The first time I played Elite was in a branch of Dixons, on Hounslow High Street. I remember it quite distinctly. I was about ten years old, and I think I’d wandered in with my parents for some reason, and they had Elite Plus running on one of the PCs. (In fact, they had it there for a long time – years – and I’ve often wondered if anyone in the store was a fan who liked to play it during quiet times…it seemed a strange thing to use for display.) There was nobody around, and naturally enough I didn’t have the first idea what I was doing, and I just flew around, back and forth, watching the sliders move around, heading towards a planet. And crashing. I remember that part.
About a year later, I got my first PC, my first computer, actually, as we skipped the early days in my house, my parents deciding that they’d rather wait for a real computer to become available; which got me to a 386 PC. In 1994, I had my first taste of Elite, with a game that would soak up far too much of my childhood. Frontier: Elite 2. I played that game to death, usually in six-week bursts, building a character up from the first Eagle fighter at Ross 154 until I ran out of steam. I’d spend hours flying between Barnard’s Star and Sol, going from Eagle to Adder, then to Cobra Mark III, then fly over to Imperial space and work up to the Imperial Trader, the ship I think I spent most of my time in. (Back then, I was definitely Imperial…)
Frontier: First Encounters was one of the first games I bought on CD – one of the first games I got for the Pentium that was my second computer. I played that almost as much, but somehow, it wasn’t FE 2. I didn’t know at the time of the problems that had plagued the release, the launch, but somehow it registered, and I didn’t ever get quite as much play out of it at the time. (Though later, during the 2000s, that was the game I’d go to, oddly enough.) When I first heard about Elite: Dangerous, it was near the end of the Kickstarter, and I didn’t end up backing it, though I was extremely tempted. I did pre-order the game, though, and played it for a time during the first couple of weeks. Circumstances, however, conspired to stop me playing for a while, as I changed jobs, and that sucked away all of my free time for ages.
That job? I’m actually a science-fiction writer, and in 2013 I quit my job to write full-time. I almost Kickstarted for one of the ‘write a book’ slots, and that I didn’t is still something I regret. If the offer was open now…
Fast-forward to today, 2018, and my increasing realization that I needed a hobby. And the sudden death of my gaming PC, which at seven years was really showing its age at that point anyway. I ended up getting a new gaming rig, one far better than my old one, top-notch graphics card and all, and I quickly reinstalled Elite: Dangerous and fired it up, curious to see how it would look on a machine designed to run games such as that. I was blown away, and found my old save still intact, sitting at an outpost in a Hauler, having waited for four long years. At that point, I resolved that he would wait no more, and set out to play again – and for the last fortnight, I’ve been racking up an hour or two every night, slowly building up.
I’m a writer – and I’ve always loved the lore behind Elite: Dangerous. I must have read ‘The Dark Wheel’ a dozen times, and I want to get into the secrets of the setting. I’ve missed the early days of the Thargoid invasion, but there’s an awful lot of storyline there yet to play out, and the secrets of the Dark Wheel itself remain untouched. As does, of course, the maybe-mythical world of Raxxla, which we have been told is somewhere in the game, waiting to be found.
So far, I’ve concentrated on building up. I’m going to need Elite status in at least one of the three fields – and given that I’m pretty hopeless at combat, exploration and trading are probably the ways to go. Over the last six or seven hours of gameplay I’ve worked my way up to a pair of ships – a Type 6 Transporter, Eudoxus, and a Diamondback Explorer, Nearchus, both of them equipped to A-grade. (And incidentally managed to get a Sol System Permit as well.) My first order of business, then, is a few long expeditions, designed to get me some funding and the coveted Elite status for exploration. Because while I don’t know this for certain, I’d guess that the Pilot’s Federation and Jameson Memorial are going to be important at some point, and needing Elite status to get there makes it a good target to aim for…
