Originally Posted by
Mayhem
Elite was effectively the first "sandbox" game. You know, the basis of an awful lot of games today, and the inspiration in part for GTA. You could choose to do what you wanted; you could trade goods, fight pirates, smuggle illegal stuff, take on the police, and then if you became good enough, you'd unlock some secret missions to take part in. The original was released in 1984 for the BBC Micro, a machine that took an awful lot of memory up with some of its video modes, and yet Braben and Bell shoved this game into 32k of memory. ANYONE of my era in Europe knows Elite.
Comments like this are why European retrogamers shake their heads at the utter console-centricness of US "history" of that era... like the computers never existed.