Frontier: Elite 2 was one of the big factors that drove me to study astrophysics at university. It seems utterly ridiculous now that they managed to fit an entire galaxy, dozens of customisable ship models and a full trading and mission system onto a single double density floppy disk - less than 1Mb.
I think Elite 2 is a marvel in gaming industury i was thinking exactly the same. Now playing Elite Dangerous which makes me remember my childhood memories
The crazy thing is that people can’t write code like this anymore. They rely so much on Libraries. Even something like Geos vs Office is interesting. Programs seem to get bigger and bigger and yet don’t appear to do much more. Really good example of poor code is salesforce, clunky and huge, but really does very little.
@@dave24-73Salesforce is the worst software I've ever had the misfortune of encountering, and then they sell 'training courses' to account for the fact the whole thing is a bloated unintuitive clusterfuck. Basically a scam.
The fact you could land on planets, fly over cities, then travel across the galaxy is still mind blowing to this day. And the fact in Elite Dangerous you still can't fly or land on planets with atmospheres is freaking hilarious. Also I refuse to accept this was 30 years ago wtf.
I notice my aching hip joints too.... Seriously, the unimanitive development FF is doing on ED is really hilarious. Bur far worse is a certain type of player which mistakes the series with War Thunder in space. That really makes me sad. And the fact that FF listened to them.
I think if they did that, they’d have to ‘Microsoft Flight Sim’ each habitable planet which would be a tad difficult. Elite 2 cities were basic and tiny, which was fine at the time. I remember Earth only having 4 cities.
@@neo_265 They could just procedurslly generate the cities like they have been doing with everything else. Or just have few small cities. Would still be better than the ones we have right now.
Two games in my life broke my brain when I first saw them. The original Elite and Castle Wolfenstein. I was stationed in Greece in 1986-88. A friend of mine had Elite and I had my Commodore 64. The fact that you stuck one floppy disk into the drive... it seemed to access it for less than a second... and then you could play for weeks or months off of that tiny bit of data... unbelievable. Plus, the first time with 3D graphics. I'm sure it's hard to imagine now but your brain would translate the graphics you'd see back then. In your mind you were seeing pretty much what you see in Elite Dangerous now. I never played Elite 2 but I can confirm the massive impact the original Elite had.
@@adsadsaddFQ I love graphics today and can't wait for what they do in the future but you have to imagine kids are missing out on something. Like when they never read a book and create that world in their mind. Oh, well. It's all good.
I used to play Frontier with my dad as a kid. He would let me take over to pilot the ship when in combat. We used to pretend the house was the ship, kitchen being a galley etc. I'd also cover our dining table with blankets and stick a toy gun out the front and pretend I was inside a Panther Clipper. Nearly 30 years later and I want to grab a VR headset and get my dad to play Elite Dangerous (Horizons). I hope it will give him the same sense of wonder that he gave me with Frontier. Thanks for this video OA. Brings back a lot of good memories.
Imagine building this with 0 tools, 0 help from Google as it wasn't up yet, 0 references. They probably didn't have access to math libraries at that time and had to implement everything from scratch. That shit is absolutely insane
1991 had some major 3D Games too. Activision's 3D open world game "Hunter" from 1991 also had very long development time. 1 1/2 year. Hunter on Amiga were the first 3D "GTA game" ever and Activision made it. Not many know this. In 1991 Psygnosis also made a open world game with planes and land vehicles (Armour Geddon).
I love how you can go to earth like planets and enter their Atmosphere. While in Elite Dangerous, you couldn't even go near planet atmospheres, until DLC came out. Even with DLC you can't enter Earth-likes
Seems like they really botched the basic design phase. All those features that should have been there from the start. And walking around your ship was already advertised before the first Alpha.. never happened.
@Okabe Rintaro That's just an another type of failure. Does not mean that it's a wrong approach, just badly executed if they tried to eat too many cakes at once.
@Okabe Rintaro How did it end? I'm a Star Citizen backer, the worst I can say is, it didn't end. It's still going. Not ideal but not such a terrible thing. At least SC keeps improving with quarterly patches. *shrug* Elite made its decision, and it seems like it was better in the short term, but is failing it in the long term. While Star Citizen backer numbers, funding and content only seem to be accelerating. I hope CMDR's get what they need from the change in FDevs future content plans.
This is it! This is THE space game. This is THE game that hooked me back in 93 on the Amiga, when I was 12. The box, the physical galaxy map, the unequivocal open world game that, in my mind, started it all. Thanks OA, you don't need to make any more videos.... I'm happy now ;-)
That era of games, especially on Amiga systems, was some of the greatest art of all time. Those computers made it feel like really anything was possible in a game, and it was just one classic after another.
This version for the Amiga was the reason fell in love with this game...It was waaaay ahead of its time. It was mindboggling big, and it fit on a single floppy disk. The only time I had a practical use of Trig was to use the 365 ly jump glitch to cross the galaxy on a single tank of gas.
Played it in early 90's on my Agima 1200 with a DKB Cobra Expansion card on a HDD. I still have the Amiga and Elite 2 Box and all the content. I spent hundred of hours in this game. Ended up to the Deadly Elite rating. The Stardreamer was very useful when doing assassination missions. After taking the contract. It would tell you where and when your target would exit from an hyperspace cloud, o you could go there and fast forward the time seconds prior you target exiting and blow it out! Sweet memories!
@@LeetTreet I was thinking exactly the same thing. Also so much Modest Mussorgsky music! It's almost embarrassing to admit that this is the first place I ever heard Baba Yaga!
I remember landing on a planet, in Frontier, and then not being able to take off because the gravity of the planet was too high and my ships engines not powerful enough lol 😬 that being said, I know a few people, myself included, that would disappear into Frontier and emerge weeks later 😜 It truly was a game to get lost in and yep, way ahead of its time ❤️👍🏻
The greatest game i ever played. Still play it today and I have the star map in my office framed above my computer. There is nothing like it. It has everything. I love this game so much.
This game is just unbelievable, How is is possible to fit so much? I can even remember at what point of my childhood I spent playing this, all I have is memories of endless adventures, exploration and challenges to overcome.
For me it's the best ever. The only thing I really hated back then was the Newtonian flight model - and this is something I would immediately take again nowadays. Played it on the A500 back then and later First Encounters on the PC. The wmv took away a bit of the immersion of FE compared to Frontier. But I guess that's a question of taste. I hate to say it but Frontier is still far ahead compared to Elite Dangerous. I always hoped that FF would add more of Frontiers features (including planetary landings and over SIXTY ships). Sadly the shooter crowd (space and fps) won the battle.
Did they even win the battle though? It feels like the minority were actually asking for ground combat and fps gameplay (and I reckon a decent chunk thought that would guarantee thargoid combat further down the line). Feels like everybody wanted walkable ship interiors and settlements as opposed to what we got.
@@Jenna_Talia That´s what I´ve meant even if only hinted at it and didn´t communicate, here (contrary to the offical forum were I did it over years until I gave up)
On the Amiga 1200 with accelerator I've played it a lot. I remember holding the zoom out button down with sticky tape on the galaxy map to see how far it zoomed out. It took hours to see the entire galaxy. It was also fun to just find a place in space to hang out and using the fast forward buttons to see planets orbit their stars etc. Or trying to land on random planets without a station/port. I've also hacked a fast and light shipband added thousands of cargo capacity so I could to dogfights in space as well as transport a lot of cargo. Good times!
