Frontier Developments | Code Like It's 198x

Frontier Developments began with a resolution. David Braben had spent five years writing Frontier: Elite II, the sequel to Elite, “on my own”, and by the time it came out in 1993 he knew he did not want to do that again. “After Frontier, I’d resolved never to do a major project on my own,” he told Amiga Power in 1995, “so I set up Frontier Developments and got a team around me.” The company he started in Cambridge in 1994 had a disastrous first release, a lean decade of conversions and contract work, and then an unexpected second life making theme park games. It went back to Elite with money raised from players on Kickstarter, and it is still in Cambridge more than thirty years later.

Fast facts

Founded: incorporated 28 January 1994 by David Braben, in Cambridge.
First games: a CD32 conversion of Frontier: Elite II, then Frontier: First Encounters (GameTek, 1995).
Turning point: the Xbox conversion of RollerCoaster Tycoon (2003), which led to RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004).
Own games: LostWinds (2008), Elite Dangerous (2014), Planet Coaster (2016), Planet Zoo (2019).
Licensed games: Wallace and Gromit, Kinectimals (2010), Jurassic World Evolution (2018).
Stock market: listed on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s growth market, on 15 July 2013.
Chief executives: David Braben until August 2022; Jonny Watts; Jo Cooke from January 2026.

Before the company

Braben co-wrote Elite with Ian Bell at Cambridge in 1984, then wrote Zarch and Virus on his own. Frontier: Elite II took him from 1988 to 1993. At the end of 1993 Acorn User was still calling Elite “the greatest Acorn game of all time”, and noted with regret that the sequel would “appear first on other platforms”. GameTek released it at the end of October 1993 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC; Chris Sawyer wrote the PC version. It went to number one in the charts, and when Amiga Action reviewed it on a compilation in 1995 it wrote that it “could quite rightly be described as the most awaited computer game of all time”.

The new company’s own account of its founding, printed in Amiga CD32 Gamer in January 1995, said that by the winter of 1993 “it was apparent that one-man games production was unlikely to be a viable option in the Nineties”. Frontier Developments started work in February 1994, in a farmhouse “on the edge of rural Cambridgeshire with acres of parking and almost no traffic noise”. In ten months the team grew from three people to eight, among them a programmer who had worked on the Amiga, ST and BBC versions of Exile, and a software engineer whose title was “Astronomy”. Edge was still interviewing Braben at the farmhouse’s kitchen table in 1998.

First Encounters

Frontier’s first released game was a conversion of Frontier: Elite II for Commodore’s CD32, the Amiga-based console. The first game it made from scratch was the sequel, Frontier: First Encounters, and it went badly wrong. GameTek, which Wireframe later described as “itself in dire financial straits”, released it for the PC in 1995 before it was finished. PC Zone called it a “disappointing enhanced version” of Frontier that was “bugged to jiggery”. Its letters page that August was full of readers who had returned their copies, and the magazine’s staff wrote that they had been told the problems came from something “going wrong just before it went to duplication”.

Braben took GameTek to court. “The legal stuff really spoilt it for me,” he told Edge in 2000, “even though I finally won the case last year, which is why I haven’t gone back to Elite for so long.” The David Braben entry covers the case, and the falling-out with Ian Bell over royalties from the same game.

Space games, then theme parks

For the rest of the 1990s Frontier kept to space and shooting. Darxide (1995) was an Asteroids-style game for Sega’s 32X that Wireframe thought pushed the add-on “much further than anything else on the format”. V2000, a sequel to Virus, came out for the PC through Grolier in 1998, and Infestation through Ubi Soft in 2000. Edge, visiting in 2000, called Frontier “the team now working on Elite 4”. Wireframe’s verdict was that none of these games “really managed to capture the public’s imagination in the ways Elite – and Braben – had before Frontier’s formation”.

The change came in 2003, through somebody else’s game. Frontier converted Chris Sawyer’s RollerCoaster Tycoon to the Xbox, did it well enough to be given expansion packs for the PC game, and then made the whole of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, which Atari released in November 2004. By 2013 Frontier counted about six million copies sold of the RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 games. The same years brought Dog’s Life for the PlayStation 2, in which the player is a dog, Wallace and Gromit games, and Thrillville for LucasArts. Wireframe worked out that a studio which had made four space games and two conversions by 2003 had made fifteen theme park and management games by 2018.

Frontier also published a game itself for the first time. LostWinds, a puzzle platformer for the Wii’s download service, was a launch game for WiiWare in 2008, and Frontier financed it on purpose to learn how self-publishing worked. Braben later said no publisher would have backed it: “We didn’t have a credible demo and yet we shipped three months later.” For Microsoft Frontier made Kinectimals, a game about befriending big cats that launched with the Kinect camera in 2010, and Disneyland Adventures. Not everything came out. The Outsider, an open-world thriller about a wrongly accused CIA officer, was worked on largely in secret from 2005 until 2011, when Braben told Edge it was on “semi-permanent hold”.

Elite Dangerous and the listing

In November 2012 Frontier asked players on Kickstarter for £1.25 million to make a new Elite. Braben told Retro Gamer that the studio had worked on it “on and off” since 2000, “mostly building technology to make the game possible”, and that he wanted no publisher involved: “Our experience with publishers with the Elite game hasn’t been very good.” The campaign raised £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers.

