I'm one of those 1984 players who never quite made it to ELITE.
I got to DEADLY and played for what seemed like 6 months before giving it up, so this is quite special for me.
I dont know which platform you used, but on the MSX version of elite (which we had when I was tiny) you needed 1.3 million kills to get elite. Presumably, because noone ever made it as far the as the internet can tell me.