Frontier Developments

Frontier Developments' first game was the 1993 Amiga CD32 port of the largely successful Frontier: Elite II followed by Frontier: First Encounters, second sequel to the seminal 1984 game Elite by Acornsoft. The company describes the original Elite as a "Game by Frontier", in its back catalogue during the company's 2013 sale of shares to the public, with David Braben owning all rights to the game assigned to the company in 2008.

Between 2005 and 2011, the company experienced turmoil while developing its next generation title The Outsider. Its feature list was ambitious from its initial announcement, although little was seen of the game in public following this. The project was initially self-funded by the developer but failed to maintain publisher backing. When Codemasters withdrew from the deal the studio was also forced to make 17 staff members redundant.

Frontier Developments had been planning a new Elite sequel, under the working title Elite 4, since 1998. The company completed a successful Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2012, where the new sequel's name Elite: Dangerous was revealed. Early-access versions of the game have been playable by backers since December 2013. The full game was released to PC on 16 December 2014.

Frontier Developments has made many other games, including Dog's Life, Thrillville, and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. The company also made games for the Wallace and Gromit franchise, and has released Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo, and a tie-in game for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In 2008, Frontier released LostWinds, a launch title for Nintendo's WiiWare platform. It received critical acclaim, scoring 81% on Metacritic. It was followed up with a sequel in 2009, entitled LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, which scored 86% on Metacritic. In 2010, Frontier developed Kinectimals for Microsoft's Kinect controller on the Xbox 360. In 2011 Kinect Disneyland Adventures and Kinectimals: Now With Bears were developed, along with ports of LostWinds for iOS and Kinectimals for iOS and Windows Phone. In 2012, Frontier released Coaster Crazy, and started to work on Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter, which successfully closed at the start of 2013. In 2013, Frontier released Xbox One and Xbox 360 exclusive Zoo Tycoon, published by Microsoft Studios, and launched backers alpha for Elite: Dangerous in December. In 2015 the company released Screamride, a theme park construction and management simulation game for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The company has recently released Planet Coaster, a construction and management simulation video game similar to the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise. The game is the second major self-published franchises from Frontier along with the Elite series. Frontier announced that they will begin self-publishing all their future games, starting with Planet Coaster.[5]

On 3 January 2017 TMZ reported that the company sued Atari, Inc. for not paying the company enough for royalties for their game RollerCoaster Tycoon 3; Frontier reported that they only received $1.17 million when they needed $3.37 million. David Walsh confirmed the report in a GameSpot interview, stating that they had previously attempted to resolve the issue without legal action since April 2016.[6]

On 6 February 2017 Frontier announced that they had acquired licensing rights from Universal Pictures to be used in their third self-published title, an "enduring movie franchise of global renown".[7] This was later announced to be Jurassic World Evolution, which released on 12 June 2018.[8]

On 26 July 2017 the company announced Frontier Expo 2017, a press and community event focusing on Elite: Dangerous, Planet Coaster, and Jurassic World Evolution. The event took place on 7 October 2017 at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, UK.[9]

In July 2017, Tencent, a Chinese investment company, bought a 9% share in the company.[10]

In June 2019, Frontier announced that it would begin publishing games from third-party developers under a new label named Frontier Publishing. At Gamescom 2020, Frontier announced that their publishing label would be renamed to "Frontier Foundry", and that it would publish Struggling from Chasing Rats in 2020, and Lemnis Gate from Ratloop Games in 2021.[11][12] They would also publish an upcoming project from Haemimont Games.[13]

In July 2020, Frontier announced they were sponsoring The Centre for Computing History to help support the museum’s ambitious video game preservation project.[14]

• Official website