Oolite Bulletins

I never played Elite, as it was before my time, but I see that many people here have. I am curious as to how many Oolitists used to play Elite, and how many started on Oolite, so I made this poll.

Elite was published about a year before I was born, but I had the incredible luck of stumbling upon it when my brother gave me some of his old ST games in the early '90s.

Yes, I began on Elite, on the C64. I was in my mid-20's when it was released, which makes me a tad older than the majority here, I suspect..

(Never touched the sequels.. and then I stumbled across Oolite in a Linux repository four years ago.. been hooked ever since)

Yes, way back when I was in my late 20's. I played quite a lot with a couple of mates on a C64 owned by one of them. We used to take turns, changing pilot after each docking (or 'Press Space ) until the computer died.
After that was a gulf of well over 20 years during which my fond memories of Elite never died. Then around four years ago I discovered Oolite and this fine community, and my life was complete again.

When the original came out in 1984, I was in my fourth year at high school, aged about 15. Perfect age for games playing. There was lots of BBC Micros in my school then, and pirate copies on disc of Elite were floating around. So I played the original on the BBCs at school, but I did buy it when it came out for my Sinclair Spectrum at home.

Also, later I bought the Atari ST version of both Elite and Frontier. FFE wasn't released on the ST so I've not played that, but heard how buggy it was so I don't think I missed out.

I was also 15 when Elite came out, I played it then a couple of times on a friend's BBC B - never made it beyond harmless. I also read his copies of the manual and The Dark Wheel at that time.

I bought an Archimedes 305 in 1987 (one of the first batches, it had the Arthur 0.2 operating system in EPROM), on which I played ArcElite from 1991 untill 1993 - made it to "very deadly".

Before Oolite, I also played some other Elite remakes, including "Elite:The New Kind" and (IIRC) "Elite:Gold" or something like that.

Edit: it was not "Elite:Gold", it was "Elite:Platinum".

I was 12 in 1985 when I received my C-64 and soon afterwards I was introduced to Elite. It took my soul. As did Ultima IV and, later on, Civilization.

When I was a little boy (around 10) my dad worked for heathrow airport and was involved in the development of CCTV and flight information boards (the old flapboards). These were all controlled with a BBC B (via some very clever programmers) and he was allowed to take the development BBC B home every so often when the programmers didn't need it. Luckily they were in to games and we had a twin Cumana 5 1/4 drive with all the latest games including elite, chuckie egg, zalaga etc. I remember being so excited when the computer came home

Me and my dad flew around for ages with me making notes and him flying. I eventually flew myself and with my dog as co-pilot I played Elite as much as possible and even wrote stories about it as part of my creative writing at primary school!! I ended up getting an electron for my birthday and became dangerous on both - the electron was such a pain in the arse as it was tape based and we had to turn off the plus3 to get it to work.

A few years later I played frontier on an A600 and became elite - I still wear the t-shirt much to my mrs disgust

Now both me and my dad play oolite - with the benefit of retirement he made elite last week however as a worker I'm well off and deadly

Took my C64 setup to Commodore Users Group for demo of Elite. I think it went right over their heads. Discovered Oolite a couple years ago.

Not only did I play elite I still have the original BBC B game

My dad bought an Acorn Electron in the 80's. I played Elite on. Didn't come very far but I was captivated by the Manual and the planet descriptions!.
I still have the manual! It was source for fantasies and imagination.
In the 90's I played Frontier and Frontier Elite and Elite Plus.
Later I played Freelancer, X-series.


I always had fond memories of the original Elite so in 2006 I looked for a clone or an emulator. I stumbled upon Oolite and never looked back!
Simply the best game there is. It is the game I wanted Elite to be.

played elite on my commodore 64 when I was a new gamer..

Elite came out when I was little more then an idea in a bar!

I started video games during my teens, and even then it wasn't until I moved out that I truly started to play games. I discovered Oolite overseas, and was hooked. Just trying to dock was infuriating, yet sooo satisfying. Then the combat hooked me, and thats what got me interested in Elite. Oolite was the door, and I recently have put time into the sequels. However, Elite was a good six years before my time, and from the sounds of it most of you folks have decades on me!

when i bought my floppy drive for C=64 in '85, it came with with a few games on disk, elite was one of them.
later i tried a version for amiga, but it just wasn't the same.