David Braben

David Braben
Braben at SingStar premiere at 2005 Cambridge game event
Born	1964 (age 46–47) Basford, Nottingham
Alma mater	Jesus College, Cambridge
Occupation	Game designer, programmer and entepreneur
Years active	1984-present
Spouse	Katharin Dickinson

David John Braben (born 1964, Basford, Nottingham) is a British computer programmer, best known for co-writing Elite, a hugely popular and influential space trading computer game, in the early 1980s.^[1]

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.

Panel at 2005 game event in Cambridge. Braben is the second on the left

As of 2006, Braben was working on a game called The Outsider with Frontier Developments. As said in an interview,^[2] 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.

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 USB memory stick, and has a USB plug on one end with a HDMI monitor socket on the other, and provides a 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.^[3] 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."^[4]

References

1. ^ The Making Of: Elite, Edge, May 22, 2009
2. ^ Q&A: David Braben--from Elite to today, GameSpot, Nov 22, 2006
3. ^ Rory Cellan-Jones, "A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers", BBC News, May 5, 2011
4. ^ Raspberry Pi Foundation website

External links

• Frontier Developments
• David Braben's profile at MobyGames
• BBC TV: Brits Who Made The Modern World - Elite Computer Game
• David Braben on the future of video games:
  • Towards games with the wow factor, BBC News, 31 December 2005
  • Games without end, The Guardian, 8 July 2008

Persondata
Name	Braben, David
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1964
Place of birth	Basford, Nottingham
Date of death
Place of death