When Elite: Dangerous launched just three months ago it also announced a contest worth a total of 13,000 British pounds, including a single 10,000 pound grand prize. Over the weekend, Frontier Developments CEO David Braben finally announced the winners on YouTube, and the results are remarkable.
The Race To Elite contest featured four categories, three of which awarded 1,000 pounds, or around $1,500, to the first three players to reach Elite rank in combat, trade and exploration. The grand prize went to the first player to reach Elite rank in all three categories, and had a payout of 10,000 pounds, or the equivalent of $15,000.
The exploration award was won by a player known as Commander Tequila, who travelled over 190,000 light years to survey 7,967 unique star systems. Commander Lordkee took home the $1,500 prize for trade, moving more than 834,353 metric tons of cargo over 1,046 hours of total game time. Commander Fromtonrouge was the winner in the combat category, bringing down 8,563 ships since Elite launched.
The grand prize went to Commander Onepercent, who visited a stunning 10,342 unique star systems, tallied up 9,032 kills, traded 835,410 metric tons of cargo (including 2,000 metric tons on the black market) and took 1,029 in-game hours to do it.
Elite was recently announced for the Xbox One. By the time it launches on the console there will still be plenty of universe left to explore. Frontier has crunched the numbers and said that, at the current rate of player exploration, the game's 400 billion unique star systems will take around 150,000 years to explore in-game. Polygon had some stick time before the game went live, and you can see our video below.
