Rock, Paper, Shotgun

David Braben, he of Elite fame, has unveiled a PC that fits on a USB stick, the Raspberry PI. He has also unveiled a brand new way of pronouncing “obfuscated”. The device has an HDMI in at one end, and a USB out at the other, letting you plug it directly into a television, and then attach a keyboard. Braben’s rather egalitarian idea is that it would be cheap enough (“Ten to fifteen pounds,”) that every child could own one, with the idea that they could learn to program. It sounds really promising. But are there some issues, too?

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun has received word that David “Elite” Braben’s much vaunted next game, The Outsider, was apparently cancelled yesterday.

Edit: David Braben has confirmed to us that development on The Outsider has ceased, explaining that it was due a “change [in] priorities” with regards to unannounced projects, telling us that he is “very sad” about the resulting redundancies. The full quote is below.

Edit edit: Braben has since claimed to Develop that, “There is still publisher interest in the project, and we haven’t cancelled it.” So it’s all a bit confusing. We’re currently trying to establish what “changed priorities” actually means, and have got back in touch with Braben for clarification.

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Kieron and I have been expanding our minds and destroying our livers at the annual Develop conference in Brighton, Blighty for the last couple of the days. One of the highlights of the show so far has been David Braben, he of Elite fame, and Dave Jones, he of APB and GTA1 fame and their ‘designer mash-up.’ The concept – they play each other’s most iconic game, and provide retrospective commentary about their time making these two goliaths of gaming history. Some ramblomatic highlights below…
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Towards the end of July, at the Develop conference, we took a much-needed break from listening to design paradigm analysis to have a coffee with Frontier Developments‘ David Braben. He’s one of the living legends of the industry – one word:Elite – and it was a welcome chance to casually pick over the issues of the day. So, yes, the P-word features strongly.
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According to reports leaking out of the GameCity event in Nottingham, UK, David Braben is still working on Elite IV. The game showed up on a slide during his presentation, with the nomenclature “PC, PS3, Xbox 360″ next to it. That suggests that the fourth freeform space epic might not be too far off.

It’s not the first time this has come up, of course, as it was first mooted back in 2000, when Braben apparently dabbled with the idea of Elite being an MMO, but shelved the notion due to fear of MMO technological immaturities. Then there was some minor Elite IV rumblings in 2006 during Braben’s first press outings for The Outsider which, damnably, is not coming out on PC. Apparently Braben’s team will be able to use what they’ve learned from the proposed 2009 release of The Outsider in the development of a fourth Elite game. Funny that, when most development teams still haven’t learned from what Elite did in 1984.

And it’s just occurred to me that most of our American readers won’t have a clue who David Braben is, or why we’re excited about Elite… will they? Hmm. Not much we can do to fix that, other than perhaps link to the OpenGL version of Frontier and say that Elite started many of us on the long road towards being the boring old nerds we are today.