My brother and I spent many hours playing this game back in the day. I always wanted a Lion Transport for my endless journeys between Sol and Barnard's Star. Never played 1 game long enough to amass enough money get one...until 18 months ago when I downloaded it and got it working on DOSBox. Being older (more patient and with an eye for finding more profitable routes) I stuck at it and got my dream ship. Only to be left utterly dissapointed by the performance of the Lion Transport. It suffered terribly with deceleration, though not as bad as ships larger than it which had a tendency to be so bad a deceleration that you could easily find yourself unable to dock at starports (and some planets for that matter!) as the autopilot struggled to figure out how to move faster than the starport and then slow down fast enough to dock. Great game. Right up there with Command & Conquer and Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but seriously, don't go above and ship that needs more than 2 crew if you want to reliably dock somewhere...
@Okabe Rintaro I think you haven't actually seen what modern computer graphics can do. Kerbal Space Program (and its upcoming sequel), Space Engine, Pioneer (Elite II remake), all of these games allow you to fly down to the beach of an alien planet with aerodynamic simulation (most realistic in KSP) and Pioneer has cities, even more extensive than in Elite II. It's absolutely possible within power demands. Frontier just simply cannot be bothered - the best things about update 12 literally pertain to what you can do sat down.
I don't know about you but I'm getting bored, more I insult elite more I think it's needless to say elite is dead. because if he is dead, why you publishing the news all the time. provided that elite is not dead but is about to die; but in reality he is dead.
I wouldn't say Pioneer has better graphics. unlike Elite II with its vivid and simple yet hypnotic flat pixel graphics, Pioneer tatters this with low quality textures, generic looking ships and weird MIDI tracks as opposed to the catchy chiptune tracks the Amiga version of FEII had. Call me a boomer, but I don't think technological improvements equate to better graphics.
FE2 is still the GOAT for me with NMS a close second (mainly because it looks like Merlin!). E:D had the promise but FE2 still gives a better sense of scale because you jump to the outskirts. So if you land in a red giant system you get a size for the star vs jumping to every system & the star feeling the same size. You could put star dreamer on >> and the stations scale up on approach accordingly vs station pop. Lighting somehow is better too imo. There’s a lot they could have lifted from FE2. Sandro dropped the ball imo.
Very surprised that I've never heard of this game before! It looks insanely ahead of it's time in terms of design and scale. Conceptually the design reminds me of No Man's Sky, only made 23 years earlier, and before the benefit of widespread information on the internet. To me seeing the graphics for the first time, obviously the 3D is dated but I think the simple geometry and trails of the light from the ship engines are still very iconic looking. It reminds me of the same early 3D aesthetic that the TRON film had.
I remember when it’s sequel “First encounters” first came up. What an absolute disaster that was. Game kept crashing and was full of bugs, sounds familiar doesn’t it. If I remember at the time it wasn’t frontiers fault, it was the Publisher game tek that pushed for an early release. It’s kind ironic how the tables have turned now for Frontier.
I still remember my amazement and euphoria when you started the game in Merlin and you were welcomed by that majestic gas giant with its rings on the horizon and then you realized that it was not just a background but that you could take off and travel to it...
I used to live in this game for weeks at a time. The flight model (in atmosphere) was unremarkable, but once you got into interstellar space, you would have to keep the "Newtonian" nature of the motion in mind: no stopping/turning on a dime. You approached a planetary body at 100Km/s, you would have to use reverse thrust to brake in time or become a splat on the surface. Yes, fighting ships was an annoying joust and one slip up would cost you, until I figured out you could "reverse joust": turn off the engines, turn to face your opponent, then apply reverse thrust while keeping the opponent in your sights to duck out of their path/fire, and return fire as they would crawl past you. You could also use the stardreamer's high acceleration settings to turn any fight into a one v one (a thing that they fixed in the follow up).
i remember doing a planetary landing without atmospheric shielding after it got damaged in a scrap, it took hours lol, the feeling i got after landing was the same as making it to sag A and back in elite dangerous in a un engineered asp classic
I've been telling people how good this game was for the last few years, oh wait it turns out i've been going on about this game for 30 years. Thanks for makng me feel old!
How was Amiga ahead of its time when there were plenty of computers similar, same or even more powerful then Amiga. For example Atari ST ran Frontier better then Amiga, on ST the game was barely playable, on Amiga was most of the time unplayable (unless in open empty space). And PC destroyed both Atari and Amiga in Frontier...
So many memories of this game, played it probably more than any other Amiga title I had. Although in my opinion it was surpassed by First Encounters, which was basically the same game, with an addon pack (And probably the game that still holds one of my proudest gaming memories to this day, finding the thargoid homeworld, even managed to convince my folk to let me write to a magazine, cant remember which one now, to help another reader with the coodinates and system name).
UK Frontier Users Group represent... Swapping floppies in the post, reading the news letter, getting random programs written and out for everyone... Loved it!
Fantastic game, still fire it up on an atari St emulator occasionally. Two problems with the game: 1) the need to service the ship's drive every year in game limits the exploration distance from the core systems, 2) atari St version crashes when the mining device is deployed
IIRC with some versions of the game if you went out past 655.36 light years on the map you would get an "in range" notification. Which made exploring a bit easier.
Omg Obsidian, this game took over my life. I was only 11 years old and didnt have it myself but my mate at school did and I used to race around his house everyday after school just to be the "map reader" lol. The title music still gives me shudders
I sank tons of hours into the game, I remember the autopilot crashing bug and the annoying copy protection lol, the game on accelerated Amigas looks stunning and I really wish it got a modern coat of paint and improvements as it could still hold up
@@Assimilator1 I think I still prefer FEII personally. if you ask me, Pioneer doesn't look nearly as pretty. The graphics that were colourful and vivid (and used a lack of textures as an advantage in the Amiga version) are reduced to the usual black space brown planets in Pioneer with even Earth looking a bit meh, and hyperspace clouds no longer looking like concentric circles with lightning coming out, instead just being a soft transparent-blue-white gradient with no interesting visual choices. The ships are rounded and generic looking, nothing looks great.
The game has a lot of light and a lot of shadow. I bought it in 1993 and was very disappointed because it was so buggy that you couldn't play it. Without these errors, it really would have been the best space simulation. It was exactly the same with Frontier First Encounters.
Frontier: Elite II was one of my favourite games growing up as a kid. There is though a few things I would add to this video: 1. Even though the galaxy was massive, your hyperdrive would explode after 1 year of usage (1 max length jump is 1 week). This means that it would be impossible to travel to distant stars outside of a forced mis-jump where you jam a screwdriver into the console and jump literally anywhere. This can also destroy the drive. 2. There was the bug in Cemesis where at John Coates you were paid to take the most expensive goods in the game, gem stones at about 3200. You could just not do this for single player, but it is something of an issue. 3. The ships were great in terms of how their capabilities progressed. You could go from the Eagle long range fighter start ship up to the Panther Clipper. After this i just went down to the Eagle Mk2 or 3, or even the super-light military fighters and became a bounty hunter. 4. The Lave corner was a hotspot for increasing your elite rank. Riedquat always seemed to have masses of pirates looking to attack. With the way the hyperspace worked, a departure and arrival hyperspace cloud existed from the jump point to destination would could be detected and analysed. If you are jumping your full hyperspace distance, 1 week is a long time for pirates to detect and fly to intercept. 5. if you wanted to be an absolute beast, you could fly to a system like Zaonce in an Imperial Courier (the biggest fighter in the game outside of the secret ship) and intentionally allow yourself to take damage to destroy your hyperdrive. You would be stuck in-system until you bought a new ship but would gain 150 cargo for shields and weapons. 6. The flight model was a little "off" in that you could use an auto pilot to align to the destination station and fly a long distance in Alpha Centauri accelerating up to you maximum speed. Then just as you are going to fly by switch on the auto pilot and it would magically start the docking process. No way it could do that, but there you go. Fond memories. Even with a few flaws it was a good game for the freedom it provided.
I remember taking longer to slow down approaching a plant than it took to accelerate to max speed. You started reverse thrusting light years away to slow down in time. Hehe
Absolutely amazing game (yes especially for the time). Totally agree about the ‘grind.’ I hate that term. I know in the modern world of getting everything now but I just loved (and still do) working towards something- to me I love the investment of time and getting lost in a game. So when I got this game it was like the feeling when you get lost in a book (or a trilogy or a series of books). Nowadays people may mock this game and it’s style of game play; but I guess the same will happen be true of the best of the best games now when we hit 2052!
Oh man, this took me back! Thanks for the nostalgia trip! I looooved this game back on the Amiga! That Intro (and its triumphant music) is lodged in my memory.
The thing that boggles my mind to this day was that the game fit onto a legacy double density disk (720kB) and didn't even need the "modern" high density one (1.4MB)!!!
This is what made me get Elite Dangerous. In the 90's I had NO clue what this game was or how to fly, but I knew I wanted, no I had, to dive into it, same for Privateer, and twenty-five years later I found Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen. Now that was technical progress, woah. No matter what will happen to ED, this is why it has a special place in my heart. o7
It took me a while to love Elite Fontier Ii, as I craved the smoothness of the wire vector graphics in Elite and the old ships. However Elite Ii finally won me over and I really enjoyed its game play and the ability to land on planets, was really cool. Looking back now, Elite II was fantastic and so advanced for its day.
I remember waiting, waiting and waiting for this one to come out. Launch dates slipped and slipped. What came was great but flawed- combat came down to a ramming competition of who had the best shield for the most part Though when I finally got a big ship and lots of shield generators, it was amusing to have smaller 'flies' to swat themselves on my hull. The in-system flight thing was a bit challenging- speeding up time while the ship's computer calculated the right slow down point to get you to the right speed when approaching your destination. If your ship's computer was damaged in combat, you were screwed for long range travel! Other than these flaws, I loved it.
Repeatedly pressing the 'M' key to match the targets speed, during combat. I remember the intro that was released on the cover disk of Amiga Format. I watched in awe, having been brought up with the original elite on the speccy.
You're supposed to use Engines Off in combat, which stops the ship from attempting to correct its vector and allows you to match velocities with the enemy. A surprising amount of people have obliviously denounced Elite II for this non-issue.
Elite 2 was just amazing, I played it on my Commodore Amiga :) Weird that in a lot of ways Elite Dangerous that came out decades later, from the same creator even, was actually a step backwards.
At the time Frontier Elite 2 was a wonderful experience, but Elite Dangerous surpasses it in almost all areas, despite its crushing flaws. I do wish they had kept a few features of Frontier Elite 2 though, like the AI crew requirements for ships. It feels so silly to fly an Anaconda on my own. It is one of those things I do not understand about the decisions Frontier made. A cool, improved crew mechanic would have added some much-needed depth to gameplay. Ignoring this crew mechanic is one of the many mistakes FDev has made.
Played this on an accelerated A1200 back in the 1990's - absolutely loved it. And it was a massive step up from Elite (CPC464) and Elite+ (A500), both of which I'd played to death.
I seem to remember it was shipped with some significant bugs and Frontier had to put a patch disk out for it. Or maybe I just made that up, it was 30 years ago.
Brings back memories! Used to take advantage of a bug on Amiga version, spawn mars and purchase a ship and it would give you the money instead. Remember leaving a ball of blu tac on the key for a hour 😂. Panther Clipper!! I used to struggle getting enough staff to take off 😂.
I remember really struggling with the physics and not being able to turn around. You'd be flying around then to come to a halt you'd have to turn around and thrust in the opposite direction for an hour.
Man... This game consumed my life as a 13 year old (1997). The Amiga was already dead by this point, but I got a an A1200 that year with hundreds of games and this one just blew me away in spite of all the fancy 3D games that were out for other machines.
Fond memories of ten year old me slowly amassing wealth through slave trading and smuggling weapons. I also remember buying slaves without installing life support for the cargo bay, and then wondering why my slaves had turned into fertiliser.
This was my life when I was 14 in the 90's on my Amiga 1200. and later on my 486 PC. so many years I played it! I remember them announcing they wanted to make Frontier Elite 4 (now ED) with concept art in like 1999. it was a long wait :D
I played this on my Amiga, but had none of the manuals or any instruction, so I had no idea what I was doing and was absolutely terrible at it! Couldn't resist that epic intro, though. Still, absolutely marveled at how they fit such a huge galaxy and all those assets onto those 2 disks! I'm glad that Elite Dangerous came along, as it felt like my chance at redemption. Whenever Frontier:Elite 2 would kick my butt too much, though, I'd just switch over to Star Control, which was also a lot of fun.
Three things that stand out in my memory about playing this as a kid: 1. If I didn't speed up time when auto-docking I would always crash and die, but if I did I'd be fine. 2. Instead of using my turrets in the Panther Clipper I'd just lock onto the enemy, engage auto-pilot & splat them across my windscreen like a bug. 3. I could land on atmospheric planets.
The legendary programmer Chris Sawyer was credited for coding this masterpiece. According to the lore, this was the last time that a major game was coded in assembly and not some other higher level language.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 99% written in assembly language, and that was released in 1999. It was also written by Chris Sawyer. In 1993, programming games in assembler was still commonplace.
Frontier: Elite II was fantastic and allowing for it's age, I still say it's better than Elite Dangerous and most other space games around today. I seem to remember some issues with aliens or something. There was also 'controversy' around it's release. It came on a 1.44mb floppy yet was only about 400-500k (or something). A number of folks thought they were being ripped off, stating there was no way a game that big was in a file that small. They were wrong.
I played thousands of hours of this. There were 4 games that defined gaming for me. Kick off (and player manager), f/a 18 interceptor, Cinemaware's Rocket Ranger and Elite II Frontier . I Was not even 18 at the time when i got it . Wonderful for it is time.
I don't know Rocket Ranger but I completely agree on the other three and the time spent on them. Although I did eventually prefer Sensi Soccer to Kick Off but that didn't arrive until later.
