Make it EVE+"spitfires in space" and I think an entire generation will be lost.

EVE is not a bad take on Elite with one huge show-stopper, EVE is all about coop and team playing. In EVE you cannot dominate without huge corp backing, Elite was all about the single player.

Only four months? ;-)

I think I played Elite nearly every day for a year or so... I'm almost afraid of what would happen if a new one that was any good came along.

I guess I'm just too young to get it. I wasn't yet born when Elite was released. I have a lot of respect for older games and I'm usually the first to say graphics don't matter, but looking at screens and videos... I don't get the appeal. It's hard to even tell what is going on.

Get a copy of Frontier First Encounters - the last part of franchiase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXKTTB95JlY