Studio Profile
How the UK’s largest independent developer built an empire spinning science
How Frontier Developments, the UK’s largest indie developer, built an empire spinning science
“PEOPLE HAVE GOT INTO PROGRAMMING, INTO SCIENCE, BECAUSE AS A KID THEY WERE INTERESTED IN ELITE”
David Braben says that Elite Dangerous tells one big lie, the lie that faster than light travel is possible. “When you start looking at the equations, how on Earth can something as fragile as a human not get ripped to shreds by the process of going through hyperspace? But hyperspace isn’t ruled out by physics!” he quickly adds, revealing his discomfort with the fact that Elite Dangerous has to interfere with the veracity of its 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way, which was closely based on the latest astronomical data and modelling when it was being made. But it had to function as a game, even if Braben wanted to complete the dream he started to realise on a BBC Micro in the form of 1984’s original Elite. After all, what use is a galaxy of stars and planets if travelling to even the very closest takes literal years?
If there’s one shared quality to the genre- and audience-crossing breadth of Frontier Developments’ games, it’s that they strive for authenticity. Disneyland Adventures? You get to explore an accurate rendition of the real place.
Planet Coaster? Its physics are accurate enough that Steel Vengeance, the tallest, fastest, steepest and longest wood-and-steel rollercoaster in the world, was debuted in the game before it was opened to the public in May. “It was magic to stand in front of this real coaster and to play video of it in the game,” creative director Jonny
Watts recalls. “The wind resistance has to be spot-on to match,” Braben says.
“The lie in Planet Coaster is that it doesn’t have health-and-safety rules,” Watts adds.
Even in Jurassic World Evolution, Frontier’s latest release, the team had to lean on the fiction of the Jurassic Park universe to provide the instant recognition it needed, but also filled in the many blanks that the films don’t show – the full sweep of daily dinosaur behaviour and the way they move, their sounds and the details of their appearances – from recent paleontological research.
Put it this way: if you went to Frontier Expo last year you’d have heard astrobiologist William Baines talking about xenobiology, palaeontologist Jack Horner (who inspired Dr Alan Grant, Sam Neill’s character in Jurassic Park) talking about dinosaurs, and aeronautical engineer and selfstyled ’thrillologist’ Brendan Walker about the psychology behind rollercoaster design. Authenticity forms the backbone of Frontier’s games, granting them depth, credibility and coherence. But there’s something else to it, too. “Just imagine if people play Jurassic World
Evolution and some of them are stimulated to study dinosaurs,” Watts says.
“It’s funny, people have got into programming, into science, because as a child they were interested in Elite,” says Braben, who is also one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which aims to promote computer science to children. “It used be Elite that came up often, but now it’s [ Elite sequel] Frontier.” Indeed, many of Frontier Developments’ senior staff have been working there for a decade or more, having grown up with Elite and its first sequel, Frontier:
Elite II. Some of them, such as Elite Dangerous producer Adam Woods, who had a pirated copy of Frontier on his Amiga, now get to work on it.
Frontier Developments is
about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. When we visit, it has amassed 370 staff and has just moved into a new office in its Cambridge science park, having outgrown its previous one. One floor leading off its multi-level glass atrium is, intriguingly, still empty. On a floor upstairs, one side of the office houses the Elite Dangerous team, which is still supporting a game that’s now coming up to four years since its full release with new ships, features and things to find across the galaxy. The team that made the recent Jurassic World Evolution, meanwhile, occupies another half of a floor. Elsewhere, members of the Planet Coaster team have moved to dinosaur-park management, but many remain to continue to produce content packs. There’s another big space for Frontier’s publishing team, and finally, half a floor is given to a mysterious new project.
This thoroughly multi-game studio is the UK’s largest independent developer, a studio which has been self-publishing since the release of Elite
Dangerous in 2014. To a large extent, this shift has been enabled by modern-day internet-driven movements such as Kickstarter, on which Elite
Dangerous earned £1.5 million in January 2013, digital marketplaces such as Steam, and socialmedia networks. But you can trace a spirit of independence right through Braben’s career, from when he attempted to find a publisher for
Elite with co-creator Ian Bell. He remembers taking it to a meeting with Thorn EMI, only to hear its seasoned publishing team question the appeal of entirely open-ended play and criticising it not for granting its players lives like every other game of its generation. “They liked it technically, but they said it didn’t work as a game,” he says, but he and Bell stuck completely to all their ideas. The rest is history.
Fast forward to Frontier: Elite II, and Braben managed to get a publishing deal with Konami only to find it selling it to another company called GameTek, which went bankrupt a few years later.
