How Elite Influenced Starfield and 40 Years of Space Games

ign.com:

“One of the first things I wrote in machine code was an expanding starfield. Just literally flying through it, and I found it mesmerizing. I thought ‘It has to be a game.’” That was the moment David Braben, co-creator of Elite and founder of Frontier Developments, changed space games forever. It was video games’ equivalent of the Big Bang, the birth of an idea that would eventually go on to shape four decades of space games and, eventually, Starfield.

In the early 1980s, space games were pretty rudimentary and there was little more to them than flying a ship and shooting aliens. David Braben, who at the time was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, had the idea that a game set in space could be so much more.

“We had Space Invaders, we had Galaxian, we had Williams’ Defender, but they all had a very similar format, i.e. three lives, a score that goes up, you get a new life at 10,000 [points], you get a smart bomb or something games-specific at 1,500,” explains Braben. “Pac-Man was there. And I know it sounds silly, but even then they were starting to become a little bit samey.

“I had played some games like Adventure, Colossal Quest, text-based adventures – the sort where you say, ‘go north, pick up key,’ that sort of thing – and I liked those. And it struck me that these are being played on the same machine, so surely you can [do something] more interesting? I found, with Space Invaders, all I really cared about was whether I got slightly further than I did last time.”

It was around this time, frustrated with the state of sci-fi arcade games and tinkering with some home games, that Braben met fellow programmer Ian Bell, and together shared notes on some projects they were working on.

“We talked about it and we thought,