[morsch]

There's no doubt that Elite is an ancestor of EVE and many other games. But clearly they're going to implement a superset of the features the original had, and I don't get the impression that the end result will be very similar to EVE. That said, an early single player version of EVE wouldn't be very similar to EVE, either; I get the impression that EVE is almost purely about player relations and the metagame.

On an unrelated note, you could land on planets in Elite 2. That totally blew my mind back then. Sort of like a real time lo-fi version of Powers of Ten[0] running on your computer.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten