Seven Days Of Elite, Day Four: Always Be Closing
How do you sell a game like Elite?
Like this? (Thanks, ‘tr0d’.)
Hmmm. Yes, possibly not. For one thing, that isn’t really a TV advert – it’s too long and boring. This probably existed on a screen at a games show of some kind, or maybe on some sort of video presentation to shareholders – it’s telling that the sublime sound of the Blue Danube Waltz, so often associated with the dance of the docking spaceships in the film 2001, is here used as a counterpoint to… buying some fuel. Um.
We’re then treated to a shot of the pilot attempting to shoot down an innocent ship, failing, and crashing into it, before trying to dock with a space station at an angle that will tear the wings off his craft and kill him horribly. “It’s the space death of a lifetime!”
Also… £14.95? In the eighties? Jesus Christ. I don’t remember that.
I was actually hunting through the internet for print adverts that might corroborate this, but all I could find was this one – not only copyrighted, but tedious. Could it be that Elite tried to sell itself entirely on word of mouth? Did all games back then? All the game adverts I remember are either in American comic books (I’ll be going through a selection of those later) or in the pages of 2000AD – and usually console cartidges or handheld electronic games. Was the BBC Micro too cool to stoop to such tactics? Did it merely nod its sage electric head wisely as the lesser platforms scrabbled for their pennies?
Part of RE: RETRO – or at least my interpretation of it – is exploring the past, my past in particular. (The other part is making grandiose promises like saying I’ll spend a whole week talking about Elite.) This is a very different blog now from Jonic’s (still available in the archives! See how much better it was!) and it’s become something of a voyage of discovery, as I sift through a bygone era when I was, frankly, much happier in my own self-created world. Computer games were a large part of that world – but, unlike comics, not a part that I obsessed over. They weren’t something that would come to define my life – they were simply there.
So it is possible for me to be surprised when I realise that I never saw an advert for a BBC game. They were brought into the house, often bought by my brother or my Dad, or borrowed – Dad had a work collegue who’d lend him games from six months at a time, in exactly the same way that I lend out games or DVDs, or have them lent to me, today. Or I’d see them in John Menzies in Leatherhead’s fabulous Swan Shopping Centre (still there today, although I think it’s a WH Smiths now) and then save up my money until I could afford them, or I’d go to Guildford and get them for a couple of quid in the model shop next to the second-hand record store. Later, in the Atari days, there would be computer magazines with adverts and reviews aplenty… but for the BBC? For Elite?
What was there?
Was Elite so good that it didn’t need adverts?
It can’t be true. So I’m going to rely of my nascent readership to write in with links or scans of Elite adverts. I promise I will analyse anything that comes in. So get those cards and letters pouring in to:
RE: RETRO,
PO BOX 101,
BBC TELEVISION CENTRE,
SHEPHERD’S BUSH,
LONDON.
Tomorrow we sing along with ELITE: THE MUSICAL!
