David Braben

David John Braben (born 2 January 1964) is an English video game developer and designer, founder and President of Frontier Developments, and co-creator of the Elite series of space trading video games, first published in 1984. He is also a co-founder of and works as a trustee for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which in 2012 launched a low-cost computer for education.

Biography

Early life Braben was born in West Bridgford, Nottingham. He attended Buckhurst Hill County High School in Chigwell, Essex. He studied Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge, specialising in Electrical Science in his final year.

Career In 2008, Braben was an investor and non-executive director of Phonetic Arts, a speech generation company led by Paul Taylor. Phonetic Arts was acquired by Google in 2010, for an undisclosed sum.

In May 2011, Braben announced 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 size of a credit card, has a USB port 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 for a configured system, cheap enough to give to a child to do whatever he or she wants with it. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is 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".

Game development Braben has been called "one of the most influential computer game programmers of all time", based on his early game development with the Elite series in the 1980s and 1990s. Next Generation listed him in their "75 Most Important People in the Games Industry of 1995", chiefly due to the original Elite.

Elite was developed in conjunction with programmer Ian Bell while both were undergraduate students at Cambridge University. Elite was first released in September 1984 and is known as the first game to have 3D hidden-line removal. In 1987, Braben published Zarch for the Acorn Archimedes, ported in 1988 as Virus for the Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC compatibles.

After Zarch, Braben went on to develop the sequel to Elite, Frontier, published in 1993, and founded Frontier Developments, a games development company whose first project was a version of Frontier for the Amiga CD32. Braben is still the President and majority shareholder of the company, whose projects since 2000 have included Dog's Life, Kinectimals, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, LostWinds, Planet Coaster, Elite: Dangerous, Jurassic World Evolution, Kinect Disneyland Adventures, Zoo Tycoon, Coaster Crazy, and games based on the Wallace & Gromit franchise.

In 2006, Braben was working on an 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 special value to him. The Outsider was abandoned due to the removal of publisher support and was never published.

In 2012, Braben explained in an interview with developer website Gamasutra his opinion that the sale of secondhand games negatively affects the development of new titles, also holding the price of games in general much higher than they would otherwise be. However, later in 2014 he acknowledged: "Piracy goes hand in hand with sales. If a game is pirated a lot, it will be bought a lot. People want a connected experience, so with pirated games we still have a route in to get them to upgrade to the real version. And even if someone's version is pirated, they might evangelise and their mates will buy the real thing."

On 6 November 2012, Braben's Frontier Developments announced a new Elite sequel called Elite: Dangerous on the Kickstarter crowdfunding site. Elite: Dangerous achieved its funding goal and was listed as one of the most funded Kickstarter campaigns. The game was released on 16 December 2014, and by April 2015 had sold over 500,000 copies. As of August 2017, the game has sold over 2.75 million copies.

In August 2022, Frontier announced David's transition to his new role of President and Founder, stepping down as CEO.

Personal life In May 1993, he married Katharin Dickinson in Cambridge. According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Braben and his wife have an estimated combined worth of £182 million, an increase of £50 million from the previous year.

Awards

On 5 September 2005, Braben received the Development Legend Award at the Develop Industry Excellence Awards in Cambridge.

In 2012, Braben was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

In 2013, Braben was co-award winner of Tech Personality of the Year at the UK Tech Awards 2013. In the same year, he was awarded an honorary degree by Abertay University.

Braben was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to the UK computer and video games industry.

In January 2015, he received the 2015 Pioneer, Game Developers Choice Award (GDCA), for his work on the Raspberry Pi and for working more than 30 years as a game developer.

On 12 March 2015, Braben was awarded the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award in video gaming at the 11th British Academy Games Awards.

Braben is the recipient of three honorary doctorates from Abertay University (2013), the Open University (2014), and the University of York (15 July 2015).

Braben was inducted into the UK Games Industry Hall of Fame on 4 March 2025.

Games Game name First released Braben's role(s) Elite 1984 Designer and programmer Zarch 1987 Developer Conqueror 1990 Developer Campaign 1992 Programmer (original 3D shape display code) Frontier: Elite II 1993 Designer, writer and programmer Frontier: First Encounters 1995 Director and writer Darxide 1995 Designer V2000 1998 Programmer Infestation 2000 Creative director and engine and tool programmer Dog's Life 2003 Director and designer RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 2004 Executive producer RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked! 2005 Executive producer RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild! 2005 Executive producer Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 2005 Executive producer Thrillville 2006 Executive producer Thrillville: Off the Rails 2007 Executive producer LostWinds 2008 Executive producer LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias 2009 Chairman Kinectimals 2010 Executive producer Kinect Star Wars 2012 Chairman and Founder Tales From Deep Space 2014 CEO and Founder Elite: Dangerous 2014 Director Planet Coaster 2016 CEO and Founder Jurassic World Evolution 2018 CEO and Founder