#Elite dangerous odyssey xbox upgrade#

“That's not very much data on each one because you've got to have all the 3D render, which I'd already written – we knew how big that was. “And I thought, ‘Well how many locations can you travel between?’ And I was thinking 20, 30…

“We were targeting the 32K BBC micro but actually only really had 20K of available memory because the screen uses up some, the operating system uses up some,” Braben explains. But back in 1984, he was working with a computer that had less memory than a modern day calculator. And he wanted them to be filled with planets – 256 in each to be precise. However, Braben didn’t just want to travel one galaxy, he wanted to fly across eight.

#Elite dangerous odyssey xbox upgrade#

But the latter, you also have the added benefit of going through the wreckage and selling on what’s left for additional cash.īy rethinking the elements that made up much of the day’s arcade games in simulation terms, Braben and Bell came upon the idea of Elite, a game where the goal wasn’t to shoot down tiny aliens for power-ups, but to travel the galaxy, fight pirates, collect rewards, upgrade your ship, and continue into the vastness beyond. “And it’s that sort of lightbulb moment where you just start thinking, ‘Wait a second, isn’t score just money?’ And it’s terribly sort of capitalist but from a gameplay design point of view it was fantastic.” It makes sense – the points you score for destroying a ship in Galaxian can be equated to the bounty you claim for shooting a pirate in Elite. “We talked about it and we thought, ‘Wait a second, if you had a real spaceship, you’d probably be doing something, you’d be traveling between destinations making money,’” Braben remembers. It was around this time, frustrated with the state of sci-fi arcade games and tinkering with some home games, that Braben met fellow programmer Ian Bell, and together shared notes on some projects they were working on. And it struck me that these are being played on the same machine, so surely you can more interesting? I found, with Space Invaders, all I really cared about was whether I got slightly further than I did last time.” “I had played some games like Adventure, Colossal Quest, text-based adventures – the sort where you say, ‘go north, pick up key,’ that sort of thing – and I liked those.