Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (17 page)

Peter Irvin had success with the 1983 release of
Starship Command
, a quirky shoot-em-up with a clever rotation mechanic, which earned him respect and a little bit of cash. Much later,
Jeremy Smith created a game called
Thrust
, a gentle yet addictive depiction of a spaceship fighting gravity using occasional boosts from its rockets. It was more successful than
Irvin’s effort, becoming a mainstay of Superior Software and Firebird’s back catalogue and a fan favourite.

Ian Bell beat them both to publication, however, with an interpretation of the tabletop game Othello called
Reversi.
It was a good place for a good mathematician to start: the board
game format was graphically straightforward, but exposed itself quickly if the computer’s artificial intelligence wasn’t up to scratch. Though Othello is far simpler than chess, the
game’s computer opponent still needed to project multiple turns into the future, guessing at the player’s strategies and plotting its own. The teenaged Bell worked through these puzzles
alone, and folded them all into a small but very efficient program that could fit in the lesser version of a BBC Micro. It ran so quickly that Bell included a pause routine, to give the impression
that the computer was thinking hard about its choices.

By the time he had arrived at Cambridge University to read maths, Bell was already an established games writer – he had followed
Reversi
with a graphically intense arcade game
called
Free Fall
, which had been published by Acornsoft. He was at Jesus College, a fully fledged idyll of academe, awash with precocious undergraduates, not many of whom were familiar
with computer games. But Bell found a fellow obsessive, someone who was interested in science fiction and had tried writing a game or two. His name was David Braben.

Acorn’s computers were both complex and simple. They were complex in that they were teeming with expensive hardware that could
connect with
teletext readers, printers and robot arms. But they were simple in the way that most computers were – so that all a hardcore user really needed to know how to program was a single chip, the
6502. So when Essex sixth former David Braben received an Acorn Atom as a Christmas present in 1981, his computer shared plenty of DNA with the new BBC Micros that were selling for three times the
price. It didn’t come close to the wish list of the BBC’s education department, but it did feature a version of Sophie Wilson’s BASIC and assembler and Steve Furber’s memory
design, and it was somewhere in the same league graphically. Braben was resourceful, too: he started tinkering with his machine, adding memory and augmenting the innards. Within a few months, he
had rebuilt his Atom until it had become something of a Frankenstein’s BBC Micro.

And with no money to buy games, he had a go at writing his own. The computer came with a comprehensive manual, and the Atom boasted a blossoming programming scene, amply supported by magazines
and their type-in listings. He jumped in enthusiastically, recalling, ‘The atmosphere was great and it was very easy to write simple games at the time. Most of the machines fired up in a
programming language, like the Atom, so it was really straightforward.’

Even before he had bought his computer, Braben had been fascinated with 3D graphics. The received wisdom at the time was that they couldn’t be done, at least by a novice, but he was a
smart teenager on his way to Cambridge, and was convinced that they couldn’t be that hard. Working in BASIC, he started playing with ideas that showed 3D movement, at first drawing a
‘star field’: a sprinkling of dots that rushed past the viewpoint of the screen.

Braben found that his star field barely animated fast enough to deserve the name – the dots were visibly re-plotting, like paint spots being splattered onto canvas. So he abandoned BASIC
and learnt to code with assembler to reach right down to the 6502 processor. The effect was dramatic: the dots stormed past, and suddenly there was a sensation of movement. His new skill also
opened the door to grander graphics, and soon he had wireframe models of spaceships whizzing
around the speckles of light. He knew that he was onto something: by the time
Braben went up to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, he had the workings of a 3D flight game.

Braben and Bell first met in their college dining hall, and they quickly learnt that they were both writing games on Acorn machines. For Braben, with his underpowered,
over-stretched Atom, there was a practical advantage to linking up with Bell: ‘He had a BBC Micro and I didn’t!’ Braben showed Bell his embryonic space game, and Bell immediately
latched on to it, finding ways to make the graphics run faster and make more than one spaceship appear on screen at any one time. Bell was impressed by the images he had created – this was
something that he had never seen in a computer game before.

