Oolite – Elite open source clone
If you’re REALLY REALLY old you’ll remember a really groundbreaking game for it’s time, a space exploration, combat and trading simulator called Elite which despite probably occupying less disk space than the background image in your cellphone nevertheless managed to simulate a whole galaxy and hundreds of planets by procedural methods.
This legendary status makes it a natural for open source recovery and this is what has happened
Oolite is a space sim game, inspired by Elite, powered by Objective-C and OpenGL, and designed as a small game that is easy for users to pick up, modify and expand upon. Almost every aspect of the game can be changed by using simple, free graphics packages and text editors.
Originally written for Mac OS X, and under continuous development for over four years, Oolite is available for Mac OS X (10.3.9 and higher), Windows XP and Vista, and Linux. It requires at least a 400 MHz processor, 256 MiB of memory, and a graphics card capable of accelerating OpenGL graphics.
The game and source code are offered for free under the GNU General Public License.
Download and play Oolite here!