A genuine genre-creator and an amazing achievement.
From the very beginning on the game, which features the various ships featured in the game rotating to Johnathan Strauss's The Blue Danube, a clear reference to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odessey, it is clear that this is to be a game like no other. It was one of the first games in the world to utilise wireframe 3d graphics as opposed to two-dimensional sprites and allowed players a freedom of exploration (over 200 planets!) that was not to be rivaled for some time afterwards.
The basic structure of the game involves buying goods at one planet (or rather the space station orbiting a planet) and selling them at another, fighting off pirates and the terrifying Thargoid aliens along the way. Players were required to examine and record the prices that each good was worth at each planet in order to establish profitable tradiing routes and hence earn the money needed to upgrade their ship, buy more goods and tackle the more dangerous and inevitably more profitable regions of the galaxy.
An absolute marvel of a game, Elite more than deserves its lofty position as one of the founding fathers of modern gaming.