@@Elwaves2925 I also played SSoccer a lot. but it did come after. as for Rocket ranger, jesus go see it it even had nazis in space . master piece for it's time . it had the most realitic boxing fight for it's time also, sadly speeded up in the video . ua-cam.com/video/F6vIHcxGyIA/v-deo.html
Spent a huge amount of my mid-teens on Frontier, I even sent a letter to the makers to ask for tips (I still have the reply guide they sent me) First on an A500+, then a 1200 Amiga. Only thing I've found in recent years which is near to the absorbing nature is playing Eve Online (Which I have been doing since 2010)
I will never forget when for the first time I flew in space and was headed to some other planet and when I wanted to stop and land I realized there was no stopping... In space... you literally have to use your break rockets long time to stop at the planet... I immeadetely fell in love with the game because it felt for the first time like real space... Not a cheesy flight simulation bullshit but the real thing... Even today there is not one single game that features the real behavior of zero gravity...
I played Elite Frontier on and off in the nineties and naughties and enjoyed it. It is probably the most accurate space sim I've played although the combat was not as fun as ED. If I was to make a space game, it would be a cross between EF and ED.
Had this for my 486 dx2/66 pc back in the day, and it blew my mind. It was such a massive step up from the original. Then along came first encounters 💩
I got my Amiga on my 6th birthday, and was my primary gaming platform until i got my first pc (486). As it was common back in the day most of my games were pirated including elite ofc. A friend of my family helped my get into elite, and i played the shit out of it... Probably a thousand hours. Around the time i got my PC the discdrive on my amiga died, and i moved on to pc gaming. It was around 1996 i think. Anyway around 2000 i was in my local computershop and looked through a bargain bin with old PC games... And there i dug up the boxed dos copy of Frontier.. And then it started all over again. :D Truely a amazing game.
One of the things that I missed from Elite 2 when Elite Dangerous arrived was the limitations on hyperspace travel. Frontier was based on the model from the world's first sci-fi TTRPG, Traveller, where the minimum distance you would arrive in a new system was a minimum of a multiple of radii from the biggest stellar body - so if you jumped to a star system with a giant star, you could expect to have a long travel time to get close to binary companions and planets - in ED, you would just arrive close to the star instead, no matter its size.
I played the hell out of Elite Frontier, from cruising in a dinky Eagle all the way up to a Panther Clipper. Honestly for all of the graphic improvements in Elite Dangerous, Frontier was a better game.
One minor caveat. While updates to software and games in 1993 was rather rare, it wasn't entirely unheard of. We did have Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which one would dial-up to and get an update when it was absolutely necessary, but again, it was pretty rare. Fun fact - back in... 1991? Microprose actually mailed me a floppy disk one time just to give me an updated model that more closely resembled the F117 for their F-19 Stealth Fighter for the PC. Great memories. :-)
I spent sooo much fund playing FE2 and First Encounters. For me, the newtonian flight model and combat of FE2 with the graphics and sound of E:D would have been gaming heaven. The intro music for FE2 was absolute quality too.
I used to love my Panther Clipper... had it loaded with the most powerful weapons available and could sit outside a station blasting everything to bits and the authorities couldn't touch me...
The core problem with Frontier was that Brabham simulated authentic spaceship velocities but forgot that you can't do WW2 style combat at those velocities, yet equipped the ships with WW2 style cross-hair targeting, making combat either impossible if you were doing it manually or boring if you used auto-pilot targeting (either way, combat was spent shooting a dot and hoping to get lucky, with zero immersion). So a major part of Elite - dog-fighting - was awful. if you actually stopped your ship, forcing the other ship to also slow right down, then the combat actually looked a lot like the original Elite but nicer because the mass and acceleration was better simulated... but you'd quickly end up being too fast again. Luckily, Brabham realised the mistake and fixed it for Elite: Dangerous, so we again got slower combat speeds consistent with a crosshair based weapon with manual targeting (aka WW2 guns). You have to make space combat unrealistic (by slowing down the combat speed) to make it playable! Oh, and don't even get me started on that 'deep space is blue' thing!
Oh wooooow! getting me back to my youth. I remember I spent hundreds of hours playing it. And even getting more in history, my ZX spectrum loaded from magnetic audio tapes and tape recorder... I've been hacking classic ZX spectrum elite in ASM (assembler language) back then adding myself money... yeah those were the days... thanks mate
Frontier: Elite 2 was one of the big factors that drove me to study astrophysics at university. It seems utterly ridiculous now that they managed to fit an entire galaxy, dozens of customisable ship models and a full trading and mission system onto a single double density floppy disk - less than 1Mb.
I think Elite 2 is a marvel in gaming industury i was thinking exactly the same. Now playing Elite Dangerous which makes me remember my childhood memories
Mathematical algorithms.
The crazy thing is that people can’t write code like this anymore. They rely so much on Libraries. Even something like Geos vs Office is interesting. Programs seem to get bigger and bigger and yet don’t appear to do much more. Really good example of poor code is salesforce, clunky and huge, but really does very little.
@@dave24-73Salesforce is the worst software I've ever had the misfortune of encountering, and then they sell 'training courses' to account for the fact the whole thing is a bloated unintuitive clusterfuck. Basically a scam.
880k is an amazing achievement
The fact you could land on planets, fly over cities, then travel across the galaxy is still mind blowing to this day. And the fact in Elite Dangerous you still can't fly or land on planets with atmospheres is freaking hilarious.
Also I refuse to accept this was 30 years ago wtf.
I notice my aching hip joints too....
Seriously, the unimanitive development FF is doing on ED is really hilarious. Bur far worse is a certain type of player which mistakes the series with War Thunder in space. That really makes me sad. And the fact that FF listened to them.
I think if they did that, they’d have to ‘Microsoft Flight Sim’ each habitable planet which would be a tad difficult. Elite 2 cities were basic and tiny, which was fine at the time. I remember Earth only having 4 cities.
@@neo_265 They could just procedurslly generate the cities like they have been doing with everything else. Or just have few small cities. Would still be better than the ones we have right now.
@@neo_265 They would have to make heavy use of procedural generation.
Agreed, it drives me batty tbh
Two games in my life broke my brain when I first saw them. The original Elite and Castle Wolfenstein. I was stationed in Greece in 1986-88. A friend of mine had Elite and I had my Commodore 64. The fact that you stuck one floppy disk into the drive... it seemed to access it for less than a second... and then you could play for weeks or months off of that tiny bit of data... unbelievable. Plus, the first time with 3D graphics. I'm sure it's hard to imagine now but your brain would translate the graphics you'd see back then. In your mind you were seeing pretty much what you see in Elite Dangerous now. I never played Elite 2 but I can confirm the massive impact the original Elite had.
I get you man, when I first saw graphics of Half Life 1 it was photo realistic for me back then
@@adsadsaddFQ I love graphics today and can't wait for what they do in the future but you have to imagine kids are missing out on something. Like when they never read a book and create that world in their mind. Oh, well. It's all good.
Elite (xl/c64) and Wing commander (the game that made me want a PC) were some serious WOW!s as they came out. But so was Pirates! :)
I used to play Frontier with my dad as a kid. He would let me take over to pilot the ship when in combat. We used to pretend the house was the ship, kitchen being a galley etc. I'd also cover our dining table with blankets and stick a toy gun out the front and pretend I was inside a Panther Clipper.
