The first thing David Braben does is point out how lucky he feels.

"It was a case of right place, right time," he says, surrounded by more than 160 game developers who work at his Frontier studio on the outskirts of Cambridge.

Luck was something in short supply in 1982, when Braben wrote Elite with his then-colleague Ian Bell. The pair were trying to create something different: a game without an end. The result, the spacefaring trading game Elite, was hard for some people to get their heads around – including the publishers they needed to sell the game.

"Elite broke virtually all the rules," he says. "Publishers at the time weren't interested – they wanted something where you had three lives, that took 10 minutes to complete."

That was until a meeting with AcornSoft, which decided to take the title on. It was an inspired decision: the game went on to sell a million copies, becoming one of the most influential games of all time – even the producers of Grand Theft Auto have likened their bestseller to a hi-tech, urban equivalent of Elite.

Since then things have moved on a little. Braben now runs Frontier, an independent developer who recently launched Lost Winds, a Wii title, to critical acclaim. The studio has another game under development called The Outsider – an immersive, open-ended thriller about someone accused of assassinating the US president.

Braben is proud of his achievements, and of how important and mature the British games industry has become in the past 25 years.

"A lot of people from around then have managed to create a very big industry out of nothing. For a small country, that's impressive," he says. "We've now got a company full of people who like games; not businessmen from other industries with no love for them."

Despite being optimistic about the future, he also sees threats on the horizon – including a lack of graduates with the right training.

"One of the problems at the moment is that we're the most expensive country to set up in and we've got a real skill shortage," he says. "There are fewer maths, computer science and physics graduates coming through, while in parallel there's been a rise in computer games courses."

Braben admits that such courses offer some value, but he says they do not produce the intimate knowledge of programming and that he requires.

"The thing is that most kids these days know a huge amount about games anyway; you pick it up just by playing. But the skills you need to make games are different to what they teach. There are exceptions, of course, but as a general rule they don't teach what we need."

Still, he remains positive about games in general. He's a fan of the GTA franchise, and mentions others working at the forefront of expansive, intelligent games.

"Bioware does some interesting things, and Peter Molyneux is pushing the boundaries," he says. "And I'm very interested in Spore."

So, 25 years ago, did he ever think the games industry would get where it is today?

"In terms of machine performance, we're around where I thought we'd be – things like the PlayStation 3, these are cutting edge machines. But in terms of the software to use on them? I think we're lagging behind."

"We're still at the beginnings of the industry, though. The changes are all gradual – look at a game from two to three years ago, and it's so much less sophisticated," he says.

"The way you interact with characters, the depth of stories; these are all moving quickly. The point of the old days was that people could experiment, and now it's coming full circle: developers like us can try things out, but you've got so much more in terms of resources."