Seven Days Of Elite, Day Three: Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come For You
No, not THE 733T OF ELITE. Honestly, what do you think I am?
Anyway, It occurred to me while I was spending an hour playing the mini-Elite I linked to yesterday - thus negating any benefit that posting it up in the first place had given to my schedule - that Elite is almost certainly contains yet another famous first in gaming. One connected to the pants-filling appearance of these gentlemen.
This is a Viper, or as I may have previously mentioned - Space Filth. Anyway, while gasping in joyous amazement at the discovery that my Wing Commander training now enabled me to kill things in Elite (although I still can’t dock), I may perhaps have - accidentally mind you - shot an innocent holidaymaker full of holes and then, when the poor sap launched his escape pod, blown it up in the depths of space.
I thought it was a missile.
It was a mistake anybody could have made! But try telling that to the space fuzz who showed up two seconds later. I’d mocked THE DARK WHEEL only the day before, but the fateful passage about not shooting everybody you came across to practice your killing skills swam back into my brain to haunt me, like the ghost of a moray eel. Oh, I killed that cop! And every one of the vipery bastards who followed! But those ships are equipped with loads of missiles and it was just a matter of time before they finally destroyed me. Me - the scourge of the eight galaxies!
It occurred to me that I hadn’t had so much fun since I last played GTA.
There have been games before Elite where you could do evil things - in Defender, you could wipe out the very people you were supposed to be defending, and for advanced players that was a workable strategy as one humanoid was always easier to defend than ten. But it wasn’t until Elite came along that you could actually make a living from crime. Space stations in anarchic systems would be happy to let you in if you could fight your way to their doorsteps, and you could get fuel for free if you had the right equipment, meaning that even police states were open for cop-killing sprees. And needless to say, if you’re getting your cargo for free and skimming fuel from suns, and your only expenditure is the occasional new missile, you get rich pretty quick.
There were consquences - you always had the vipers to fight off, and the money from piracy wasn’t as great as all that - but not game-ending consequences, unlike in Defender. Indeed, your new ‘Fugitive’ status had some perks. You were suddenly free to run drugs or slaves without worrying - might as well be hung for a shape sheep as a space lamb - and pushing space drugs is always good business. And as long as you had a clean save game, it was risk free. If you end up a floating corpse in space after being blown to pieces by the law - no problem, just reload Commander Cleanliver and carry on pushing textiles back and forth between Planet Safety and Planet Boredom. Or to put it another way, you could save your law-abiding character who you’d carefully built up and then go spectacularly off the rails - to become a cop-killing, innocent-spaceman-murdering pusherman! And most people did. It was the GTA rampage of it’s day, before GTA was even a gleam in the eye of a madman.
ELITE: THE FIRST GAME WHERE YOU COULD MAKE A CAREER OF COP KILLING AND DOPE PUSHING! And it’s only the early eighties! What in God’s anus will happen on DAY FOUR of ELITE WEEK? I have absolutely no idea! But it will be - ELITE!
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POSTED IN: BBC Micro, Blowing people up, General, Murder, Space, Things that are both wicked and crucial, Wing Commander
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