V2000, a version of Virus for PlayStation and PC, was published by Grolier, which wasn’t a large enough outfit to reliably secure shelf-space to actually sell it. And Frontier itself has skirted dangerously close to becoming a work-for-hire studio over its history, making Wallace And Gromit tie-in games and entering into a threegame relationship with Microsoft to make games for Kinect, including launch title Kinectimals and
Disneyland Adventures. One big attempt to break out of that cycle was The Outsider, an ambitious open-world adventure game for PS3 and 360.
“WE DON’T MAKE LITTLE GAMES, WE MAKE MASSIVE ONES THAT DRILL DOWN INTO THE CORE AND EXPAND ON IT”
Originally signed by Codemasters, which eventually dropped it, The Outsider was in development for six years, and its cancellation led to redundancies.
What instead led the studio out of the woods was a significantly smaller game. Conceived by designer Steven Burgess and released on WiiWare in 2008, LostWinds was a simple and gently artful platformer which used Wii Remote-powered gesture controls, and it was an important experiment for the studio. “It was about validating processes as well as making something experimental,” Braben says. LostWinds was about learning to work with platform holders directly, about producing screenshots and trailers and working with the press – about doing all the things that publishers traditionally do. And
LostWinds, which was necessarily a small game because it had to fit into WiiWare’s 40mb file limit, was small enough that it wouldn’t be a risk to the company. “It’s a beautiful game. I’m very proud of it,” Watts says. And it meant Microsoft was the last publisher Frontier worked for.
”Our reputation at Microsoft was very good, though,” Watts says. “We finished the games we were signed up to do, it was super-professional, and the split was very cordial.”
“We’ve still got a great relationship with them,” Braben adds.
“And it wasn’t about financial necessity,” Watts continues. “We just wanted to make the games we wanted to make, rather than what someone else wanted us to.”
“It’s a combination of creative freedom for the teams and the fact that we can plan much longer term,” Braben says. “When you’re working with external publishers, the technologies don’t necessarily flow from one to another and there’s a danger of getting pigeonholed. Plus, it frustrated me that we didn’t participate in the success. In the 36 years I’ve been in this, the biggest risk wasn’t not performing, but in publishers going away. We’ve had that several times over that period. Publishing puts us in much more control of own destiny and with more ability to go with our gut feel on things, to do our own statistics and do low-risk projects that are actually more innovative.”
Frontier’s games are,
after all, ambitious. Disneyland Adventures reconstructed Disneyland on an Xbox 360 and used Kinect; it demanded that the studio navigate a storm of licensing signoffs, and it still completed it within a year. Elite Dangerous reconstructed the Milky Way. But underpinning all of them is the same in-house engine, Cobra, which brings such efficiencies as allowing technical advances made for one game to be incorporated into the next. So, for example, the IK solutions developed to allow Jurassic World Evolution’s dinosaurs to credibly tread their enclosures (and visitors) will go into Frontier’s next games. And it’s very flexible, able to span Elite’s multiplayer galaxy, govern thousands of on-screen park visitors, and allow Planet Coaster players to construct huge convoluted rides out of tiny components.
So far, all three of its self-published games have been big-budget projects, and Frontier has given each long-term support. Watts says “never say never” to the idea of Frontier making smallerscale games, but there’s a sense at the studio that it operates best at the end that sustains the kind of meaty technical challenges that grab headlines and satisfy big-studio developers. “We don’t make little games, we make massive ones that really drill down into the core and expand on it,” says John Laws, who’s been art director at Frontier since the early 2000s. “And then we won’t stop. We want to build up a solid and cohesive world.”
Still, Watts describes the scale of its games as ‘triple-I’. “I was once seriously shouted down for saying we’re indie!” Braben says, mockaffronted. “It’s different when you’re big, but we’re independent. I don’t think you need to be living off beans on toast to have the indie vibe.” That might be true, but it’s still difficult to buy Frontier as an indie, especially as it’s starting to publish external games. It hasn’t any titles to announce yet, but in part the idea is to gain experience in publishing other studios’ games to further refine its processes, and perhaps also help to support UK talent. “We want to publish high-quality games,” Braben says. Watts adds: “We want them to be remembered not just for their quality, but as games people will keep revisiting and engage with on emotional level.”
If Frontier finds them, those games in many ways would mirror its own. Though it’s always prided itself on its scientific accuracy and technical expertise, it’s easy to forget that Frontier’s games are also laced with odd charm and wit. “There’s always been an eccentricity to what we do,” says Laws. “Charm and appeal. We’ve always embraced diversity as a company, and we like to surprise people. We like a technical challenge, but we want people to approach a game, think they know what they’ll get and always get some nice eccentric thing which they can latch on to, a hook.”