Frontier: First Encounters is a PC video game released in 1995, where the player can go through space trading and combat simulator. It is the sequel to Frontier: Elite II (1993), which itself is a sequel to the seminal 1984 game Elite. The game was created by David Braben’s company, Frontier Developments. Many fans of the game refer to it by the shortened title of FFE. In the list of unseen-releated websites that Robert Seddon sent to us, there is even a page about some “unused missions in Frontier: First Encounters. (Retro Gamer #47 p. 31 quotes David Braben: ‘The real problem with First Encounters was that it was under an unreasonable amount of pressure,’ says Braben about the difficult project. ‘There was so much interference [from Gametek] that we offered all the money back so we could get out of the deal because I felt it was going to be a disaster. So that was a massive distraction and the game was nothing like what I wanted. As a lot of hackers have already found out there was a lot of extra story in the game that was closed off for the final release, because part of it didn’t even work.’)
At www.jades.org/brokmiss.htm we can read the unused missions text, extracted from the game: “As many of you know, FFE wasn’t finished when Gametek released it. It is possible to look at the contents of the main .exe file, and in the middle of a load of unreadable stuff the mission text is clearly readable. Among this are the missions we know about, but there are a number of other missions we don’t see. This page is dedicated to the missions which, for whatever reason, we have been denied. Note that these missions cannot be flown as the appropriate code is missing!”