Nearly 30 years later and I want to grab a VR headset and get my dad to play Elite Dangerous (Horizons). I hope it will give him the same sense of wonder that he gave me with Frontier.
Thanks for this video OA. Brings back a lot of good memories.
Did you ever get your dad to try VR Elite Dangerous? I lost my father and I hope you get the chance to do this.
@@robinhood6763 not yet. My dad lives quite a distance so its not often we get the opportunity. If I am fortunate, perhaps this summer!
@@Tidesinger Do your best before it is too late ^^ I am sure it will turn into a wonderful memory.
Turning youre House into the ship is basicly correct, the bigger ships got luxury interiour in the menu Screens
Imagine building this with 0 tools, 0 help from Google as it wasn't up yet, 0 references. They probably didn't have access to math libraries at that time and had to implement everything from scratch. That shit is absolutely insane
Coded entirely in assembly language too
1991 had some major 3D Games too. Activision's 3D open world game "Hunter" from 1991 also had very long development time. 1 1/2 year.
Hunter on Amiga were the first 3D "GTA game" ever and Activision made it. Not many know this.
In 1991 Psygnosis also made a open world game with planes and land vehicles (Armour Geddon).
I love how you can go to earth like planets and enter their Atmosphere.
While in Elite Dangerous, you couldn't even go near planet atmospheres, until DLC came out.
Even with DLC you can't enter Earth-likes
Seems like they really botched the basic design phase. All those features that should have been there from the start. And walking around your ship was already advertised before the first Alpha.. never happened.
@Okabe Rintaro That's just an another type of failure. Does not mean that it's a wrong approach, just badly executed if they tried to eat too many cakes at once.
@@benbaselet2026 i can walk around my ship on the outside... did u mean interior spaces inside our ships like we can in star citizen?
@@kevinpittman2517 Yes, walking in your ship while in the black was very much the idea before any alpha releases or anything came out.
@Okabe Rintaro How did it end?
I'm a Star Citizen backer, the worst I can say is, it didn't end. It's still going.
Not ideal but not such a terrible thing.
At least SC keeps improving with quarterly patches. *shrug*
Elite made its decision, and it seems like it was better in the short term, but is failing it in the long term.
While Star Citizen backer numbers, funding and content only seem to be accelerating.
I hope CMDR's get what they need from the change in FDevs future content plans.
If you wish to experience Frontier: Elite II but with updated graphics look up it's remake "Pioneer".
This is it! This is THE space game. This is THE game that hooked me back in 93 on the Amiga, when I was 12. The box, the physical galaxy map, the unequivocal open world game that, in my mind, started it all. Thanks OA, you don't need to make any more videos.... I'm happy now ;-)
That era of games, especially on Amiga systems, was some of the greatest art of all time. Those computers made it feel like really anything was possible in a game, and it was just one classic after another.
This was the first game in the franchise I played. On an Amiga. That was a long while back; a very impressive game for its day.
Same here. Its why I bought elite dangerous.
@@Lobs79 Me too. When I bought my new pc, the game I was most eager to play was E : D.
This version for the Amiga was the reason fell in love with this game...It was waaaay ahead of its time. It was mindboggling big, and it fit on a single floppy disk. The only time I had a practical use of Trig was to use the 365 ly jump glitch to cross the galaxy on a single tank of gas.
It was more around 650 ly.
I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space
Lol I have the same Elite box too, it's the only Amiga game I kept. Man this vid was a blast from the past. Cheers for sharing.
Played it in early 90's on my Agima 1200 with a DKB Cobra Expansion card on a HDD. I still have the Amiga and Elite 2 Box and all the content. I spent hundred of hours in this game. Ended up to the Deadly Elite rating. The Stardreamer was very useful when doing assassination missions. After taking the contract. It would tell you where and when your target would exit from an hyperspace cloud, o you could go there and fast forward the time seconds prior you target exiting and blow it out! Sweet memories!
Also the intro music (Amiga) is so iconic in itself too it stayed in my memory all those years.
Yes, a lot of footage from the intro cutscene here and I can still hear the music in my head 🎶
@@LeetTreet I was thinking exactly the same thing. Also so much Modest Mussorgsky music! It's almost embarrassing to admit that this is the first place I ever heard Baba Yaga!
I remember landing on a planet, in Frontier, and then not being able to take off because the gravity of the planet was too high and my ships engines not powerful enough lol 😬 that being said, I know a few people, myself included, that would disappear into Frontier and emerge weeks later 😜 It truly was a game to get lost in and yep, way ahead of its time ❤️👍🏻
The greatest game i ever played. Still play it today and I have the star map in my office framed above my computer. There is nothing like it. It has everything. I love this game so much.
Did you make it to Elite?
Have you looked into Pioneer Space Sim at all? It's an free and open-source modernization/remake of Elite 2, and I think you might like it.
This game is just unbelievable, How is is possible to fit so much?
I can even remember at what point of my childhood I spent playing this, all I have is memories of endless adventures, exploration and challenges to overcome.
For me it's the best ever.
The only thing I really hated back then was the Newtonian flight model - and this is something I would immediately take again nowadays. Played it on the A500 back then and later First Encounters on the PC. The wmv took away a bit of the immersion of FE compared to Frontier. But I guess that's a question of taste.
I hate to say it but Frontier is still far ahead compared to Elite Dangerous.
I always hoped that FF would add more of Frontiers features (including planetary landings and over SIXTY ships). Sadly the shooter crowd (space and fps) won the battle.
Did they even win the battle though? It feels like the minority were actually asking for ground combat and fps gameplay (and I reckon a decent chunk thought that would guarantee thargoid combat further down the line). Feels like everybody wanted walkable ship interiors and settlements as opposed to what we got.
@@Jenna_Talia That´s what I´ve meant even if only hinted at it and didn´t communicate, here (contrary to the offical forum were I did it over years until I gave up)
On the Amiga 1200 with accelerator I've played it a lot. I remember holding the zoom out button down with sticky tape on the galaxy map to see how far it zoomed out. It took hours to see the entire galaxy.
It was also fun to just find a place in space to hang out and using the fast forward buttons to see planets orbit their stars etc. Or trying to land on random planets without a station/port.
I've also hacked a fast and light shipband added thousands of cargo capacity so I could to dogfights in space as well as transport a lot of cargo. Good times!
My brother and I spent many hours playing this game back in the day. I always wanted a Lion Transport for my endless journeys between Sol and Barnard's Star. Never played 1 game long enough to amass enough money get one...until 18 months ago when I downloaded it and got it working on DOSBox.
Being older (more patient and with an eye for finding more profitable routes) I stuck at it and got my dream ship.
Only to be left utterly dissapointed by the performance of the Lion Transport. It suffered terribly with deceleration, though not as bad as ships larger than it which had a tendency to be so bad a deceleration that you could easily find yourself unable to dock at starports (and some planets for that matter!) as the autopilot struggled to figure out how to move faster than the starport and then slow down fast enough to dock.
Great game. Right up there with Command & Conquer and Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but seriously, don't go above and ship that needs more than 2 crew if you want to reliably dock somewhere...
I also still play, even thinking of making a video of it. I fly a 50k+ tonnes eagle long range, with a class 7 hyperdrive.
