Elite
Elite was a space trading game, with a bit of space flight sim built in. Released in 1984 by Acornsoft, it required the player to rank up your commander from ‘harmless’ all the way up to ‘elite’ (which I never did get to), you pilot a basic Cobra Mark III spaceship through 8 galaxies of planets. You earn credits by buying space commodities are low prices, and then selling them at a higher price. Throughout your space adventures you could mine asteroids, jump through witch-space, buy and sell illegal goods (which meant that the intergalactic police would start chasing you) and scoop up free fuel by skimming stars. The gameplay was based on the effective use of wireframe 3D graphics, which my Amstrad could not cope with very well at the time (even though it was only CGA graphics), meaning lots of stutter, which also meant trying to rotate the spaceship to dock at a space station was nearly impossible for me.
I first came across Elite when I saw a friend play it on his BBC Micro, which looking back seemed to handle to game very well. Later on I saw another friend play it on his Amiga ST which ran Elite smoothly, only to increase my feeling of envy. That bit of envy stayed with me for over 15 years, when I stumbled upon an emulated version for my ‘up-to-date’ PC, but the gameplay was so fast it was as if everything was on fast forward.
And of course, you can now play the ZX Spectrum version of Elite online.
Its also worth mentioning here another game which was released by Acornsoft for which they nearly got sued for. Snapper was near identical to Pac-Man, I’ll let you decide on how identical they are:
