Guy Lochhead, 10/04/12
Pioneering space simulation video game for BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computer systems released in 1984. It was one of the first open-ended computer games, with players able to choose their own path, loosely influenced by the moral and legal codes of a novella that came with each purchase, The Dark Wheel by Robert Holdstock. Players drift through space, visiting planets, occasionally fighting, but mostly trading resources and upgrading ships. The game was written in beautifully efficient code by two Cambridge graduates, David Braben and Ian Bell. Brilliant, innovative stuff that was so far out of the normal expectations of computer games at the time. I will include the ZX Spectrum port of the game, because I’m already including the Spectrum and don’t want to include the BBC Micro or Electron.