Damn, can't believe they managed to have fully atmospheric landings, rivers and big cities 30 years ago, but don't seem to be able to do it today.
Well, the expected level of fidelity has gone up a bit.
Well, the "atmospheric landings" back then just meant there were clouds rendered. You didn't have to actually deal with atmosphere itself so much. :D
Able is not the same as willing. The ability exists - Frontier is just set on giving us minimum viable releases.
That's where I was really hoping Elite Dangerous would end up
@Okabe Rintaro I think you haven't actually seen what modern computer graphics can do. Kerbal Space Program (and its upcoming sequel), Space Engine, Pioneer (Elite II remake), all of these games allow you to fly down to the beach of an alien planet with aerodynamic simulation (most realistic in KSP) and Pioneer has cities, even more extensive than in Elite II. It's absolutely possible within power demands. Frontier just simply cannot be bothered - the best things about update 12 literally pertain to what you can do sat down.
I had the star map pinned up on my war for years.
Still amazes me to this day, how that packed so much onto 1 floppy disk.
R.I.P. to Elite Dangerous on Console.
Rip to elite dangerous on any platform
@@fusion2128 Rubbish...
@@Arradagus maybe, but personally I’ve quit and know many others who have. I’m sure there are many others still playing but it’s not what it once was
@@fusion2128 Fair enough. People leave video games and new people join. Nothing new in that.
I don't know about you but I'm getting bored, more I insult elite more I think it's needless to say elite is dead.
because if he is dead, why you publishing the news all the time.
provided that elite is not dead but is about to die; but in reality he is dead.
Make sure to check out Pioneer, the open-source reimplementation of Frontier: Elite 2 with significantly better graphics!
there goes my free time.
I wouldn't say Pioneer has better graphics. unlike Elite II with its vivid and simple yet hypnotic flat pixel graphics, Pioneer tatters this with low quality textures, generic looking ships and weird MIDI tracks as opposed to the catchy chiptune tracks the Amiga version of FEII had. Call me a boomer, but I don't think technological improvements equate to better graphics.
FE2 is still the GOAT for me with NMS a close second (mainly because it looks like Merlin!). E:D had the promise but FE2 still gives a better sense of scale because you jump to the outskirts. So if you land in a red giant system you get a size for the star vs jumping to every system & the star feeling the same size. You could put star dreamer on >> and the stations scale up on approach accordingly vs station pop. Lighting somehow is better too imo. There’s a lot they could have lifted from FE2. Sandro dropped the ball imo.
I just want to remind everyone that there is a mod for Frontier: Elite 2 and it's called Pioneer.
You are welcome
Very surprised that I've never heard of this game before! It looks insanely ahead of it's time in terms of design and scale. Conceptually the design reminds me of No Man's Sky, only made 23 years earlier, and before the benefit of widespread information on the internet. To me seeing the graphics for the first time, obviously the 3D is dated but I think the simple geometry and trails of the light from the ship engines are still very iconic looking. It reminds me of the same early 3D aesthetic that the TRON film had.
I remember when it’s sequel “First encounters” first came up. What an absolute disaster that was. Game kept crashing and was full of bugs, sounds familiar doesn’t it.
If I remember at the time it wasn’t frontiers fault, it was the Publisher game tek that pushed for an early release.
It’s kind ironic how the tables have turned now for Frontier.
FFE did eventually get patched at least but yeah the damage was done
To be fair it's easier to "respect player's time" when things are single player non-mmo-ish.
I still remember my amazement and euphoria when you started the game in Merlin and you were welcomed by that majestic gas giant with its rings on the horizon and then you realized that it was not just a background but that you could take off and travel to it...
I used to live in this game for weeks at a time. The flight model (in atmosphere) was unremarkable, but once you got into interstellar space, you would have to keep the "Newtonian" nature of the motion in mind: no stopping/turning on a dime. You approached a planetary body at 100Km/s, you would have to use reverse thrust to brake in time or become a splat on the surface. Yes, fighting ships was an annoying joust and one slip up would cost you, until I figured out you could "reverse joust": turn off the engines, turn to face your opponent, then apply reverse thrust while keeping the opponent in your sights to duck out of their path/fire, and return fire as they would crawl past you. You could also use the stardreamer's high acceleration settings to turn any fight into a one v one (a thing that they fixed in the follow up).
My Panther Clipper earned me more credits than I could ever need.
i remember doing a planetary landing without atmospheric shielding after it got damaged in a scrap, it took hours lol, the feeling i got after landing was the same as making it to sag A and back in elite dangerous in a un engineered asp classic
I've been telling people how good this game was for the last few years, oh wait it turns out i've been going on about this game for 30 years. Thanks for makng me feel old!
Played on the Amiga here as well. A computer ahead of its time with a game ahead of its time. What an awesome combo it was.
How was Amiga ahead of its time when there were plenty of computers similar, same or even more powerful then Amiga. For example Atari ST ran Frontier better then Amiga, on ST the game was barely playable, on Amiga was most of the time unplayable (unless in open empty space). And PC destroyed both Atari and Amiga in Frontier...
It was almost unplayable on amiga though.
So many memories of this game, played it probably more than any other Amiga title I had. Although in my opinion it was surpassed by First Encounters, which was basically the same game, with an addon pack (And probably the game that still holds one of my proudest gaming memories to this day, finding the thargoid homeworld, even managed to convince my folk to let me write to a magazine, cant remember which one now, to help another reader with the coodinates and system name).
UK Frontier Users Group represent... Swapping floppies in the post, reading the news letter, getting random programs written and out for everyone... Loved it!
Fantastic game, still fire it up on an atari St emulator occasionally. Two problems with the game: 1) the need to service the ship's drive every year in game limits the exploration distance from the core systems, 2) atari St version crashes when the mining device is deployed
IIRC with some versions of the game if you went out past 655.36 light years on the map you would get an "in range" notification. Which made exploring a bit easier.
Omg Obsidian, this game took over my life. I was only 11 years old and didnt have it myself but my mate at school did and I used to race around his house everyday after school just to be the "map reader" lol. The title music still gives me shudders
Loved the title music!
I sank tons of hours into the game, I remember the autopilot crashing bug and the annoying copy protection lol, the game on accelerated Amigas looks stunning and I really wish it got a modern coat of paint and improvements as it could still hold up
Not heard of Pioneer then?
@@Assimilator1 I think I still prefer FEII personally. if you ask me, Pioneer doesn't look nearly as pretty. The graphics that were colourful and vivid (and used a lack of textures as an advantage in the Amiga version) are reduced to the usual black space brown planets in Pioneer with even Earth looking a bit meh, and hyperspace clouds no longer looking like concentric circles with lightning coming out, instead just being a soft transparent-blue-white gradient with no interesting visual choices. The ships are rounded and generic looking, nothing looks great.
Played on Amiga....1 floppy disk I kept thinking how the feck did they do it lol
Same here! It still blows the mind.
I've just mentioned the 'controversy' of some folks not believing they fit all that game on one floppy disk. It wasn't even a full disk either!!
The game has a lot of light and a lot of shadow. I bought it in 1993 and was very disappointed because it was so buggy that you couldn't play it. Without these errors, it really would have been the best space simulation. It was exactly the same with Frontier First Encounters.
