8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation.
Except that at the time almost nobody was doing this and they actually used the built in BBC Micro random number generator which is why it took so long to get the game ported to other platforms!
What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds...
...and bugs! I'll agree that it was as ambitious as Elite but it was full of often serious bugs where Elite was not. In addition to that there were some serious design issues such as your relative speed indicator switching to the planet you were trying to land on when you were far too close to the planet to be able to slow down. This resulted in having to approach at a snail's pace to ensure that you did not just add a crater to the existing surface features!