Retro Remakes: GameCity goes Elite with papercraft ships

Continuing in this week's celebration of 25 years of seminal space game Elite, Nottingham, UK festival GameCity has just announced a special 'My Life with Elite' session that will not only feature appearances by 'very special guests... responsible for creating the game itself', but also, amazingly, a reading of C64 Elite novella 'The Dark Wheel' by author Robert Holdstock, "whilst the Nottingham Trent University Choir perform a new arrangement of Strauss' Blue Danube waltz."

And just to make the event that much more surreal, GameCity has teamed up with Mark 'creaselightning' Bolitho -- a friend, it turns out, of Elite co-creator Ian Bell -- to release a series of papercraft starships from the game, which were originally designed to be sold as part of the C64 package but never made it in.

The first of the 'crafts, the Escape Pod, is already available on the GameCity site (direct .pdf link), with more coming weekly, and all the ships will be hung for the above reading to create "a kind of paper-universe of Elite craft."

One more reason I'm gutted to be missing GameCity this year (and yet another why you shouldn't) -- see the festival's official site for specifics on attending.