Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (18 page)

Under the bonnet, it was, if anything, even more inspired. When Braben had heard that 3D on a home computer wasn’t possible, he wasn’t being misled: it was a slow, cumbersome process
to work through the sums required for perspective calculation and rotation, and a home processor, built around simple addition, never seemed up to the job. The most basic building block for 3D
graphics required processor-intense ‘floating point’ division, and rotation needed a
huge amount of intricate maths to be applied to every single line and dot.
Even in machine code, calculating and drawing a typical
Elite
image using conventional programming would take an achingly long time.

But the pair weren’t conventionally trained programmers. Every program they had written so far had flowed from self-taught puzzle solving, and to bright and motivated science
undergraduates, making the impossible happen was another chance to flaunt their skills. And they did: the word ‘optimisation’ wasn’t really in use at the time, but even if it had
been, it wouldn’t quite capture Braben and Bell’s catalogue of groundbreaking techniques. Every aspect of maths, hardware and graphics, no matter how fundamental, was challenged.

By far the slowest computational chore was drawing lines on the screen. The BBC Micro’s hardware featured a built-in line drawing routine, but Braben and Bell found that this used a slow
technique designed to capture any possible line. So they replaced it with their own: a set of routines that could draw one ‘type’ of line very fast: a short, nearly horizontal line, a
long vertical line, and so on. When rendering a scene, the program looked at each line’s length and angle, and chose the fastest method. The speed of the game shot up.

They were using an 8-bit processor, which can use numbers up to 256 quickly, but ties itself in cumbersome knots for anything even slightly higher. So they set the drawing area resolution to be
precisely 256 by 256 pixels, so that their drawing routine would always fall within the golden parameters. The draw rate was boosted by a fifth, and it meant that the overall screen could be
narrowed – another memory-saving tweak.

And for the frame-rate-killing rotation calculations, the students came up with a cunning trick that used simple estimations to stand in place of precise, time-consuming calculations. For
fast-moving scenes like space combat, these pseudo-answers were good enough, but over a few seconds the tiny inaccuracies from these shortcuts piled on top of each other, and ships could start to
look ‘wobbly’. The game kept track, and used a full calculation to tidy it all up whenever
it found some spare processor time. Overall, it was another speed
jump.

When Braben and Bell analysed the rotation calculations for a single spaceship, they found that they were full of repetition – where co-ordinates were mirrored, the same sums were
performed twice. Or, in the minds of time-ravenous programmers, half the calculations for symmetrical shapes were ‘free’. All of the ships became symmetrical.

Three-dimensional maths is famously intensive, but one of the reasons it was slow was that it was full of redundant calculations: a typical object might have lots of intricate lines, but most of
them would never be seen.
Elite
’s ships were all deliberately made to be simple to render: like a cube or a block of cheese, every side could either be seen or not, but would never
be partially hidden by another part of the ship.

And by figuring out how best to take advantage of this, Bell and Braben hit upon a technique that would become a staple of game technology a decade later. The most time-consuming calculations
would be gauged with a vague test before any were undertaken properly, and by the time the whole scene had been assessed, plenty of calculations were found to be unnecessary, or to cancel each
other out. For instance, a routine could work out quickly which sides of a ship never needed to be thought about, because they faced away from the screen. This technique is now called ‘lazy
evaluation’ – back in 1983 it was simply the routine that made the whole game nearly twice as fast.

They had one final trick. On the BBC Micro, colour came at a cost of either resolution, or memory and speed, and one of the first decisions that a designer needed to make was whether it was
worth that trade-off. Not Bell and Braben – they found a way to both have and eat their cake: the spaceship visuals, which needed to be fast and precise, were in hi-res black and white; then
two-thirds of the way down the screen, the computer was wrenched out of that mode and into low-res colour ideal for the radar and flight information. It was a
handy and
quite harmless abuse of the hardware, which still earns them praise from the very highest source: the BBC Micro design team.

