David Braben

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David Braben is a British computer programmer, best known for co-writing Elite, a hugely popular and influential space trading computer game, in the early 1980s. 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 is considered to be the first true "solid" 3D game of all time.

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 this company, whose recent projects have included RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and games based on the Wallace & Gromit franchise.

David Braben has had a long-running and well publicised legal conflict with Ian Bell over a number of issues, including his failure to include Bell in the credits for Frontier and royalty payments for the third Elite game, First Encounters.

As of July 2006, David Braben is currently working on a game called The Outsider with Frontier Developments.

[edit] External links

• Frontier Developments
• Statements by Ian Bell
• David Braben on the future of video games
• David Braben's profile at MobyGames