An ambitious plan to update classic space trading game Elite has hit its funding target. Some of you may remember the old Elite game from back in the mid 80’s as being one of the first open world 3D space adventure games on the BBC Micro.

David Braben, one of the game’s original creators, sought £1.25m via crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter to fund the 21st century update of the 1984 classic. A last minute surge of pledges helped it reach its goal less than 24 hours before the funding deadline ran out.

Funding squeeze
Elite: Dangerous debuted on Kickstarter on 5 November and set itself 60 days to raise £1.25m. In November, Mr Braben said Elite was a game he had wanted to come back to for a “long, long time”.

Although some early work on the multiplayer title had been done at Mr Braben’s game studio Frontier Developments, but needed the cash to turn the code into a finished playable product. If the game did not hit its funding target then development work would stop.

Getting the cash via Kickstarter was preferable to using an established publisher because it gave Frontier and those who backed it total control over how the final game would turn out, said Mr Braben,

The finished game, he said, would keep the central trading, travel and spaceship combat elements of the original but add far better graphics, physics and feature a much larger chunk of the universe for people to play in.

Fund tracking site Kicktraq showed that after an initial surge the number of people backing the project tailed off dramatically. On its second day on Kickstarter raised more than £271,000. However, soon after pledge totals rarely got over £10,000.

A surge of pledges came forward in the closing few days of Elite’s fund-raising drive thanks to an appearance on social news site Reddit by Mr Braben and with the help of comedian Dara O Briain who urged his 1.2 million Twitter followers to back it.

When the funding target was passed, Mr Braben thanked all the backers via a message on Twitter.

“It is truly exciting, touching, and really wonderful,” he said.