I spent many many hours playing this and First Encounters. I loved my Imperial Courier and Panther Clipper
While I did chores to earn money for my first VGA card and a SoundBlaster in 1991 to play WC, it was Independence War that blew my mind.
I pulled many all nighters playing this on my Commodore Amiga. Ah, youth.
Back when Braben had passion for Elite.... thanks for the nostalgia ObsidianAnt!
That feel back in the Day...a whole Galaxy on an Amiga Floppy disc in your hands
Frontier: Elite II was one of my favourite games growing up as a kid. There is though a few things I would add to this video:
1. Even though the galaxy was massive, your hyperdrive would explode after 1 year of usage (1 max length jump is 1 week). This means that it would be impossible to travel to distant stars outside of a forced mis-jump where you jam a screwdriver into the console and jump literally anywhere. This can also destroy the drive.
2. There was the bug in Cemesis where at John Coates you were paid to take the most expensive goods in the game, gem stones at about 3200. You could just not do this for single player, but it is something of an issue.
3. The ships were great in terms of how their capabilities progressed. You could go from the Eagle long range fighter start ship up to the Panther Clipper. After this i just went down to the Eagle Mk2 or 3, or even the super-light military fighters and became a bounty hunter.
4. The Lave corner was a hotspot for increasing your elite rank. Riedquat always seemed to have masses of pirates looking to attack. With the way the hyperspace worked, a departure and arrival hyperspace cloud existed from the jump point to destination would could be detected and analysed. If you are jumping your full hyperspace distance, 1 week is a long time for pirates to detect and fly to intercept.
5. if you wanted to be an absolute beast, you could fly to a system like Zaonce in an Imperial Courier (the biggest fighter in the game outside of the secret ship) and intentionally allow yourself to take damage to destroy your hyperdrive. You would be stuck in-system until you bought a new ship but would gain 150 cargo for shields and weapons.
6. The flight model was a little "off" in that you could use an auto pilot to align to the destination station and fly a long distance in Alpha Centauri accelerating up to you maximum speed. Then just as you are going to fly by switch on the auto pilot and it would magically start the docking process. No way it could do that, but there you go.
Fond memories. Even with a few flaws it was a good game for the freedom it provided.
I remember taking longer to slow down approaching a plant than it took to accelerate to max speed. You started reverse thrusting light years away to slow down in time. Hehe
Absolutely amazing game (yes especially for the time). Totally agree about the ‘grind.’ I hate that term. I know in the modern world of getting everything now but I just loved (and still do) working towards something- to me I love the investment of time and getting lost in a game. So when I got this game it was like the feeling when you get lost in a book (or a trilogy or a series of books). Nowadays people may mock this game and it’s style of game play; but I guess the same will happen be true of the best of the best games now when we hit 2052!
Yep agree it's not grind it's living in the galaxy!
Oh man, this took me back! Thanks for the nostalgia trip! I looooved this game back on the Amiga! That Intro (and its triumphant music) is lodged in my memory.
The thing that boggles my mind to this day was that the game fit onto a legacy double density disk (720kB) and didn't even need the "modern" high density one (1.4MB)!!!
This is what made me get Elite Dangerous. In the 90's I had NO clue what this game was or how to fly, but I knew I wanted, no I had, to dive into it, same for Privateer, and twenty-five years later I found Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen. Now that was technical progress, woah. No matter what will happen to ED, this is why it has a special place in my heart. o7
Loved this game on the Amiga -just incredible how much was packed into 2 disks.
I think the fact that since this game came out they've discovered new stars closer than say Altair, is mind blowing.
It took me a while to love Elite Fontier Ii, as I craved the smoothness of the wire vector graphics in Elite and the old ships. However Elite Ii finally won me over and I really enjoyed its game play and the ability to land on planets, was really cool.
Looking back now, Elite II was fantastic and so advanced for its day.
I remember waiting, waiting and waiting for this one to come out. Launch dates slipped and slipped. What came was great but flawed- combat came down to a ramming competition of who had the best shield for the most part Though when I finally got a big ship and lots of shield generators, it was amusing to have smaller 'flies' to swat themselves on my hull. The in-system flight thing was a bit challenging- speeding up time while the ship's computer calculated the right slow down point to get you to the right speed when approaching your destination. If your ship's computer was damaged in combat, you were screwed for long range travel! Other than these flaws, I loved it.
Repeatedly pressing the 'M' key to match the targets speed, during combat.
I remember the intro that was released on the cover disk of Amiga Format. I watched in awe, having been brought up with the original elite on the speccy.
You're supposed to use Engines Off in combat, which stops the ship from attempting to correct its vector and allows you to match velocities with the enemy. A surprising amount of people have obliviously denounced Elite II for this non-issue.
I used to fly Elite on the BBC computer in 1984. Wonderful! See the first picture on Wiki.
That was my intro to Elite as well at that time. Many a school lunchtime was spent playing it. Then Frontier on my Amiga years later.
I remember buying memory expansion for my A500 to play this game. It was awesome.
I wish I knew about elite back in those days. I don't even remember hearing about it.
Elite 2 was just amazing, I played it on my Commodore Amiga :) Weird that in a lot of ways Elite Dangerous that came out decades later, from the same creator even, was actually a step backwards.
I used to play this on an Amiga 500... was like playing a slideshow! lol But I still loved it.
At the time Frontier Elite 2 was a wonderful experience, but Elite Dangerous surpasses it in almost all areas, despite its crushing flaws. I do wish they had kept a few features of Frontier Elite 2 though, like the AI crew requirements for ships. It feels so silly to fly an Anaconda on my own. It is one of those things I do not understand about the decisions Frontier made. A cool, improved crew mechanic would have added some much-needed depth to gameplay. Ignoring this crew mechanic is one of the many mistakes FDev has made.
Yep, ship crew! also being able to bribe local officials!
@@K3rbalSpace Yeah, “bribing”. That was a fun little feature too. So simple, but it added some nice flavor.
Played this on an accelerated A1200 back in the 1990's - absolutely loved it. And it was a massive step up from Elite (CPC464) and Elite+ (A500), both of which I'd played to death.
I seem to remember it was shipped with some significant bugs and Frontier had to put a patch disk out for it. Or maybe I just made that up, it was 30 years ago.
Brings back memories!
Used to take advantage of a bug on Amiga version, spawn mars and purchase a ship and it would give you the money instead.
Remember leaving a ball of blu tac on the key for a hour 😂.
Panther Clipper!!
I used to struggle getting enough staff to take off 😂.
Always found it ironic how the intro video used plane like flight to make combat look interesting... BUT in game the Newtonian jousting was dire.
I remember really struggling with the physics and not being able to turn around. You'd be flying around then to come to a halt you'd have to turn around and thrust in the opposite direction for an hour.
Man... This game consumed my life as a 13 year old (1997). The Amiga was already dead by this point, but I got a an A1200 that year with hundreds of games and this one just blew me away in spite of all the fancy 3D games that were out for other machines.
Fond memories of ten year old me slowly amassing wealth through slave trading and smuggling weapons. I also remember buying slaves without installing life support for the cargo bay, and then wondering why my slaves had turned into fertiliser.
