Games

Gollancz have announced that they will be publishing three novels based on the Elite series of computer games in 2014. The new Elite game, Elite: Dangerous (the fourth in the thirty-year-old series), recently passed its funding goal on Kickstarter , ending with more than £1.5 million raised for game development. The title is expected to be released by mid-2014. To help the game reach its goal Gollancz pledged a significant sum on Kickstarter to buy the rights to publish three novels based on the Elite universe. Gollancz had already been in discussions with David Braben and Frontier Studios about adding the original Elite tie-in novella, The Dark Wheel , to its SF Gateway online store. The Dark Wheel is notable as it was written by the late Robert Holdstock, best-known for his Mythago Wood series of novels. The Dark Wheel was packaged with the original BBC Micro release of Elite in 1984 (I still have a copy in a box somewhere). Frontier: Elite II , released in 1992, was also ac...

David Braben and Frontier Developments have put up a Kickstarter page for Elite: Dangerous , the long-awaited fourth game in the Elite series. In visual terms, this was 1984's answer to Crysis II . The original Elite was released in 1984 on the BBC Micro and is one of the most famous, seminal and game-changing titles of all time. It was an open-universe game in which you took a spaceship and could trade and fight your way across eight galaxies and some 2,000 star systems, all in (wireframe) 3D. It was the first major 3D game and one of the first games to give you total freedom in how you approached playing it. The sequel, Frontier: Elite II was released in 1993 and featured filled-in 3D graphics, multiple controllable spacecraft, an even vaster universe (hundreds of millions of procedurally-generated star systems in a - somewhat - accurate recreation of the Milky Way) and the ability to land on planets. The third game, First Encounters: Frontier II was released in 1995 and wa...