Frontier Developments is a British computer and video games development company based in Cambridge, England. The company was originally founded by Elite co-creator David Braben in order to develop an Elite sequel titled Frontier: Elite II.
Frontier was released in 1993 and was considered a success. A sequel to Frontier called First Encounters (unofficially the third game in the Elite series) was released in 1995, but publisher GameTek distributed what was claimed to be an unfinished version of the game. It contained many bugs which lead to poor review scores and low sales. Frontier initiated legal action against GameTek which was eventually settled in 1999. Though the Elite series laid dormant for nearly two decades, it was revived in 2012 when Frontier developments announced a Kickstarter campaign for Elite: Dangerous. The ambitious space sim was first released on PC in 2014 and has since found a home on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Other than the Elite series, Frontier Developments primary development thread has involved amusement park games, beginning with sequels in the RollerCoaster Tycoon series. As their first foray into the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of consoles, Frontier developed another amusement park-building sim called Thrillville (2006) and its sequel Thrillville: Off the Rails (2007). Kinect Disneyland Adventures (2001) used the motion tracker to immerse players into Disney's park where they could play minigames and meet characters. ScreamRide (2015) for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One put the coaster-building system to work in a puzzle-like game in which players had to earn points by launching wild coasters into a destructible environment. Frontier is planning to return to the construction/management style of game with Planet Coaster in 2016.
Outside of space sims and theme park games, Frontier has worked on Dog's Life, games for the Wallace & Gromit franchise such as Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo and the movie tie-in game for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and the two games in the LostWinds series.
At E3 2010 they also were a big part of the Kinect unveiling at the Microsoft Press Conference with the annoucement of Kinectimals for the Xbox 360, motion-tracking game in the vein of Nintendogs in which players can train and befriend wild animal cubs as virtual pets.
In 2005 the company began work on an action game called The Outsider whose ambition was to match their efforts in the Elite franchise. However, in 2011, Braben announced that development on the game had ceased.
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