Looking at the latest games developed by Frontier Developments (and by latest, I mean in the last decade or so), one might be led to believe that David Braben's studio does nothing but silly tycoons these days - RollerCoaster Tycoon, Thrillville, those kinds of things. But of course these are not what mr. Braben is known - and loved for among older gamers (and by older, I mean old enough to have been playing videogames two decades ago). His most famous creation dates back to 1985, and it was a game called Elite, the ancestor of today's expansive space simulators.

The Elite series flourished once more in the '90s, with Elite Plus (1991), Frontier: Elite II (1993) and Frontier: First Encounters (1995), but for the past ten years, fans have kept on waiting... and waiting, for an elusive fourth installment. Which, as it turns out now, is actually going to be doubled by a fifth, massively-multiplayer online chapter in the Elite saga. Don't hold your breath, though, this is still going to take a while!

In an interview with CVG this week, David Braben revealed that he is currently planning two more Elite games: a single-player one (with limited multiplayer), and an Elite MMO as well. Both will be built using the technology employed by Frontier's current next-gen project - The Outsider - so actual development on the Elite sequels will probably be kept on the back burner until the release of The Outsider, which is still nowhere in sight.

"There are two project designs that we've got now. One is a multiplayer game, the other is a single-player, still allowing multiplayer, but not massive multiplayer, which we do plan to do and that will follow on from The Outsider and use some of the technologies that that employs. That's the way they fit together", Braben told CVG. "Certainly the first Elite incarnation will be a single player game, that supports multiplayer, but we're not talking thousands, we're talking tens of players."

It also turns out that work on the Elite sequel began back in 2000, and at that time it was structured as a mass multiplayer game. But because of technical limitations, the project was put on "indefinite hold", only to be split in two separate projects afterwards. So now we're back to square one, doing what we do best: we wait.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)