Life and Work
Braben attended Buckhurst Hill County High School in Chigwell in Essex. He studied Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. He married Katharin Dickinson in May 1993 in Cambridge.
Elite was written in conjunction with Ian Bell while both were undergraduate students at Cambridge University. Another seminal game written by Braben was Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes (later released on some other platforms as Virus), which was one of the first true "solid" 3D games.
After Zarch, Braben went on to found Frontier Developments, a games development company whose first project was a sequel to Elite named Frontier. Braben is still the Chairman and part owner of the company, whose recent projects have included Kinectimals, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, games based on the Wallace & Gromit franchise and the platformer LostWinds, which was a launch title on Nintendo's WiiWare download service.
As of 2006, Braben was working on a ambitious next-generation game called The Outsider, being developed by Frontier Developments. As said in an interview, he was planning to start working on Elite 4 - as a space MMORPG game - as soon as The Outsider went gold. Braben said explicitly that this title was of a special value to him. The Outsider was dropped by its publisher Codemasters before release, leading to nearly 30 staff layoffs at Frontier, and was never published.
In May 2011, Braben introduced a new prototype computer intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools. Called Raspberry Pi, the computer is mounted in a package the same size as a credit card, and has a USB plug on one end with a HDMI monitor socket on the other, and provides an ARM processor running Linux for an estimated price of about £15 GBP for a configured system, cheap enough to give to a child to do whatever he or she wants with it. The prototype is part of a venture by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity whose aim is to "promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing."
In 2012 Braben explained in an interview with developer website Gamasutra his opinion that the sale of secondhand games negatively affects development of new titles.
On 6th November 2012 Braben's Frontier Developments announced a new Elite sequel called Elite: Dangerous which is being funded as a Kickstarter project
Read more about this topic: David Braben
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