Elite: "The game that couldn't be written"

The paragraph introduces Elite, a revolutionary 3D space trading game released in 1984 for the BBC Microcomputer. It had advanced graphics and open world gameplay, impacting gaming and computing in the UK. The narrator explains his personal and professional connections to Elite and provides a high-level background.

The narrator makes a disclaimer separating his analysis of Elite from politics, stating the game was created under the controversial Thatcher government but viewers should form their own opinions on any political aspects.

The narrator explains he will mix real Elite gameplay footage with custom 3D animations by Artem Tatarchenko for illustration, denoting animated content with a thumbnail so viewers aren't confused.

The narrator acquired a broken BBC Microcomputer, the machine Elite was created for, which came with a cassette tape copy of Elite. Footage shows the narrator restoring the device, allowing him to experience loading Elite via cassette.

The paragraph recounts how the UK fell behind the US in personal computing by the late 1970s. The government and BBC collaborated on the computer literacy project to teach the nation about computing, commissioning and subsidizing the BBC Micro.

The narrator analyzes the BBC Micro's technical specifications including its CPU, memory configuration, video and sound processors. He highlights advanced features like networking, expansion, and a high quality keyboard that set it apart from competitors.

The paragraph summarizes Elite's open ended gameplay, including roles like trading, combat, mining, and free exploration across billions of planets. Key features like the notoriously difficult docking, dynamic economy, and threat from pirates are mentioned.

The narrator explains technical constraints required the tape version of Elite to fit entirely in memory, while the disk version could load additional assets from disk. But strict hardware limitations applied even when loading from disk.

Drawing Elite's advanced 3D vector graphics on limited hardware required ingenious optimization. The paragraph tries to contextualize the scale using modern hardware, determining Elite could fit in modern CPU cache rather than RAM.

To understand Elite's extremely efficient code, the narrator explains its modular structure containing a main loop calling optimized subroutines for tasks like line drawing. He cites excellent references analyzing the full original source code.

The narrator praises Elite's split screen as another innovation, using timing interrupts to alternate between a high resolution monochrome view for flight and a lower resolution color panel for instrumentation.

By only drawing visible edges of 3D objects and using precomputed face normals, Elite applied hidden surface removal on low hardware. The narrator walks through the elegant method using vectors and dot products to determine visibility.

Procedural generation of billions of planets from just 3 seed numbers let Elite pack variety into tiny memory. Formulas and bit patterns defining planet details are revealed, generating variation while allowing the same universe between runs.

The radar provides an intuitive situational heads up display for combat. The narrator painstakingly analyzes the elegant 6502 assembly language implementation, involving math, optimizations, and clever XOR pixel writes.