Watch A Huge Elite: Dangerous Fleet Enter Hyperspace
This is what games are for
Brendan rode along for the first part of the Elite: DangerousDistant Worlds expedition, in which 900 pilots have grouped together for an expedition to the far side of the galaxy. The journey will take three months and has a long way to go, and the video below shows some of the players gathering together in Sagittarius A* - and what it looks like when 52 players jump into hyperspace at the same time.
This is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is that 52 players managed to meet up in a single instance of Elite: Dangerous.
The expedition is being led by Dr. Kaii, alongside Commander Erimus, one of the game's most ambitious player explorers. Kaii described the gathering at Sag A*:
"Last night six of us gathered at Sag A* for a screenie. Then I decided to ask some people to come join. Then I posted in all our comms channels for people to come and more and more came. I asked everyone to form a line. Then I thought, why not ask them to form a Star, an ode to Sagittarius A*, didn't think it would happen. Then the 52 men and women who turned up shocked me with their cooperation, organisation, ideas and patience and slowly formed up into a star.
"After an hour of madness, I asked all 52 to lock on to the same star, charge their hyperdrives with zero throttle and counted down. At zero, 49 CMDRs high-waked (and 1 low waked) out of the system in perfect synchronisation and I laughed so goofily and so hard."
It's just one of the many waystations along the route the group are taking, designed to give stragglers a chance to catch up and pilots opportunities for hijinks like, well, this.
*Sagittarius A* is the name of the actual location, so that asterisk was not there to denote clarification at the end of the post. Or... or was it?!
Thanks, Eurogamer.