This was my life when I was 14 in the 90's on my Amiga 1200. and later on my 486 PC. so many years I played it! I remember them announcing they wanted to make Frontier Elite 4 (now ED) with concept art in like 1999. it was a long wait :D
I played this on my Amiga, but had none of the manuals or any instruction, so I had no idea what I was doing and was absolutely terrible at it! Couldn't resist that epic intro, though. Still, absolutely marveled at how they fit such a huge galaxy and all those assets onto those 2 disks! I'm glad that Elite Dangerous came along, as it felt like my chance at redemption.
Whenever Frontier:Elite 2 would kick my butt too much, though, I'd just switch over to Star Control, which was also a lot of fun.
star control was an awesome game!
Frontier on the Atari ST in 1993. Utterly brilliant 👍👌.
Three things that stand out in my memory about playing this as a kid:
1. If I didn't speed up time when auto-docking I would always crash and die, but if I did I'd be fine.
2. Instead of using my turrets in the Panther Clipper I'd just lock onto the enemy, engage auto-pilot & splat them across my windscreen like a bug.
3. I could land on atmospheric planets.
The legendary programmer Chris Sawyer was credited for coding this masterpiece.
According to the lore, this was the last time that a major game was coded in assembly and not some other higher level language.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 99% written in assembly language, and that was released in 1999. It was also written by Chris Sawyer. In 1993, programming games in assembler was still commonplace.
Ian Bell was amazing to have done Elite with such limited memory, resources and in Assembly. Truly genius.
Frontier: Elite II was fantastic and allowing for it's age, I still say it's better than Elite Dangerous and most other space games around today. I seem to remember some issues with aliens or something.
There was also 'controversy' around it's release. It came on a 1.44mb floppy yet was only about 400-500k (or something). A number of folks thought they were being ripped off, stating there was no way a game that big was in a file that small. They were wrong.
I played thousands of hours of this. There were 4 games that defined gaming for me. Kick off (and player manager), f/a 18 interceptor, Cinemaware's Rocket Ranger and Elite II Frontier . I Was not even 18 at the time when i got it . Wonderful for it is time.
I don't know Rocket Ranger but I completely agree on the other three and the time spent on them. Although I did eventually prefer Sensi Soccer to Kick Off but that didn't arrive until later.
@@Elwaves2925 I also played SSoccer a lot. but it did come after. as for Rocket ranger, jesus go see it it even had nazis in space . master piece for it's time . it had the most realitic boxing fight for it's time also, sadly speeded up in the video . ua-cam.com/video/F6vIHcxGyIA/v-deo.html
Spent a huge amount of my mid-teens on Frontier, I even sent a letter to the makers to ask for tips (I still have the reply guide they sent me)
First on an A500+, then a 1200 Amiga.
Only thing I've found in recent years which is near to the absorbing nature is playing Eve Online (Which I have been doing since 2010)
The worm hole bug, old school fun!
I will never forget when for the first time I flew in space and was headed to some other planet and when I wanted to stop and land I realized there was no stopping... In space... you literally have to use your break rockets long time to stop at the planet... I immeadetely fell in love with the game because it felt for the first time like real space... Not a cheesy flight simulation bullshit but the real thing... Even today there is not one single game that features the real behavior of zero gravity...
man, look at the variety of bases, cities and infrastructure around those landing pads. . . even a few parks and fake-adverts
I played Elite Frontier on and off in the nineties and naughties and enjoyed it. It is probably the most accurate space sim I've played although the combat was not as fun as ED. If I was to make a space game, it would be a cross between EF and ED.
I had that map for years on my wall above my Amiga. Memories....
I hear the Elite: Frontier music in my head when I see this. What a great game!
There was actually at least one update for this game, but it involved sending your game disk off through the post and getting a replacement.
Had this for my 486 dx2/66 pc back in the day, and it blew my mind. It was such a massive step up from the original. Then along came first encounters 💩
I bought a memory upgrade for my Atari ST simply to play this game. It's held in with carpet tape and works to this day.
I still love this game.
this game got me into elite great vid happy memories
Elite was my escape when I was a kid. I spent years playing the game.
This game really stimulated the imagination back then.
I got my Amiga on my 6th birthday, and was my primary gaming platform until i got my first pc (486). As it was common back in the day most of my games were pirated including elite ofc. A friend of my family helped my get into elite, and i played the shit out of it... Probably a thousand hours. Around the time i got my PC the discdrive on my amiga died, and i moved on to pc gaming. It was around 1996 i think.
Anyway around 2000 i was in my local computershop and looked through a bargain bin with old PC games... And there i dug up the boxed dos copy of Frontier.. And then it started all over again. :D
Truely a amazing game.
One of the things that I missed from Elite 2 when Elite Dangerous arrived was the limitations on hyperspace travel. Frontier was based on the model from the world's first sci-fi TTRPG, Traveller, where the minimum distance you would arrive in a new system was a minimum of a multiple of radii from the biggest stellar body - so if you jumped to a star system with a giant star, you could expect to have a long travel time to get close to binary companions and planets - in ED, you would just arrive close to the star instead, no matter its size.
Played this for years, and still occasionally jump into the openGL version with the improved graphics
I played the hell out of Elite Frontier, from cruising in a dinky Eagle all the way up to a Panther Clipper. Honestly for all of the graphic improvements in Elite Dangerous, Frontier was a better game.
best space game ever. I've still got the original, boxed with the maps included and everything....
One minor caveat. While updates to software and games in 1993 was rather rare, it wasn't entirely unheard of. We did have Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which one would dial-up to and get an update when it was absolutely necessary, but again, it was pretty rare. Fun fact - back in... 1991? Microprose actually mailed me a floppy disk one time just to give me an updated model that more closely resembled the F117 for their F-19 Stealth Fighter for the PC. Great memories. :-)
I spent sooo much fund playing FE2 and First Encounters. For me, the newtonian flight model and combat of FE2 with the graphics and sound of E:D would have been gaming heaven.
The intro music for FE2 was absolute quality too.
I used to love my Panther Clipper... had it loaded with the most powerful weapons available and could sit outside a station blasting everything to bits and the authorities couldn't touch me...
The core problem with Frontier was that Brabham simulated authentic spaceship velocities but forgot that you can't do WW2 style combat at those velocities, yet equipped the ships with WW2 style cross-hair targeting, making combat either impossible if you were doing it manually or boring if you used auto-pilot targeting (either way, combat was spent shooting a dot and hoping to get lucky, with zero immersion). So a major part of Elite - dog-fighting - was awful.
if you actually stopped your ship, forcing the other ship to also slow right down, then the combat actually looked a lot like the original Elite but nicer because the mass and acceleration was better simulated... but you'd quickly end up being too fast again.
Luckily, Brabham realised the mistake and fixed it for Elite: Dangerous, so we again got slower combat speeds consistent with a crosshair based weapon with manual targeting (aka WW2 guns).
You have to make space combat unrealistic (by slowing down the combat speed) to make it playable!
Oh, and don't even get me started on that 'deep space is blue' thing!
Oh wooooow! getting me back to my youth. I remember I spent hundreds of hours playing it. And even getting more in history, my ZX spectrum loaded from magnetic audio tapes and tape recorder... I've been hacking classic ZX spectrum elite in ASM (assembler language) back then adding myself money... yeah those were the days... thanks mate