Information on the original version of Elite
The BBC Micro cassette version is the standard, entry-level version of the original Acornsoft Elite. It was released on 20 September 1984, along with the enhanced disc version, at a launch event at Thorpe Park in the UK.
This is the original Elite, the very first in a huge number of versions for a whole range of different platforms. This was the one that I fell in love with back in 1984, and it still amazes me to this day. The BBC Micro disc version is considered canonical and is probably the best choice to play today, but for those of us who were still saving up for one of those fancy floppy drives back in the day, this was the game that captured our hearts, even though it seemed to take forever to load from tape. Still, it gave us plenty of time to admire that awesome loading screen...
Here are some suggestions for exploring this version of Elite:
- Play BBC Micro cassette Elite in your browser, in either the original or the flicker-free version (read more about the latter).
- Download a disc image of this version from the downloads page, which you can load into an emulator or real machine.
- Find out how this version works under the hood with over 100 deep dive articles covering every aspect of the game.
- Navigate the codebase using the map of the source code, A-Z index and source code cross-references.
- See the code statistics for this version.
- See exactly how this version compares to the others in the feature comparison table.
- Examine the code variations between the different versions by comparing the code for features of standard Elite.
- See comprehensive details of all the different variants of this version.
- Download the source disc from Ian Bell's site as a disc image or as text files.
- Build this version from the source code with the accompanying GitHub repository.
- See this game in the BBC Micro Games Archive.