Frontier: First Encounters

Cast your mind back to the heady days of Autumn, 1995... The Big Breakfast on telly, the birth of Star Trek: Voyager, the heyday of ‘British Pop’… and somewhere, in the depths of the Fens, a spotty young teenager is almost ready to spontaneously combust at the promise of his very first PC.

Yes, friends. That was me. I'd been raised on Commodore machines from an early age, starting with a C64 and then moving on to various flavours of Amiga. I had always been into space sims, and when Frontier (Elite 2) came along as a birthday present, it sucked up huge tracts of my time. Now I was getting my very own PC – one of the first to be shipped with Windows 95, and my dad had the foresight to pick up a copy of the recently released Frontier: First Encounters.

The Saker III. Opens bottles of Grolsch a treat in the 33 rd Century...

It took a little time to get everything set up right. Having just come from an A1200, fiddling with DOS and configuring the soundcard seemed new and alien to me. But once I saw that terrific space-opera intro for the very first time, I was hooked. The memories of more or less a year of solid Frontier-playing came rushing back, and after the intro had finished I started up with my first commander.

I took the standard first start – the proud happy owner of a Saker III Fighter. Being a Frontier veteran, I knew there was a spiffing trade route between Sol and Barnard's Star. So I jumped my way down the map, and started doing the traditional trading run to garner myself some credits... always using orbital bases, so I could sell my atmospheric shielding and get more juicy cargo space.

Parking offenses carry heavy penalties in the future.

Time passed. I read the journals and gradually got better and larger ships. My bank balance steadily increased, and I played with the smug satisfaction of one who has found the gravy train and has no intention of getting off.

By rights I should have been bored out of my mind, but the satisfaction of finding someone who wanted a specific commodity that I was carrying and was willing to pay three times the market price was terrific. It was like winning the space lottery.

More time passed. I got more ambitious – buying a medium-sized ship and outfitting
it for pirate hunting, then maybe a few assassination missions, with some military
package delivery on the side…

Parking offences carry heavy penalties in the future.

Sure, there were some bugs (thankfully though, my dad had got me the patched version), and the only advantage of having the CD-ROM copy was a video welcome on the bulletin board (recorded, no doubt, by the programmers and their friends). But the pure joy of being able to do what you feel like, when you feel like it was amazing. The graphics were surprisingly good for the time, and being able to fly in from the other side of a star system and land on a planet with its own unique topography was wonderful.

I simply haven't played a game since that immerses you so fully in its world, and allows such tremendous freedom, while at the same time delivering masses of missions and even a plot to engage with. I've played X and Tachyon and Privateer, but for me, none of these even comes close. With First Encounters, the universe wasn’t just some vast, intimidating void. It was mine.

STUARTB, May 2004.

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