On 15 July 2013 Frontier Developments plc joined AIM. Its admission document gave the company 227 full-time staff in Cambridge and Halifax, Nova Scotia, valued it at £39.4 million at 127 pence a share, and left Braben with 56.4 per cent of it. The money was tied to Elite: Dangerous, which Frontier would publish itself, and to its own game engine, Cobra. Elite Dangerous came out in 2014, and Frontier has kept adding to it since.

Planet Coaster, dinosaurs and after

After Elite Dangerous the studio went back to theme parks, this time with its own games. Wireframe called Planet Coaster (2016) “a fantastic spiritual sequel to the likes of Theme Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon”. Jurassic World Evolution (2018) put the same park-building skills to work on Universal’s dinosaur licence. Planet Zoo, released on 5 November 2019, did the same for zoos, with more attention to the animals’ welfare than to the visitors’ wallets. The Chinese company Tencent invested in Frontier in 2017.

Frontier also tried publishing other studios’ games, under a label it named Frontier Foundry. In June 2023, after a profit warning, it announced that it would stop signing new games from outside developers, because the Foundry titles had failed to “deliver on expectations of a positive return on investment within the first year”. Braben stepped down as chief executive in August 2022, after 28 years, and took the title of President and Founder. His successor, Jonny Watts, had worked with Braben for 24 years. Watts steered the company back towards what it called “creative management simulation” games, and after Jurassic World Evolution 3 came out in October 2025 he announced that he was leaving, 27 years after joining. Jo Cooke took over as chief executive in January 2026.

Sources

Amiga Power issue 48, April 1995: Braben on writing Frontier on his own and setting up Frontier Developments.
Acorn User games review supplement, December 1993, p. 33: Elite as “the greatest Acorn game of all time”; Frontier to appear first on other platforms.
Amiga Format issue 53, December 1993: Frontier released through GameTek at the end of October.
Edge issue 5, February 1994: Braben on the Amiga version, “Chris Sawyer did the PC version” (as cited in the Chris Sawyer entry).
Amiga Action issue 68, March 1995, p. 43: compilation review, Frontier as “the most awaited computer game of all time”.
Amiga CD32 Gamer issue 8, January 1995, p. 22: Frontier Developments company profile (Frontier at number one in the charts, one-man games production, the start in February 1994, the farmhouse, the team of eight, First Encounters).
Edge issue 54, January 1998, p. 59: Virus 2000 feature, interview at the farmhouse.
PC Zone issue 29, August 1995: buyer’s guide entry and letters on Frontier: First Encounters.
Edge issue 64, November 1998: V2000 review box (PC, Grolier, £40).
Edge issue 87, August 2000, p. 38: Infestation (Ubi Soft) and the Frontier studio; Braben on the legal case.
“Developer Profile: Frontier Developments”, Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 50–53: the 25th anniversary, the CD32 conversion, GameTek’s finances, Darxide, V2000, Infestation, the move to management games in 2003, Dog’s Life, Thrillville, The Outsider, LostWinds, Kinectimals, Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution, the 2013 listing and Tencent’s 2017 investment.
Computer Gaming World issue 241, August 2004, p. 67: RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (Atari, Frontier Developments, November 2004).
“Forward motion”, Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, p. 12: Braben on The Outsider.
“Manifesto: developers versus publishers”, Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 80–81: Braben on self-publishing LostWinds.
“Elite returns”, Retro Gamer issue 110, January 2013, pp. 8–9: the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter and its £1.25 million target.
“Braben and Oliver on success and failure”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, p. 6: £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers.
Frontier Developments plc, AIM admission document, 9 July 2013 (web, secondary): admission on 15 July 2013, 227 staff, 127p placing price, £39.4 million, Braben’s 56.4 per cent, Cobra, the back catalogue and sales figures, LostWinds as a self-published WiiWare launch game. https://frontier-drupal.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/development/frontier-corp/s3fs-public/FrontierDevelopments_plc_Admission_Document.pdf
Companies House, Frontier Developments plc, company 02892559 (web, secondary): incorporation on 28 January 1994, change of name in December 2012. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02892559
Wireframe issue 22, September 2019, p. 12: Planet Zoo preview (Frontier Developments as developer and publisher, release 5 November 2019).
“Frontier Developments bins third-party publishing arm to focus on own titles”, Proactive Investors, 14 June 2023 (web, secondary): the end of Frontier Foundry’s third-party publishing and the reason given. https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1017831/frontier-developments-bins-third-party-publishing-arm-to-focus-on-own-titles-1017831.html
“Frontier founder David Braben steps down as CEO”, NME, 10 August 2022 (web, secondary): Braben’s 28 years, the new title of president and founder, Jonny Watts as his successor after 24 years working with Braben. https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/frontier-founder-david-braben-steps-down-as-ceo-3287139
Patrick Killeen, “Frontier Developments CEO leaves after 27 years at firm”, BusinessCloud, 16 December 2025 (web, secondary): Watts’s departure, Jo Cooke as chief executive from January 2026, the management-simulation strategy, Jurassic World Evolution 3 in October. https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/frontier-developments-ceo-leaves-after-27-years-at-firm/