‘
Elite
is the program that couldn’t have been written,’ says Sophie Wilson. ‘David Braben came up with the trick of reprogramming the video controller halfway
down the screen, squashing more into the machine than was possible.’

Steve Furber agrees: ‘What David Braben managed to do on a computer with no memory and no computer power –
Elite
had the BBC design team staggered. It was one of the most
astonishing games.’

Bell and Braben were bounding ahead of every game available, but they couldn’t know for sure that there weren’t rivals with similar ideas somewhere in the country,
on the verge of publication. They had a couple of scares in 1982: Malcolm Evan’s
3D Monster Maze
game sounded like it might be steps ahead of theirs, with its solid walls and
lumbering monsters. It was with some relief that they found it to be minimalist and rotationless, using the ZX81’s limitations for atmosphere rather than overcoming them. They also hunted
down a demonstration of a rotating 3D house that Acorn itself had put together. It wasn’t as fast as their own 3D models and, they found out, didn’t rely on real-time calculations at
all. The Acorn team had created it to show how fast data could be loaded off their new hard drive – after all, no computer could genuinely calculate 3D maths at that speed, could it?

But
Elite
’s creators were still secretive, and very cautious about approaching publishers. It was 1983, with the game in an advanced, playable state, before they dared show it to
anyone outside their narrow circle. Braben had a contact at Thorn EMI, so they started there. The publisher was an almost absurdly stereotypical corporate behemoth: Bell and Braben found themselves
presenting their game in a gleaming London office, where music executives were plotting hits on another floor. It was a company that understood the
entertainment business;
it knew how to make pop stars smile and how to fill record shops with their products.

In EMI’s world, entertainment arrived in three-minute consumable chunks, and it saw computer games in the same way. So
Elite
, years in the making and taking months to play,
presented by students from the geekier end of an intellectual world, seemed to these confident media men like a category error. It was a fantastic technical demonstration, they told Bell and
Braben, but games needed three lives and a ten-minute playing time. They needed a score, and objectives, and an appeal to casual users. They needed to be like arcade games.

It was a dispiriting moment for the two students. Working on their own, looking only to each other for assurance, all they had was their own instinct that
Elite
was worth playing. Were
they wrong? But they had other industry contacts through Bell’s earlier games, and so they tried the nearest of those: Acornsoft.

The company could hardly have been more different from Thorn EMI. Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry were frantically busy with the success of the BBC Micro, and in any case were not really games
people, so David Johnson-Davies had been given a free hand. When the two developers took him their game – Braben later recalled that he was working out of an office at the end of ‘a
valley of bins’ – Johnson-Davies was enthusiastic, as astonished by the graphics as everyone else, but also mesmerised by the breadth of the game. He had some reservations: he thought
the scale should be reined in to make the universe look like a handful of vast galaxies, rather than an unconquerable mathematical formula. And the ability to trade narcotics gave him pause –
that there was profit to be had from drug-dealing seemed the wrong lesson for the nation’s educational computer to be teaching.

But he didn’t hesitate to sign them up. Their relationship with Acornsoft felt natural: ‘The fact that Acorn and Acornsoft were within an easy cycle ride – walking distance
even – did help’, recalls Braben. The advance was one thousand pounds each and he used some of his to buy a genuine BBC Micro.

For a further few months the pair debugged and tweaked – the
galaxies were cut back, but the narcotics stayed in – until the product was bulletproof. During
this time, Acornsoft published a Spitfire simulator by Geoff Crammond called
Aviator
, which used similar, but much more spartan, wireframe graphics. The pair appreciated it but its small
environment, featuring three buildings and suspension bridge, didn’t compare with
Elite
. There was still nothing else like it on the market. They remained nervous that something soon
would be, though, and by summer 1984 they were ready to release the product. And then Acornsoft made them wait.

Johnson-Davies could see that
Elite
was big, perhaps huge, and wanted to create a marketing buzz. This game used unheard-of technology and could take over players’ lives for
weeks. If he managed this well, he could charge twice the going rate.

