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When Aviator burst forth from the darkest depths of Acornsoft a few months ago it shed a radiant glow on a somewhat uninteresting software market and created a stunned aura of admiration of the kind you see around a man who kicks bulls around the area that makes a bull a bull. So when I burst into the Big K offices the other day screaming, "It's better, it's better!" I thought it might provoke some kind of reaction.

It did. "Don't be stupid," someone muttered and a large box of last month's issues hit me squarely between the eyes. This was not the kind of reception I expected, so I grabbed a nearly head firmly by the ears, dragged it over to the nearest BBC and loaded the game.

As I started showing him how to play, the glazed, overworked look gradually faded from his eyes, turbing to that of the hardened games freak who knows paradise when he sees it. He gave a hoarse scream, forced me out of the seat and took the controls.

By this time, a few of the others had started to show interest and were drifting slowly in our direction. Before long, a full scale fight had developed for a crack at this most wonderous of beasts. It looked as though that was the last I was going to see of Elite for some time.

And it really is that good. Vast and highly complicated, it's a sort of space arcade-action slash adventure slash strategy game where you roam the galaxies earning a dangerous living trading between the planets, avoiding pirates and hostile aliens and behaving yourself - or not - when the local law come sniffing at your tail.

As the game, or should I say epic, begins you find yourself safely docked in an orbiting docking station above the planet Diso. Inspecting your ship you find it to be a Cobra Mk III trading/combat craft, equipped with a front-firing pulse laser and a twenty-tonne cargo hold. You check the market prices and decide to fill your hold with low-priced food.

There's no way of knowing for sure, but there'a a pretty good chance of selling it for a profit on Leesti. With a quick glance to make sure everything is OK, you launch the Cobra and set hyperdrive co-ordinates for Leesti, a small, light industrial settlement a few light years away.

Within minutes, the hyperdrive cuts in and before long your viewscreens show Leesti not far away. You open up to full power, life is hard enough scratching a living on the spaceways without losing half your cargo to pirates, and the planet looms closer.

Just as you're approaching the safety of local space, a blip appears on the long-range scanner, followed by another, then another, until there are five. They close in fast and suddenly all hell breaks loose. You swerve to meet them, firing rapidly and manage to pick one off.

Another soon goes down to a homing missile but the rest are too much. Your only chance is to run for it. You swing round to face Leesti and, after what seems like hours of endless dodging and weaving, your control panel indicates that you are within the defensive screen of Leesti's space station. Your energy banks may be heavily drained but at least you've made it and maybe your cargo will fetch enough for that beam laser you've always been promising yourself. If that last episode was anything to go by, you were going to need it.

So goes a typical session at the controls of Elite. The action scenes take place in real time - very real - line graphics, similar to those which made Aviator so popular, and believe me it's hectic. Pirates are only one of many hazards facing you in this universe. If you think you can make a fast buck by running contraband, slaves or narcotics, then watch out for the local law. They take none-too-kindly to lippy traders trying to make fools of them and they show it. Once they're on your tail, you'll never shut them off. On top of this, there are the Thargoids, virtually indestructible, invariably nasty.

It really is unlikely that you've ever seen a game of this kind of scope, probably as close to a genuine simulation as there is ever likely to be. A few days ago, if anyone had asked me if anything like this was possible, he probably would have received a sharp clout to the base of the neck for asking inane questions, but now? Who knows, anything is possible. Whatever happens, this is a classic - in the genuine sense where classic means Forever.

A few phonecalls put Big K in touch with David Braben, co-author of Elite. David and his partner, Ian Bell, had spent the past year coding before the epic was ready and were now sitting back, basking in the warm glow of praise being showered on the game.

David Braben, it turns out, is a social sciences student and Ian Bell studies maths, so Elite was written largely in spare time. "It's just a hobby really," we were told. Some hobby. And what made him write it? "It started off as a combat game."

Neither of them have got any further than a 'competent' status, which still leaves 'dangerous' and 'deadly' to go before they reach 'elite', the ultimate accolade.

If the creators can only get that far, what chance do us ordinary mortals stand? "There's a rumour floating around that someone's reached 'deadly', but I'm not sure who."

Braben was very careful to point out that Elite has nothing to do with Aviator, in spite of the obvious visual similarities - which is understandable considering the amount of work they've put into it. Let's hope they keep it up.