For the time, the box that the game came in was also revolutionary. http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acornsoft-Elite-... It has a big thick manual, a novel, posters. I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. It was mind blowing, and hilarious - written as if you had just bought a Cobra Mark III and it was explaining the details of your new ship to you. Some parts of it had flashes of Douglas-Adams style humour.
Loading up the game and playing it was also mindblowing. There were so many different keys and controls. You could switch to side or rear view cameras from your ship - even just watching the parallax stars float by was amazing. The solar system you were flying around in was bewilderingly huge, with a planet and a distant sun that you could actually fly to. On my first go I mistook the space station for a Thargon (I had really taken the manual to heart) and fired on it. Big mistake. The police were launched and they shot me to pieces. The 3D combat felt very realistic, and the clever 3D radar made everything understandable. The fact that I could launch a homing missle and it would use its own AI to fly to its target was incredible.
And it was a _hard_ game. Trading was hard. Docking was hard, until you learnt how to line up properly from a good perpendicular angle. Getting more than a few systems away from your start point was hard. Flying to anywhere but the safest systems was very dangerous. It was hard to build up money and buy new kit or fuel. The manual said there were 8 galaxies with hundreds of systems in each galaxy, but it was hard to survive more than a few hops.
This was running in 32K of RAM. The game loaded from a floppy disk that had I think 100K of space on it.
The overall impression was a mindbendingly huge game of so much depth and diffuculty. The state of the art in those days was supposed to be Arcade machines, but they had nothing to compare to this - because Arcade machines were based on people playing for a couple of minutes. This was a game that could keep you busy for years. Nothing like that had existed before.