To understand this you need to go back to the original Elite on the BBC Micro.
In Elite there were no other players, there was no internet (web). It was just you, your ship, and the galaxy.
You did what you wanted to do, and you went were you wanted to go when you wanted to do so.
There wasn't that much to do in point of fact. There were only three missions, the galaxies were very limited in scope, there was only one planet around a star and that's where the station was.
It was just stars, stations, and you.
And yet from this very limited set of potentials came something that expanded in your mind into a thing that allowed you to be come a space pilot. A person living in a hostile galaxy on your own wits, with only your skills to protect you. You could go and see the wonders of the galaxy (spoiler alert: There weren't any), or hunt pirates, or trade, or be a pirate, or anything you could, back then, think of to do.
It was something that allowed you as an individual access to a much larger world. Access to a living breathing galaxy. It allowed you do become that space pilot.
You became that lone pilot against the odds in a hostile galaxy.
This was something that had never, ever been available before.
This is critically important so I'm going to repeat it: This was something that had never, ever been available before.
There were other games sure but nothing that gave you the opportunities Elite gave you. Nothing that fired the imagination of people like me. Nothing that allowed me to live an another life as a space pilot living on my wits and skills and travelling the universe to live or die on my terms.
Nothing. Nothing. At. All.
And in all this, there were no others. No one else. Just me. Against the galaxy. Or sometimes working with the galaxy. And other times not. But it was always just me.
Elite isn't a cooperative game, it's not a multiplayer game. It never has been. It has always, always, always been about that lone pilot on their own living on their wits and skills.
Elite is a single player game.
Now Elite: Dangerous has implemented multiplayer, and amazingly well actually, given how difficult it is to square that requirement against the entire historical ethos of the lone pilot game.
But that's not what it's about. It's not about multiplayer. That's not the ethos of the game.
It's about one thing: You.
And only you. Out there, with your skills and your wits, living as well as you're able to. On your own.
Just you against the galaxy.
This is what Elite: Dangerous was born from. This is what it means for me and thousands of others.
And people like me, and those thousands of others who played the original Elite and had their imaginations fired by being able to live that other life in space, helped in a small way to make it happen.
Elite, in all its variants over all time, at its core, at its foundation, will always be a single player game.
When that feeling of being the lone pilot living and dying on their own terms is gone, then Elite is dead.
Right now it's alive, vibrant, and being wildly successful in delivering an enormous amount more that I could ever have hoped.
Long may that continue.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
) like to play games with others.
