Code Like It's 198x

David Braben

Co-author of Elite, author of Zarch and Frontier, founder of Frontier Developments

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David Braben wrote Elite with Ian Bell while both were undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Acornsoft launched it in September 1984. He went on to write Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes, its conversion Virus, and Frontier: Elite II, which he programmed largely alone. In 1994 he set up Frontier Developments in Cambridge, whose first game, Frontier: First Encounters, was released by GameTek in 1995 in a state that led to years of litigation. Frontier went on to make RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, LostWinds and Kinectimals, returned to Elite with the Kickstarter-funded Elite Dangerous, and joined the stock market in 2013. Braben also co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was appointed OBE in 2014.

When Acorn Programs went to meet the authors of Elite in the autumn of 1984, it found “two unassuming undergraduates at Jesus College, Cambridge”. The game had sold 13,000 copies in its first two weeks. David Braben, the younger of the two, planned to spend his share on a car. He had taught himself to program from the manual of an Acorn Atom, and Elite was, the magazine noted, “his first professional effort and his first game for the BBC B”. He kept going for the next decade. After Elite he wrote Zarch, the showpiece of Acorn’s Archimedes, and then spent five years building Frontier: Elite II largely on his own, before setting up the company that still carries its name.

Fast facts

  • Born: January 1964.
  • Education: Jesus College, Cambridge, where he met Ian Bell.
  • Elite: written with Bell for the BBC Micro; published by Acornsoft, September 1984.
  • Zarch: Acorn Archimedes, Superior Software, 1987; converted as Virus for Firebird, 1988.
  • Frontier: Elite II: Amiga, Atari ST and PC, GameTek, October 1993.
  • Frontier Developments: incorporated in January 1994; its first game was Frontier: First Encounters (GameTek, 1995).
  • Elite Dangerous: Kickstarter campaign in November 2012, raising £1,578,315; released in 2014.
  • Stock market: Frontier Developments plc joined AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s growth market, on 15 July 2013.
  • Raspberry Pi: one of the six founding trustees of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
  • Honours: OBE, 2014 Birthday Honours; BAFTA Fellowship, 2015; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
  • Now: President and Founder of Frontier, after 28 years as its chief executive.

Elite

Braben and Bell met at dinner in Hall at Jesus. “It took us some time to admit that we were both interested in computers,” Braben told Acorn Programs. “At first we were too embarrassed.” Both had owned computers since their last year at school, Braben an Acorn Atom and Bell a Tandy TRS-80, and neither had been taught to program. “They had no computers at school in my day,” Braben said.

The game started with Bell, who wanted to follow his Acornsoft game Freefall with a 3D simulation set in space. “Then Braben added the trading ship scenario and things just developed from there,” Bell said. Soon after they started, they took the program to Acornsoft, which was interested enough to lend Braben a BBC Micro. Bell’s own list of who wrote what puts the ship plotting, the trading and equipment screens, the navigational charts, the sound effects and the galaxy generation on Braben’s side, with Bell handling the planets, the 3D movement, the enemy tactics and docking. Braben designed the Cobra Mk III, the Python, the Sidewinder, the Viper, the Mamba, the Constrictor and the Thargoid, and the Coriolis space station.

The galaxy generator is the part most often described. Elite keeps no list of planets: each system comes from six bytes of “seeds”, and the program derives the next system’s seeds from the last with a repeated “twisting” step based on the Tribonacci series, where each number is the sum of the three before it. The eight galaxies of 256 systems therefore cost almost no memory, which mattered on a 32K machine. Braben complained to Acorn Programs about the BBC’s “hideous shortage of memory”. “The main thing is to make sure that every instruction is a useful one,” he said.

They finished the game in January 1984, “then we finished it again — and several times more after that,” Bell said. Acornsoft insisted on secrecy until the launch in September 1984, and in December Acorn Programs reported Acornsoft’s forecast of Christmas sales “in the region of 100,000”. The pair kept the rights to other machines and sold them to Firebird. According to ZZAP!64, they converted the game to the Commodore 64 themselves while studying for their finals, and in 1995 Braben told Amiga Power that he and Bell later “wrote a version for Nintendo”. The Elite entry covers the game, its launch and its many versions.

