Acornsoft Advert - October 1984

Elite was perhaps Acornsoft's most famous game. It was written by Ian Bell and David Braben, was hugely influential and, according to Sophie Wilson, one of the designers of the BBC Micro, was "the game that couldn't be written".

However, the technical dexterity which saw the game use virtually every byte of free memory was not without issues, as some of the memory it used was also used by third-party Disk Filing Systems, meaning that the game wouldn't load.

Acorn, as usual, was fairly unhelpful about this problem, coming across as "cold and unhelpful".

Prior to its launch, it had been the subject of the biggest security operation that Acorn had ever undertaken.

It was so secret that, unusually, there were no previews given to computer and gaming magazines, so instead half a dozen journalists were taken to Cambridge and shown the game in a locked room.

Tony Quinn of Acorn User was one of the journalists and wrote of it that:

"Imagine a subtle blending of Aviator and Starship Command, a sprinkling of the Star Wars films, shaken with a trading adventure, served up with some secret ingredients and you have Elite. It sounds ambitious but it's all there, wrapped in a short science-fiction novel that sets the scene, a substantial training manual, a poster identifying the foes and friends you are likely to encounter and a postcard giving entry to the competitions that Acornsoft plans to base around the game. Not bad for £15"^[1].

The price of £14.95 for the cassett version would be about £63 in 2025. It was also available on floppy disk at £17.65 (£76), or £12.95 for the Electron - it was possibly cheaper because it could only work in monochrome on this machine.

A recruitment advert for Acornsoft's educational software department. From Acorn User, October 1984

There was however displeasure in the "Cambridge circle around Acorn" when Bell and Braben decided to auction the rights to Elite to other micro manufactures, as Acorn believed it had exclusive rights.

Acorn eventually calmed down and stated "we now hope to work with the authors on other versions"^[2].

Elite went on to sell over 1 million copies and eventually appeared on almost every other home computer platform of the day, including Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Apple II, MSX and the IBM PC^[3].

An advert for Elite on several non-BBC machines, including the Commodore 64. from Commodore Horizons, December 1984

Several follow-ups appeared, including a crowd-funded sequel called Elite: Dangerous, released in 2014^[4]

David Braben in 1993. From PC Review, December 1993Braben, who would go on to found the Raspberry Pi Foundation, had refused a regular programming job at Thorn EMI, which had been offered after he'd showed the company some 3D demos he'd written on an Acorn Atom.

He returned to take up his place at Cambridge University, where he met Bell, who was working on another of the games shown in this advert - Free Fall.

Free Fall was apparently similar enough to Braben's demos for the two to pool resources and ideas in order to collaborate on a new game that would become Elite.

When the pair showed their game to Acorn, the company was "just amazed" and proceeded to offer them an advance of £1,000 each (£4,020 in 2025). Braben took his in the form of hardware, saying at the time:

"The great thing was, I didn't have a BBC Micro and it was becoming a real pain, so I asked if I could take my £1,000 as hardware, and I think they did it at trade price"^[5].

Part of a sales brochure for Acornsoft showing Freefall for the Acorn Electron - the "cut down" BBC Micro

Meanwhile, the software tentacle of telecoms behemoth British Telecom - Firebird - found itself in a bit of hot water as it discovered that the licence it had purchased for Elite through games industry agent Jacqui Lyons, of Marjacq Micro, wasn't actually valid.

As soon as Firebird started advertising the game, Acornsoft threatened legal action for intellectual-property infringement, although it eventually granted a licence based on sales royalties.

Lyons had previously been a literary editor, and it was this background that appeared to have led to the controversial auction of Elite.

In an article for September 1991's The One magazine, she reported having been told that it was "an appalling way" to go about things, but reckoned that it was "absolutely standard literary procedure". She continued:

"against all that criticism we held the auction and were helped by Channel 4 news doing a whole item about [Elite]. We sold the rights for a very substantial sum to BT ... it had just established its software division and needed a big game to establish itself"^[6].

Meanwhile, Elite became the first release of Firebird's New York operation Firebird Licencees Inc, when it was made available as a disk version for the Commodore 64 at $29.95^[7]. BT's various software labels - Firebird, Rainbird, and Silverbird - came under the umbrella of its Telecomsoft group.