They started developing it as a team. ‘We each had loads of great ideas and it seemed logical to work together,’ recalls Braben. ‘We discussed how we could make it into the
sort of game we would both want to play.’ Shooting and combat were added first: the game let the player fire at spaceships, later destroying them in a blaze of particle effects lifted from
Bell’s
Free Fall
. In itself this was an innovation: although 3D combat had been seen in Atari’s tank game
Battlezone
, space combat was more fluid and freeform, and
excitingly mimicked the dogfights seen in the
Star Wars
films.

Their creation also mimicked the form of the arcade games. Braben was fond of arcade machines –
Defender
in particular was a favourite – but the approach didn’t suit
their game: destroying ships for its own sake wasn’t enough to be satisfying, and nor was earning points. ‘The banality of having a score felt wrong,’ he says.

Arcades had been designed to keep the turnover of games high. Players were given three lives and a high score to beat for a quick, repetitive fix, designed to encourage another 10p to drop into
the machine within a few minutes. Longevity was a product of addictiveness, rather than the content of the game, which had to draw players back, and then throw them off as quickly as possible. To
Braben and
Bell, this seemed a bizarre design choice in the home environment where there were no coins to collect.

It was boring, too. The score increased, but Braben found the motivation didn’t: it was an abstraction, occasionally incentivised with a reward. ‘Many games at the time had a
tradition of an additional “life” every 10,000 score, and something else extra at 15,000,’ he says. Their game might have fallen into this trap, but the two young programmers were
unwilling to follow the convention.

It was the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s first government and, as Braben put it, ‘she wasn’t best liked in university circles’. Already the touchstones of her
premiership – individualism, entrepreneurship – were becoming apparent, and Braben and Bell, with some sense of the irony of their choice, put these concepts at the heart of their game.
Instead of increasing their score by shooting spaceships, players would earn money.

‘The score-as-money was the obvious way forwards,’ says Braben. ‘It seemed appropriately ironic at the time with the whole “greed is good” mantra and the
anti-Thatcher protests.’ With this idea set, others naturally followed: that the player could buy more and better weapons; that the points awarded for destroying the ships were payments from
an omniscient power. It was decided that the enemy ships should be villainous, and pirates fitted the role. And if they were pirates, what were they pirating? Goods that they could drop once
destroyed, which the player could pick up for cash. And if pirates dropped cargo, why not have innocent, unaggressive ships do the same thing? But shooting these ships would be morally wrong, so
the player must risk punishment for doing it – by earning the ire of a galactic police force that would send their ships after wrongdoers. The ideas were spun, developed and refined as Braben
and Bell created a universe with internal rules, motives and choices.

One decision in particular cemented the tone of the game: the cargo, a reason for pirates and player alike to shoot at other ships, should be available to be bought and sold. The pair developed
the
idea that players would travel across a galaxy where each star system had different characteristics – there would be industrial, agricultural and anarchic
planets. And each type of world would set a different price for different goods. A space pilot could make a fortune buying cheap and selling dear, judging who would pay the best price for the food
or minerals he or she had picked up for a song on an impoverished world. Like a fleet of virtual Thatcher’s children, the players could become traders.

But they didn’t have to. Instead, they could hang around wealthy star systems, gunning down trading ships for their cargo and scarpering when the police showed up. Or they could visit
dodgy, anarchic planets and kill villains for profit. Or they could shoot at police ships leaving a space station, capture their escape pods and sell them as slaves. And they didn’t have to
limit themselves to any one of these scenarios – the gameplay could be mixed and matched at the player’s whim. It was a freedom that ran throughout the game: ‘We wanted the player
to be able to choose,’ says Braben.

