Frontier Dev Regulatory News (FDEV)

18 October 2013

Frontier Developments plc

Elite: Dangerous - Alpha testing to begin in December 2013

Cambridge, UK. Frontier Developments plc (AIM: FDEV, "Frontier" or the "Company"), a leading developer of video games with studios in Cambridge, UK and Halifax, Canada, today revealed that eligible backers of Elite: Dangerous will be able to get their first taste of the game with the start of the Alpha test phase in December 2013, as expected.

The Alpha phase will begin with a combat test build - testing the combat systems in a close-to-final form.

At the end of 2012, Frontier raised £1.6 million via Kickstarter, the crowd funding service, and via its own website. The funds were raised specifically to develop Elite: Dangerous - the latest sequel to the Elite game that CEO David Braben originally co-authored, published in 1984. Backers eligible to access the Alpha test phase in December 2013 are those who contributed £200 or more to develop Elite: Dangerous.

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About Frontier Developments

Frontier was founded in 1994 by David Braben, co-author of the seminal Elite game. The Group has 227 full-time employees and operations in Cambridge, UK and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Frontier has a proven track record of software technology development and innovation spanning several decades of rapid technological change. Frontier has leveraged its technology to develop innovative videogames across a wide variety of different game genres and platforms, and has established relationships with globally renowned partners.

At the end of 2012, Frontier also raised £1.6 million via Kickstarter, the crowd funding service. The funds were raised specifically to develop Elite: Dangerous - the latest sequel to the Elite game that CEO David Braben originally co-authored, published in 1984. Elite was one of the first home computer games to use 3D graphics and the first to employ an open-world 'sandbox' gameplay model. Its revolutionary 3D graphics ensured that the game created the modern space flight simulation genre and influenced gaming as a whole.

About Cobra

Frontier's Cobra software technology has been developed and evolved since 1988. Initially conceived as a solution for the problem of easily porting the same game across different target hardware devices, Cobra today supports multi-core CPU and GPU architectures of PC, console, tablet and smartphone with a modular, high performance system offering of state of the art efficiency and visual fidelity that is applicable across a wide range of game genres.

Cobra incorporates a framework which enables rapid development of powerful game creation tools, which offer the ability to view, tweak and review changes to content (e.g. animations, audio, 3D models etc.) on target platforms in a live game session running on that platform, without the intervention of a programmer.

For more details on Cobra see http://www.frontier.co.uk/our_technology/