Playing with Money (2): Space Trading
January 31, 2018
Over on ihobo today, part two of the serial looking at shops in videogames, this time looking at the 1984 classic Elite, and its relationship with tabletop role-playing games. Here’s an extract:
These two sci-fi games, Traveller and Space Opera, were to go on to inspire one of the most influential videogames of all time: 1984’s Elite, created by Cambridge University students David Braben and Ian Bell. A space trading game, its play consisted primarily of buying goods at one space station, and flying them to another station while enduring pirate attacks en route. It offered the player tremendous freedom of choice within its world, supporting everything from asteroid mining to bounty hunting with little more than a tight and flexible design – a design that descends directly from the early science fiction tabletop RPGs. This connection is frequently overlooked, most likely because of the tendency to ignore the relationship between early videogames and the tabletop games that lead to them…
You can read the entirety of Playing with Money (2): Space Trading over at ihobo.com.
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