Frontier is a computer game written by David Braben and published by Gametek, as a sequel to Braben's earlier game Elite. It is available for (at least) Amiga, Atari ST and PC computers.

Frontier retained the same two principal ideas as Elite: accurate real-world physics and completely open-ended gameplay. There is no preset plot you must follow in Frontier, instead you are free to shape your own destiny. As a consequence, Frontier can't be "won" (although it can be lost) - you have to decide yourself what to aspire to, and when you have achieved it.

Game play

In Frontier, you play the part of one of Commander Jameson's grandchildren, having inherited from your grandfather one hundred credits and an Eagle mk I spacecraft. According to the game's standards, this is incredibly modest, which is all the more reason for you to seek to progress further.

Like Elite, Frontier is mostly about trading. You can buy and sell lots of things like food, industrial parts, jewelry, medicine, and even slaves, hoping to make a profit. Learning to compare prices in various places is essential for progress. Note that some things (particularly narcotics and slaves) are illegal at some places. Attempting to trade them may result in getting fined by the police.

Getting from one place to another is done with realistic space flying. You get to control all the major spacecraft flying controls yourself, if you want to. For the less experienced flyer, the game offers an autopilot. The flying part of the game is viewed in 3D with filled-in polygons.

The problem of the vast distances in space is solved with hyperspace (analogous to warp drive in Star Trek). Even here, Frontier offers a more realistic touch than other sci-fi games or movies: Even in hyperspace, time passes as normal. You spend the duration of the flight in suspended animation, which saves you literally years of boredom.

Sooner or later you're bound to meet enemies, mostly space pirates. Combat inevitably ensues, and is handled completely realistically. In practice, this means both ships taking slingshot thrusts at each other, lasers firing madly all along, until one of the ships is destroyed. All enemy ships you destroy count towards your combat rating, starting from Harmless and progressing towards Elite.

There is something of a "background story" to Frontier, establishing two major factions in the galaxy: The "Federation", based in the Sol system, and the "Empire", based in the Achernar system. These two factions are bitter enemies, but for the current time (the whole duration of the game, it seems) they are in some kind of cease-fire, akin to the Cold War in the 1960s.

You are free to side yourself with the Federation, with the Empire, with both, or with neither. The game doesn't even try to restrict your political career. Both sides have a military force that you can run freelance missions for, and if you succeed, you may be awarded a military rank. The ranks of the Federation and the Empire are indenpendent of each other. Of course playing for both sides can get you in trouble if one side's military begins to think you're too closely affiliated with the other.

Compared with Elite

Frontier, of course, has better graphics than Elite, but this is mostly due to the differences in the underlying computer platforms - the Amiga, Atari ST and IBM PC offer much more power than the BBC Micro and Commodore 64.

The biggest improvement in the actual gameplay is that you are no longer stuck with the same ship (the Cobra mk III ) for the whole game. Frontier offers dozens of ships, from small but nippy fighters like the Eagle and the Cobra to huge cruisers such as the Anaconda or the Panther. You can only have one ship at a time, so every time you buy a new ship, your old ship is traded in, with its trade value deducted from the new ship's price.

Some people feel that all the accurate realism and open-endedness has made Frontier less interesting than Elite, because there is less intense action and combat.

Bugs

Frontier was getting late on schedule near its release, so Gametek was in a rush to release it. As a result, there were some bugs left in the first release.

The most famous of these is the "wormhole" bug: Normally your ship's hyperdrive has a range of about 15 light years at the most, so planetary systems dozens of light years away are too far to reach in one hyperspace jump. However, if you happen to find a system exactly 655.36 light years away, it is suddenly within the range!

Die-hard fans have tried to explain this with a wormhole theory, but the most probable explanation is that the game only uses 16-bit math instead of 32-bit when calculating system distances for hyperspace jumps, and its internal variable rolls over when reaching 655.36 (2 to the power of 16, divided by 100).

Another bug causes a passenger to sometimes want to go to a system with no planets, making a successful delivery impossible.

Frontier in the media

Frontier was generally well received by the media. Most magazines were awestruck by its sheer volume and accurate depiction of real-world physics, and gave it similar awesomely high ratings they had originally given Elite.

One notable exception was Amiga Power, who viewed the game not as a successor to Elite's throne, but as a space flying game on its own right, and were disappointed by its lack of action. This made them dismiss the game as boring, ranking #100 in their top 100 games list.

Trivia

The first two combat ratings, Harmless and Mostly Harmless, are references to the book Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Successors

Frontier was succeeded by First Encounters , which was available for PC computers only, as the graphics had become too detailed for the Amiga and Atari ST to cope with.