Zarch and Virus

Braben’s next big game was written for Acorn’s new 32-bit computer. Owners of the Acorn Archimedes first met it as Lander, a playable demo on the machine’s welcome disk. The full game, Zarch, came from Superior Software in 1987. The player flies a hoverplane low over a solid, shaded landscape, shooting down aliens that spread a red virus across the ground. ACE saw the demo in its first issue in October 1987: “every particle of a Lander/Zarch explosion casts its own shadow and falls under gravity. An Archie will set you back upwards of £800 and you don’t even get a joystick port for that money, but what a game!” Its review two months later gave Zarch an ACE rating of 979.

In May 1988 ACE called it “the highest ACE-rated” game so far and reported that Braben was converting it to the Atari ST and Amiga himself. The Archimedes could show 256 colours at once, so Zarch shaded its landscape darker with distance. The ST could show only 16, so its version had to do without that “depth-cueing”, but it already ran at “a healthy 15 frames per second or so”. The conversions came out as Virus, published by Firebird in 1988, with the Amiga version at £19.95.

Frontier: Elite II

Frontier took Braben five years. He started it in 1988, “on my own”, he told Amiga Power in 1995, working “first with Konami and then with Gametek”. He spent much of the time on astronomy and “how things work”, and he later regretted not using the textured graphics he had developed early on: they were ahead of their time in 1988 but “slightly behind the latest” by 1993. Bell’s account is that Braben developed the game “with some assistance from me”. Amiga Format announced its release through GameTek “at the end of October” 1993.

CU Amiga gave the Amiga version 97% in November 1993, at £34.99, and called it “the single most important step forward for games this decade”. GameTek put that line on its advertisements.

Frontier Developments and First Encounters

“After Frontier, I’d resolved never to do a major project on my own,” Braben told Amiga Power, “so I set up Frontier Developments and got a team around me.” The company was incorporated in January 1994, based in Cambridge. Its first game was the sequel, Frontier: First Encounters, which GameTek released in 1995.

It shipped with serious bugs. PC Zone’s buyer’s guide in August 1995 called it a “disappointing enhanced version” of Frontier that was “bugged to jiggery”, and its letters page that month was full of readers who had returned their copies. Magazine staff wrote that they had been told the problems came from something “going wrong just before it went to duplication”. Braben took legal action against GameTek over the release. In 2000 he told Edge that “the legal stuff really spoilt it for me, even though I finally won the case last year, which is why I haven’t gone back to Elite for so long”. Later reports describe the case as settled out of court in 1999.

His relationship with Bell soured too. According to Retro Gamer in 2005, the two had been at odds over royalties from First Encounters, and the row became public in 1999: Braben objected to Bell offering Elite free on his website, which was closed down following legal action and later restored, and Braben then said publicly that he had no problem with the game being made available. Bell has written on his website that, after a 1995 interview, “Braben still attempted to sue me for libel”; the Ian Bell entry quotes his account.

Frontier after First Encounters

The next few years were harder than the name suggested. Wireframe’s 2019 profile of the studio lists what followed First Encounters: Darxide, an Asteroids-style shooter for Sega’s 32X in 1995, then V2000 and Infestation, none of which “really managed to capture the public’s imagination in the ways Elite – and Braben – had before Frontier’s formation”.

The turn came in 2003, and it came from somebody else’s game. Frontier converted Chris Sawyer’s RollerCoaster Tycoon to the Xbox, and did it well enough to be given expansion packs for the PC game and then the whole of the next game in the series. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 came out in 2004, and when Frontier listed its back catalogue for investors in 2013 it put sales of the RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 games at about six million copies. The same year brought Dog’s Life for the PlayStation 2, in which the player is a dog, and a Wallace and Gromit game. By 2018, Wireframe counted, a studio that had made four space games by 2003 had made fifteen theme-park and management games.

Not everything shipped. From 2005 Frontier worked, largely in secret, on The Outsider, an open-world thriller about a CIA officer who has been wrongly accused. In 2011 Braben told Edge that it was “on hold. That’s semi-permanent hold”. “When things don’t see the light of day it is very upsetting, and I don’t mind saying that,” he said, and he pointed out that its technology had gone into Frontier’s later games.

Two of those were small and new. LostWinds, a puzzle platformer for the Wii’s download service in 2008, was published by Frontier itself. “We didn’t have a credible demo and yet we shipped three months later,” Braben said in 2011, arguing that no publisher would have backed it; Frontier had to do the publisher’s work too, “physically travelling around” America to get the game reviewed. Kinectimals, a game about befriending big cats, was one of the launch games for Microsoft’s Kinect camera in 2010. By then Edge was describing Frontier as “one of Europe’s largest independent developers”, with Braben as its chairman.