His ploy was to make the sense of depth and quality visible throughout the product. It was only a few years since games had been sold with leaflets in plastic bags, and the form now was not
markedly more sophisticated: a cassette box with a paper inlay, like albums at the time. Acornsoft had already differentiated itself by packaging its software in large cardboard boxes containing a
plastic moulded berth for the tape or disc, and an A5 leaflet of instructions, but for
Elite
, Johnson-Davies planned unprecedented luxury: the game would have a thick, illustrated manual,
written in the style of a pilot’s guide within the fictional universe. The BBC Micro was portrayed in a hand-drawn picture as part of the console of the spacecraft, and the instructions were
rich with mythmaking about the vast world to be explored.

Some details were real features of the game – the police, the pirates, the asteroid-mining lasers – and some were inventions that hinted at a greater universe. Players were left to
wonder if there really were vast generation ships, or dredgers that ate other craft, and rumours that someone had found one would circulate playgrounds and magazines for years afterwards. And there
was more: a novella written by renowned fantasy author Robert Holdstock. His story
gave character to an already well-defined universe: a first for a game, and tremendously
effective. The package was topped off with a poster identifying the most common ships, an aide-memoire to help untangle the complex controls, and an entry card for a competition open only to
players who managed to reach ‘Elite’ status.

Such lavish packaging took time to put together, but Johnson-Davies was also holding back for an autumn release and the vital Christmas sales. In the meantime, Bell and Braben were busying
themselves with thoughts of a sequel. They toyed with the idea of the player taking a role in the military, so that rather than playing free form, they would have a role in a team. One of the
pair’s first jobs was to tackle the slightly confusing radar system they had developed – in
Elite
, it showed the battle from two planes, which the player had to co-ordinate in
their head. Braben and Bell tried a revised version with a squashed 3D map of the space around the craft, and the game became instantly more playable. In a sense, it was unfortunate: they felt
almost an obligation to show it to the overwhelmed Johnson-Davies, who was two weeks from going to press.

Despite the enormous disruption it would cause, he agreed that the new radar should go in, but the work to make this happen landed right back on the young developers’ shoulders. They
stayed up late implementing, testing, debugging, and finally reproducing screenshots for the manual, but they hit their mark, and were ready for Johnson-Davies’ planned launch in September
1984. The press were invited to Thorpe Park, then promoting a science fiction ride called the Black Hole, where they watched Bell and Braben, each a boffinish figure in a shirt and tie, launch a
ship into space on a giant projection screen.

The response was rapturous. Every magazine and newspaper that covered the launch glowed with praise. Some missed its scope – they had only an afternoon to play a game that takes an age,
after all – but the graphical leap was applauded, and the sight of eight galaxies of hundreds of planets made the scale clear, even if the variety on offer wasn’t quite understood.

And consumers burned with anticipation. In an era well before television review shows or YouTube promos, the descriptions of this incredible game seemed tantalising,
even too good to be true. Could these screenshots be real? Did these space ships really fly out of the screen, or was there some trick?

The game became the nation’s best-seller as soon as it was released. Johnson-Davies was right to risk the higher price point – the size of the package made buying it feel very
special. As it happened, Acornsoft had neglected to take into account the extra space folded paper needs, and the box was a couple of millimetres too small for the content. The distributors managed
to squeeze it in, so when consumers ripped the polythene off, they found the box literally bursting with goodies.

There’s a popular story that the game sold as many copies as there were BBC Micros in the world: around 150,000 of each. In fact this comparison takes a generous view of the timeline
– by the time the sales of
Elite
had reached this figure, the BBC Micro was well into its lifecycle, during which it sold 1.5 million units. But the tone of the story is right.
Children without their own BBC Micros did buy copies of the game to play in school at lunchtime, and the competition cards that were packed into the game became much sought-after – players
with pirated copies of
Elite
often wound up buying the genuine article to acquire one. To enter the competition required reaching Elite status, which meant hundreds of hours of gameplay.
As sacks full of cards arrived at the publisher, it was clear the game wasn’t simply a success at the till, it was using up millions of hours of British leisure time.