….today’s celebration of the mundane through the sound-bite culture of instant gratification is hateful. Nothing worthwhile is easy, but requires a significant investment of time.

So writes David Braben in a feature on the BBC website. Braben, founder and currently Chairman of Frontier Developments, was the co-creator (with Ian Bell) of the legendary computer game Elite. In the article Braben reminisces about the Acorn BBC Micro: clock speed 2Mz, 16k or 32k of RAM and no hard drive. The machine which, for many of us, was our first experience of computing.

I used BBCs at school, and had an Acorn Electron at home. Braben laments the passing of the days when, despite its pitiable performance levels, the technology was so accessible and controllable. The BBC and Electron didn’t hold your hand. There were no annoying paperclips bounding up and down telling you how to do things. Instead, you got a manual (which included a full guide to programming in BASIC) and a few bits of software. Armed with these, you simply got on with it.

A lot of kids just played games, but the real joy was to be had in programming, finding out what you could make the thing do. I spent a rainy half-term holiday writing an adventure game when I was 10, something which remains among my proudest achievements. Messing around like that was fun, and, although I’ve not turned out to be much of a scientist or engineer, I learned analytical, structured thinking skills that are with me to this day.

And I played Elite. Constantly. Even though I never achieved the ultimate rating, I’ve never enjoyed another game more. Braben and Bell started writing it while they were undergraduates at Cambridge. Even in these days of motion capture, advanced AI and photorealistic gameplay, Elite remains an incredible achievement. Braben and Bell packed a game engine, motion vector graphics and a whole invented universe into just 32k. That’s about a third of the amount of data used to display this page.

The story of Elite’s development gets a whole chapter in Francis Spufford’s excellent book, Backroom Boys, which is well worth a read if you like stories of genius and improvisation - and a reminder that, as Braben says, nothing worthwhile is easy.

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