The two creators of one of the most revered games of all time spoke at Nottingham’s GameCity festival yesterday, putting aside disputes of the past to celebrate 25 years since the release of Elite for the BBC Micro.

Ian Bell and David Braben created Elite while undergraduates at Cambridge University in the early 1980s. The game was hugely successful, but its legacy was marred by a series of legal spats between the co-authors in the 1990s over the intellectual property rights.

There was no hint of these wrangles during the GameCity session, however. As well as Bell, Braben, and Sinclair Spectrum version coder Dominic Friar, ‘My Life with Elite’ included sci-fi author Robert Holdstock - who wrote the novella bundled with the game - and artist Mark Bolitho, who produced origami templates of Elite’s spacecraft that were to be included in the game box but were dropped due to cost considerations.

Like the other contributors, Bell and Braben took to the stage separately to talk about Elite and its legacy. Bell said that what now struck him after 25 years was the “sacred and profound responsibility” of creating games that can influence other people, especially children.

“You’re reaching into the minds and the imaginary spaces of children, and you’re to an extent shaping their characters and their life stories,” he said. “It wasn’t something I was considering at the time. Elite was an artistic statement really, doing the best we could on the platform without letting commercial considerations compromise what we thought was the best product we could make in terms of a really good game that we wanted to play, that showed the potential of a 3D game. But since then I’ve regarded games as a sociological device.”


_{^{Ian Bell (picture by Chris Chapman)}}

Bell drew on comments by Lord Puttnam, who in the previous session had urged games developers to think about the wider cultural and educational value of their creations. “If you’re not thinking in terms of what effect your game is having, and what you’re doing to the player – whether you’re educating them or stimulating them – that’s really what matters,” he said. “It’s not about creating a technical achievement and it’s not about making a lot of money, although those things are nice. It’s more about how you can shape our species.”

Bell cited George Orwell’s novel 1984, a warning against totalitarianism set in the same year that Elite was released. “The world Orwell depicted hasn’t come to pass as he predicted it, but there are elements in these days where we take out a military stronghold in ‘Afpak’. There’s a newspeak that’s pervading our culture now and the media exists not to educate, not to inform, but to promulgate consumption.”

“I’m glad [Elite] isn’t Doom because I’m glad that even though we didn’t really think in these terms, I think its effect on players and on people’s lives is good,” Bell continued, “both in the sense of giving them good memories but also in making people think in different ways and awakening interest.”

Saying that “it was a real privilege and an honour” to be able to touch so many lives, Bell urged those working in the games industry to raise their sights, to “Not just be looking at sales figures and target markets, but to be taking a step back and thinking ‘Am I contributing positively to the cultural psyche? Am I moving things forward or am I pulling things down?’”