Elite Dangerous

Braben had been talking about a fourth Elite since 1998. In 2008 he assigned his rights in the Elite games to Frontier, which agreed to pay him 10 per cent of the profits from any sequel. On 6 November 2012 Elite: Dangerous was revealed, with a Kickstarter campaign asking backers for £1.25 million and a release planned for March 2014, the original game’s 30th anniversary. “We started in 2000 and did some work on it,” he told Retro Gamer. “Essentially what’s happened is that we’ve worked on it on and off in the intervening time as a skunkworks project, mostly building technology to make the game possible.” He wanted no publisher in the way: “Our experience with publishers with the Elite game hasn’t been very good.”

The campaign raised £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers. Where the original Elite had been two undergraduates, the new game had “around 60 people”, Braben told Edge in 2013, and he admitted what he missed: “the feeling that you could, as a single person or small team, make a huge amount of progress”. Like its ancestor, the game generates its galaxy instead of storing it; Frontier’s 2013 prospectus described it as recreating “the 100 billion star systems of the Milky Way galaxy”. Elite Dangerous came out in 2014, and Frontier has kept adding to it since.

A listed company

Frontier Developments plc joined AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s market for growing companies, on 15 July 2013. Its prospectus gave the company 227 full-time staff in Cambridge and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and valued it at £39.4 million at the placing price of 127 pence a share. Braben, its founder and chief executive, would still own 56.4 per cent of it.

The prospectus tied the money it raised to Frontier’s own game technology and to Elite Dangerous, which Frontier would publish itself. After that game the studio went back to theme parks with its own games: Planet Coaster in 2016 and, with Universal’s dinosaur licence, Jurassic World Evolution in 2018. The Chinese company Tencent invested in Frontier in 2017. Braben ran Frontier for more than 28 years, until August 2022, when he handed the chief executive’s job to Jonny Watts and took the title of President and Founder.

Raspberry Pi

Braben was also one of the six founding trustees of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the educational charity behind the Raspberry Pi computer, and brought what the Foundation calls “an industry perspective” from the difficulty he was having recruiting programmers. In May 2011 he and Eben Upton took a prototype, about the size of a USB memory stick, to the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, who filmed it on his phone. The video had been watched more than 400,000 times within days. The Register reported that the Foundation hoped to sell the computer for about £15, so that children could “get one with pocket money”.

“For me, the BBC Micro crossed that gap,” Braben told Edge in 2011, meaning the gap between editing levels in a game and real programming. He blamed school ICT lessons for missing “a generation or two”, and hoped for “a demoscene of things in BASIC or some simple language which a kid can pull apart and go, ‘Oh, that’s not so complicated, I’ll tweak it’”. “That’s how I started, really,” he said. The Raspberry Pi went on sale on 29 February 2012, and Cellan-Jones reported that around 100,000 were ordered that day.

Honours

By 2013 Braben was a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In the 2014 Birthday Honours he was appointed OBE “for services to the UK Computer and Video Games Industry”. In March 2015 BAFTA gave him its Fellowship, its highest honour, at the British Academy Games Awards. “I have a truly great team behind me at Frontier,” he said, “and without them I would not be receiving this, so the honour is effectively for all of us.” Frontier also lists honorary doctorates from Abertay University, the Open University and the University of York.

