David Braben
| David Braben | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Born |
2 January 1964 West Bridgford, Nottingham, U.K. |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Game designer, video game developer |
| Years active | 1984–present |
David John Braben, OBE (born 2 January 1964), is a British game developer, game designer and CEO of Frontier Developments plc, co-developer of Elite, a space trading computer game, 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.
Braben attended Buckhurst Hill County High School in Chigwell in Essex. He studied Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge, specialising in Electrical Science in his final year. In May 1993 he married Katharin Dickinson in Cambridge.
In 2008, Braben was an investor and non-exec 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 same size as a credit card, and 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, 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."
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.Next Generation listed him in their "75 Most Important People in the Games Industry of 1995", chiefly due to the original Elite.
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