Frontier: Elite II

Frontier: Elite II from 1993 is the sequel to the legendary Elite, the 1984 game that founded the space trading and exploration genre. This record documents the Commodore Amiga version, the platform where the sequel shone brightest; Konami appears as the publishing label on this record, while GameTek distributed the game in other territories.

Frontier was a technical miracle for its day. An entire galaxy fit on a single floppy disk: thousands of procedurally generated star systems, planets you could genuinely fly around and land on, and Newtonian flight physics that turned every manoeuvre into a small lesson in orbital mechanics.

The player received total freedom: trade, smuggle, hunt pirates, ferry passengers, or simply fly farther than anyone had bothered to look. No fixed storyline – just an open universe and your own ambition, a recipe the industry would not return to in full force for another two decades.

The Amiga was the ideal home for such a project. Its combination of graphics hardware and a passionate community made it Europe's leading gaming platform in the early nineties, and Frontier became one of the machine's defining showpieces.

The game was designed by David Braben, co-creator of the original Elite, whose obsession with astronomical fidelity defined the whole project – from the scale of star systems to the passage of time on interstellar crossings. The legacy is plain to see: today's space simulations descend directly from Frontier, and their creators openly acknowledge the debt.

This version cannot be launched in the browser on OldGame.cz; the game's card preserves the year, the publishing details and a gallery, so the mapping of the galaxy can at least begin with your eyes.