Seven Days Of Elite, Day Two: An Empty Hold Means An Empty Head Apparently

A lot of games have crappy novels set in their universes. (Look here if you don’t believe me.)

But only one game in the eighties was good enough – elite enough, if you will – to have a crappy novel set in its universe actually present in the box you bought it in. Elite was that game. You got your instruction manuals, but you also got… THE DARK WHEEL. A novel of space piracy and dark secrets written by Robert Holdstock, a man who clearly realised car boot sales in space needed a bit of dramatic oomph to spice them up enough to make a story out of.

THE DARK WHEEL has a fairly classic you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die plot including a grizzled old mercenary who is more than he seems and a fabled planet with unspeakable treasure on it… ah, why do you want me to burble on about it when you could read it yourself?

Go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Back? That was… well, it served it’s purpose, didn’t it? You can’t really ask for much more.

But, of course, there is more. Elite was probably the first game of its kind – a game with an immense universe to get lost in, eight galaxies of planets to fly to and from. Yes, the mechanics were simple – a variable to decide technological paradise or agrarian development usually dictated the prices, while another variable that decided where the planet lay on the scale between police state and anarchic commune dictated the chances of attack, and since all you were doing was shuttling something around and waiting to either be attacked or attack one planet was pretty much the same as another anyway – but it was this very simplicity that fired up the imagination of the players. Inside a black screen filled with little white dots and big white circles, you can do anything and be anything – which explained why later versions of the game that attempted to impose more order on things never quite took off the same way.

Naturally, this led to reams and reams of fan-fiction, some of which is available right here for your pleasure! The bottom two links are particularly good. I’ll leave you to decide if I mean that ironically.

I’m not sure if that makes Elite THE FIRST GAME TO INSPIRE DEVOTED FAN-FICTION SITES – there’s only one way to find out and that’s to offer the prize of a picture of Pac-Man anally penetrating a ghost to the first reader who brings me a link to such a thing happening in story. Only that will steal Elite’s crown, I’m afraid.