Sources

  • Nicole Segre, “Limitless horizons for the Elite team”, Acorn Programs, December 1984: Jesus College, the Atom and TRS-80, meeting in Hall, Freefall, the BBC Micro from Acornsoft, the memory quotes, finishing in January 1984, secrecy, 13,000 copies in two weeks and the Christmas forecast, the car.
  • ZZAP!64 issue 1, May 1985, pp. 14–17: the Commodore 64 conversion by Bell and Braben during their finals.
  • ACE issue 1, October 1987: Lander on the Archimedes welcome disk, Zarch from Superior Software.
  • ACE issue 3, December 1987, pp. 60–61: Zarch review, ACE rating 979.
  • Andy Wilton, “Silicon Spires”, ACE issue 8, May 1988, pp. 31–33: Zarch as the highest-rated game, Braben’s own ST and Amiga conversions, depth-cueing, 15 frames per second.
  • The One issue 1, October 1988: the Amiga Virus at £19.95. ACE issue 13, October 1988: Virus, Firebird.
  • Amiga Format issue 53, December 1993: Frontier released through GameTek at the end of October; Konami and GameTek advertisement.
  • CU Amiga, November 1993: Frontier review (GameTek, £34.99, 97%).
  • Amiga Power issue 48, April 1995: Braben’s timeline from Elite to First Encounters (the Nintendo version with Bell, Frontier on his own, Konami and GameTek, setting up Frontier Developments).
  • PC Zone issue 29, August 1995: buyer’s guide entry and letters on Frontier: First Encounters.
  • Edge issue 87, August 2000: Braben on the legal case and Elite.
  • Companies House, Frontier Developments plc, company 02892559, incorporated 28 January 1994 (web, secondary). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02892559
  • Henry Winchester, “‘The tech caught up to our ambition’: David Braben on the return of Elite”, TechRadar, 12 May 2014 (web, secondary): the out-of-court settlement with GameTek; the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter. https://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/-the-tech-caught-up-to-our-ambition-david-braben-on-the-return-of-elite-1248142
  • Ian Bell, Elite FAQ, Ian Bell’s website (web, secondary, one party’s account): who wrote what, ship designs, Frontier “with some assistance from me”; question 13, Bell’s account of the 1995 libel writ, quoted as his words. http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/faq.htm
  • Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005, abandonware feature: the 1999 dispute with Bell over royalties and the free Elite, and Braben’s public statement.
  • Mark Moxon, Elite on the 6502, “Galaxy and system seeds” (web, secondary): six bytes of seeds, twisting, the Tribonacci series. https://elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/
  • “Developer Profile: Frontier Developments”, Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 50–53: the games after First Encounters, the move to management games in 2003, Dog’s Life, The Outsider, LostWinds, Kinectimals, Elite Dangerous (2014), Planet Coaster (2016), Jurassic World Evolution (2018), the 2013 listing and Tencent’s 2017 investment.
  • “Forward motion”, Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, p. 12: Braben on The Outsider.
  • “Easy As Raspberry Pi” and “Q&A: David Braben”, Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, pp. 84–88: the Raspberry Pi and Braben’s views on teaching programming.
  • “Manifesto: developers versus publishers”, Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 80–81: self-publishing LostWinds; Frontier as one of Europe’s largest independent developers.
  • Edge issue 223, January 2011: Braben as chairman of Frontier; Kinectimals as a Kinect launch game.
  • “Elite returns”, Retro Gamer issue 110, January 2013, pp. 8–9: the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter, its £1.25 million target, Braben on the game’s history and on publishers.
  • “Braben and Oliver on success and failure”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, p. 6: £1,578,315 from 25,681 backers.
  • “An Audience With… David Braben”, Edge issue 258, October 2013, p. 96: the team of around 60, what he missed about 1993.
  • Frontier Developments plc, AIM admission document, 9 July 2013 (web, secondary): admission on 15 July 2013, 127p placing price, £39.4 million market capitalisation, 227 staff, Braben’s 56.4 per cent, the 2008 Elite rights assignment and 10 per cent royalty, the back catalogue and sales figures, the 100 billion star systems, Braben as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. https://frontier-drupal.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/development/frontier-corp/s3fs-public/FrontierDevelopments_plc_Admission_Document.pdf
  • Frontier Developments plc, “Director Biographies and Committees” (web, secondary): Braben as chief executive until August 2022, then President and Founder; one of the six founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation; honorary doctorates. https://www.frontier.co.uk/investors/director-biographies-and-committees
  • “Frontier founder David Braben steps down as CEO”, NME, 10 August 2022 (web, secondary): Jonny Watts as his successor. https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/frontier-founder-david-braben-steps-down-as-ceo-3287139
  • The London Gazette, supplement 60895, 14 June 2014, p. B11: OBE. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/60895/supplement/b11
  • BAFTA, “David Braben to be Honoured with BAFTA Fellowship”, press release, 4 March 2015, as reprinted by Movies Games and Tech (web, secondary): the award on 12 March 2015 and Braben’s reply. https://moviesgamesandtech.com/2015/03/04/david-braben-to-be-honoured-with-bafta-fellowship/
  • Rory Cellan-Jones, “Chapter 4: Raspberry Pi”, 12 May 2021 (web, secondary): the May 2011 meeting and video, the launch on 29 February 2012 and first-day orders. https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/chapter-4-raspberry-pi
  • Tony Smith, “Elite coder readies £15 programming gadget for schools”, The Register, 6 May 2011 (web, secondary). https://www.theregister.com/2011/05/06/david_braben_raspberry_pi/
  • John Lazar, “A vote of thanks to our Trustees”, Raspberry Pi Foundation blog, 3 July 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-vote-of-thanks-to-our-trustees/

See also

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