# david braben's procedurally generated elite nostalgia > if it's worth caching something today in memory in those days it was 1200 times less worthwhile because performance was slow slow compared to the amount of memory > ~ david braben on elite's unique memory constraints to consider the component of nostalgia built into david braben's garme elite: dangerous as a fully procedural process - of culture what seems 'dangerous' about elite is its aggressive nostalgia - which is not merely a nostalgia for past glory but for an often entirely (wilfully) missing or ignored present / reality where monetary gain crushes common humanity every time remember: nostalgia was once classed as a medical condition **the making of elite** the unique nostalgia field generated by / through elite is clearly on display in a cheesy bbc documentary about it. the title of the documentary could be read as "how elite is constructed culturally as a computing experience" - or as a "computational experience called culture" with shameless aggrandizement of the avant garage it states that "elite is the product of two young (privileged] students (from an elite university] who dared to dream the impossible" what seems truly impossible to understand is how the ideas behind dave's garme and ir approach to the whole big business of garming - complete with taittinger champagne receptions - are painted as somehow remotely radical and 'bra burn'ing // video here notice how they talk about "a sense of wonder" about how elite is "not just a garme which you play but a fully 3d world in which you live" how braben loved the way it could 'paint a world in your mind'; yes - a world of ceaseless war conflict and endless greed what's important here is not so much what one is nostalgic for but the feeling of retro itself - how 80's life on the uk's little backwater island was so paltry so circumscribed that many garme designers / nerdy anoraks were forced to construct ir own computer generated reality to escape the daily b.s of society what's entirely non-ironic is how the cut-throat trade / slavery based space capitalism of elite - and the subsequent runaway entrepreneurial yuppie success of elite itself - is entirely based on strictly thatcherite principles of ruthless profiteering half way through a talking head from the centre for computing history appears to inform us of elite's charm and 'revolutionary' brilliance - never realizing that the entire (tv) program itself is a user generated nostalgia field - of raw ideology the cfch guy states that assembly "has no fat on it" - yet elite as a cultural phenomena seems stuffed to the thrusters with the fatty padding of selected memory and choice (economic) cuts ie. uncritical culture industry prescribed ways of seeing its own history interesting how major garme publishers at the time wanted and perceived players as only wanting '10 minutes and three lives' - almost as if elite's promise of an entire world to explore represented a threat - as though expanding player's dimensional imagination potential into three spatial and one temporal vectored planes would overload them the cfch guy states the entire appeal of elite rests with the ability to "fly around the universe in your own little world" - that is to conveniently exist in a self-generated hermetically sealed cockpit of 'pure' culture market based nostalgia sublimely oblivious to anything except in one's own investment in prepackaged ad-venture capitalism - to paraphrase the sex pistols it's a cheap (online only) space holiday trading other people's misery while elite's nostalgia appears random and spontaneous it's in fact an entirely artificial memory construct of the modern garmey industry / roman.tic empire of culture - a very safe (conservative) play indeed // video here // republic of bob