Many thanks to all of the contributors that made our celebration of 25 years of Elite such a success. After some scene setting to transport the room back to 1984, joining Iain and James on stage were Ian Bell, David Braben, Mark Bolitho, Dominic Prior and Robert Holdstock each of whom talked through their specific contribution to the game and its continued meaning to them a quarter of a century on. We were very keen not to simply tell the same story about the game’s development. Francis Spufford’s excellent book The Backroom Boys makes essential reading and Iain and James’ own 100 Videogames tells some of this background. Instead of focusing on the couple of years leading up to Elite’s release, we wanted instead to focus on the 25 years since. This session was all about emotion impact and the place of the game in people’s lives. As such, and in keeping with the NVA’s interest in telling the stories of players as well as those of games, technologies and development, we were as excited to hear Ian and David’s thoughts on the game’s impact on their subsequent careers as we were hearing how GameCity tech genius Matt had somehow managed to get a day off school to play the game for charity.
One thing that struck us all was the sheer amount of joy that the game still inspires. We played a lengthy clip of the C64 game (which Ian and David converted themselves) from the initial flickering colour bars of its bootup via some space travel, a bit of stargazing taking advantage of the various viewpoints right through to the inevitable (and rather sudden) ‘Game Over’, the crowd sat mesmerised. This was not mere nostalgia, however, and many of the audience members were clearly not old enough to have unwrapped their own copies of Elite in 1984. Rather, there was in these vector graphics and chip tune waltzing, an object lesson in game design. In an age of high definition and photorealism, the simplicity of this representational world comes as a sobering reminder of the power and importance of the player’s imagination and the way in which, through its apparent complexity, a gameworld can provide scaffolding and potential for adventure and excitement without having to beat the player about the head with bells and whistles. Of course, in the case of Elite, that gameworld did not only extend into the screen but spilled over into the paratextual materials that literally filled the game’s box. The importance of these ‘additional’ pieces of the Elite gameworld and their function as prefigurative materials that not only round out but mediate and frame the playing and replaying of the game is difficult to underestimate and it is surprising and not a little saddening that the decision to include them has not been a more widely adopted. In an era of digital downloads, these absence of these kinds of materials seems likely to be even more keenly felt. As a reminder, we had produced a limited edition A3 print of Mark Bolitho’s original ‘lost’ origami designs that had been designed for inclusion in the 1984 pack but were cut due to budgetary constraints. The NVA is proud to have been able to redress this even if we were 25 years late.
Once the queue of eager fans had managed to get their commemorative prints signed by the stellar crew of developers, artists and programmers, we all adjourned outside to to the GameCity tent which had been transformed into a paper universe of origami models each lovingly created by Bolitho and the many visitors to GameCity. Dramatically lit by twinkling starlight, it was to this ethereal and otherworldy backdrop that Robert Holdstock read from his Dark Wheel novella. Punctuated by the Nottingham Trent University choir performing a specially commissioned arrangement of Strauss’ Blue Danube, the event transported the audience into space, back in time to 1984 and signalled the future of the NVA and GameCity. Performance and theatricality are two words rarely associated with videogames – even less so with exhibitions of videogames – but these are, without doubt, watchwords for the NVA as we move forward.
Happy birthday Commander Jameson.