And gamers were given a vast playground in which to make their choices. They would have thousands of star systems to explore, reaching across hundreds of galaxies. They could name their pilot,
whose odyssey would last far longer than a single playing session – as with adventure games, their progress could be saved to tape or disc and picked up later. And as with
MUD
,
pilots would have ranks to note the kills notched up on their consoles. Braben and Bell both appreciated Douglas Adams, and they borrowed the first two levels from his
Hitchhiker’s Guide
to The Galaxy
: Harmless, and Mostly Harmless. The highest level was their own creation, and gave their groundbreaking game its name. Every player started out as Harmless, but after weeks of
play and 6,400 kills, a pilot could achieve the very highest accolade:
Elite
.

The design was all encompassing, the appearance completely immersive, and the universe they were creating was vast. But throughout the development of the game, Braben and Bell’s problem
was that they had to show all of this – planets, spaceships, space
stations – using the power of a modest 6502 processor. And they had to fit it all into a BBC
Micro’s 32 kilobytes of memory.

A layman’s measure of the progress of computing power is to look at the growth in a typical computer’s memory. It’s not an ideal charting tool – only
one yardstick amongst dozens – and the division between memory for running programs and storage is often blurred. But nonetheless it makes the rapid advance of the home computer astonishingly
plain: a modern PC, or even a smart phone, contains easily a million times the memory found in the machines available in the eighties. For modern systems, memory constraints are still a boundary,
but also something of a moveable goal, as a compromise can usually be found somewhere – in the number of colours, the quality of the sound, how blurred a texture looks close up.

But as memory becomes tinier, the choices become harder. Fewer bytes stops meaning a less detailed experience, and starts to cut into what can be done at all. When a computer has only 32
kilobytes to play with, data becomes more and more precious, until eventually each tiny tweak of memory will be carefully planned, designed and tested. It’s not simply a case of doing less
with less memory – the challenge is qualitatively different.

The first lesson a BBC Micro developer learnt was that the memory they had to use was already rather smaller than 32 kilobytes. The image held on the screen took up a vast chunk of it: a third,
or two-thirds for really high-resolution or colourful graphics. Bell and Braben chose a high-resolution two-colour mode, which immediately bumped their available memory down to 22 kilobytes. And
into this, they squeezed eight galaxies, each with hundreds of stars, planets and civilisations.

They used an elegant mathematical technique. Each aspect of a solar system and its society could be represented by a number: its co-ordinates, the prices it charged for goods, its political and
economic type, and even, using a lookup table of syllables, its name. And there are some calculation processes that can generate a string of
numbers that appear to be
random, but are in fact entirely predictable: the same set of numbers is produced every time the routine is run. Combining these two concepts allowed Bell and Braben to create unlimited galactic
data from a tiny amount of memory.

Of course, even pseudo-random numbers aren’t always convenient. The co-ordinates produced could leave some stars completely unreachable, so Bell and Braben wrote a program to discard any
galaxy where this happened. The prices might also be wildly askew, so an algorithm was written to tie them to the economy of the planet. And the names could throw up some unfortunate combinations.
Bell and Braben held a ‘beauty parade’ to weed out obscenities: they decided that it was just about okay to have the planet ‘Arse’ deep in the depths of space, but nothing
ruder awaited a blushing space pirate.

The galactic milieu offered players months, or even years of gameplay. They might have had an inkling that such scale wouldn’t have been possible if each element had been handcrafted, but
that didn’t need explaining – it only added to the wonder of an unexplored universe.

The visuals, on the other hand, were an unmissable technical marvel. Planets, bright white stars, dogfighting spacecraft and orbiting space stations all rotated and whizzed past as the
player’s ship manoeuvred amongst them. It was magnificent, in an absurdly better league than anything else seen on a home computer at the time. The two creators spent eighteen months, working
between their university studies, to make Braben’s primitive demonstration into a cockpit’s eye view of a living science fiction universe, and it paid off.
Elite
looked
astonishing.