating a believable and absorbing game environment is about more than just the quality of graphics and sound. Let me explain …
We (Littleloud) payed a visit to the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum before xmas, which charted the history of computer games from Pong to PS3. Experiencing some tangible artifacts of the old days – BBC Micros, Ataris, Commodores and Spectrums – made me very nostalgic for the early days of computer games, when the field was so much more interesting and experimental than it is today. In the eighties, when I was an eager young consumer of the new home computing revolution, the hardware was very limited, but the originality and creativity of the programmers, forced to wring every last drop of performance out of their primitive kit, more than made up for it. It was this spirit that built the industry, yet this now seems completely forgotten.
Today games often have budgets exceeding Hollywood films, assembled by huge teams of graphic artists, story-boarders, voice talent and programmers. Their aim is to create cinematic experiences on our home systems, with believable worlds we can explore as if they were real places. But still, somehow, not one of these multi-million pound developed worlds has managed to capture the feeling of infinite possibility that you got wandering the mathematically generated universe of Elite; the product of two geeks exploring the limits of the 32k BBC Model B back in the early eighties.
Everything that made up the universe of Elite, the names of planets, their descriptions, commodities, politics etc, was generated procedurally using the Fibonacci sequence (explained in more detail here). This isn’t the same as being randomly generated, this universe was a fully defined and predicable place – predictable because the rules that generated it were reproducible, so a star with a certain name and location would always be in that same location and have the same name. But, by creating the universe using a mathematical formula, it meant it was both predictable, yet still surprising – it was so large that players of the game could easily explore places that were essentially uncharted, even by its creators.
In 1984 Ian Bell and David Braben, the creators of Elite, had produced a game that was capable of defining a thoroughly believable universe containing 2 to the power of 48 galaxies – that’s 282,000,000,000,000 possible destinations to fly to, all within the 22k available memory of the BBC Model B computer. The final release of Elite had this number substantially reduced – 8 galaxies of 256 stars each – on the insistence of publishers Acornsoft, because a universe of such a size would be too daunting, and would likely induce a minor existential crisis in the player, making them question how such a place had been created.
Basing an artificial reality upon the Fibonacci sequence was a piece of simple brilliance, born out of the necessity of the tools they were working with. But it is a trick that can’t easily be applied to the graphically sophisticated environments of modern games (although I would love to see it tried). Today’s worlds are designed, rather than programmed, so their features cannot be allowed such a degree of chaos.
So is this ‘realistic’? Only a religious fool would ever describe our world using the concept of ‘design’. If you were to ask a cosmologist about the nature of reality, she would probably begin by outlining a few essential mathematical principles and constants on which our universe is based, just as the universe of Elite was created. Perhaps only Braben/Bell have had the right idea so far. Perhaps the mathematically generated universe of Elite is actually the most ‘realistic’ simulated world ever created in a computer game.
[ follow-up post: Grandad's Guide to Computer Games Pt 2 ]
tags: vector games retro games elite
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March 18th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I think it’s too easy to make that generalisation, and it’s not entirely true. The increased size of profesional teams and the big bucks nature of the business nowadays certainly leads to a kind of defensive stance from publishers and developers, possibly more so than it used to, but you’re ignoring the very real prospect of digital distribution reversing the trend. That’s actually happening right now, to a small extent, with games available for purchase over the Internet or through other online services – Steam, Xbox Live, the PS3 Store. I can only see it becoming more important in the near future as more people gain more knowledge about what’s available freely or at a (relatively) small cost direct from the developers.
Your post also ignores the endless waves of not just copycat games, but full-on rip-offs – sometimes down to the code – that helped destroy the entire western videogames market in the early ’80s and continued to have a presence throughout the rebirth of the industry when the home computers started to fill the gap. I don’t know how many different versions of Defender, Space Invaders or Pac-Man I’ve played over the years, all exactly the same as each other bar visual quality and name, or how many 2D platformers that had little to distinguish themseleves from each other.
Where I think you can make a solid argument about there being a different approach from the main players in the industry nowadays compared to twenty, twenty-five years ago is on the topic of visual realism. The limited nature of the hardware available at the time meant that you couldn’t get anything even close to a convincing recreation of reality in visual terms, so developers either had to settle for abstract visions of the real world or else abandon reality altogether and create their own reallities or sod it all off and go for the surreal. Or both.
So what you got were lots of games that all still manage to look very unique and are memorable on that basis. And that’s what you don’t tend to get now, because the hardware gives people the opportunity to try and take on blockbuster movies at their own game and put the audience into the middle of something immediately recognisable.
I’d also be wary of making statements about a current lack of artistic vision when compared to days of yore. It’s impossible to tell how much of the look of something like Manic Miner (to pluck an entirely random name out of the air) was determined by the restrictive capabilities of the host machines and how much of it by pure artistic inspiration.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
No, you’re right Dupre. It’s not the black and white ‘old games good, new games bad’ I might have implied. My point is simply that there was a spirit of creative endevour that existed in the early days of computer games, that seems to have been lost.
And true, there was also a spirit of entrepreneurial piss-taking of the time too, as there often are with emerging commercial fields, which accounts for all the Defender clones. But bear in mind that genres were still emerging too, so the multiple spins on PacMan, Space Invaders etc were only rip-offs in the same way as you can say Halo is a rip-off of Doom.
I can’t say I’m very well qualified to talk on the state of current gaming, because I don’t play consoles much. But I do write games – I (along with everyone else and their uncle) make Flash stuff for the web, which is a field still mainly driven by novelty, much like it was in the Spectrum/Commodore days. And I value novelty as a concept far above hi-fidelity.
But your point about web distribution is a good one. What the modern consoles have been lacking in recent years, which early home computing had at the forefront, was accessible programming. When you turned on your ZX Spectrum you were greeted with a cursor, it was a machine to be programmed, not played. You didn’t need a license from Sinclair to write your first game. The XBox and Playstation don’t offer that invitation, although this is changing now too, particularly with Microsoft’s XNA kit.
April 14th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
An important point I feel has been left out of this is that it is not only gaming that has gone big bucks, it is the entire computing industry. Back in the 80s, you were expected to have a reasonable understanding of how your PC worked, or you didnt get to do much with it. Early PCs such as the sinclair, spectrum, commodores, etc. were also an open box. They shipped with builtin programming environments as well as manuals fully detailing the language and memory maps of the machines. All of this at no extra cost. You were allowed, encouraged, some might even say expected to learn basic programming skills, and the industry supported you in doing so.
Nowadays anyone who even thinks about programming is expected by the industry to pay several hundred dollars on the programming environment, books, and courses to even get ones foot in the door. One might argue that the knowledge is publicly available through free environments, and this is true, but the industry no longer supports the average joe learning to use his machine on his own terms. This environment breeds imitation and stifles innovation.
Worse yet, the average consumer has been trained that what matters most is eye-candy (beach volleyball anyone?) and that anything with less than the presentation of a hollywood blockbuster is to be passed over. I must confess that I agree with this, to some extent. As you pointed out, todays (commercial) games are all about graphics. So a commercial game with poor graphics is not likely to make up for it in other areas.