30 years ago I started working Funcom, a then roughly 30 person game studio in Oslo, I was supposed to start working on Daze Before Christmas but the dev kit I was supposed to use hadn’t arrived yet, so I helped out on We’re Back – A Dinosaur’s Tale instead.
I figured I’d share some highlights of my work so here we go!
Before I worked in games it wasn’t really a carreer choice, but I had a lot of fun in the Amiga demo scene. While I was a member of the group The Silents some of the other members created a pinball game and founded Digital Illusions and basically showed the way! Thanks to the demo scene I had no problem getting invited to an interview at Funcom!
Daze Before Christmas was an interesting project, Faith Johnson and Time Extension published a great article about it: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2022/12/the-making-of-daze-before-christmas-the-festive-platformer-that-shouldnt-exist
We worked on We’re Back for SEGA Genesis, and Visual Concepts in California did the SNES version. I’ve interviewed at and visited VC a couple of times and keep joking about the versions with Scott every time! My friend Ivar also interviewed there a long time ago and still works there.
At some point I remember Disney visiting Funcom and I was showing them pickup-truck skateboarding in We’re Back, which eventually led to me lead programming Pocahontas!
Even though I worked on 7 released games and a bunch of canceled games (excluding Daze which was un-canceled) I only worked at Funcom for a bit over 3 years. My friends who I worked with at Funcom have managed to stay at companies for 13, 18, 23 and 26 years (the two longest still work at their respective companies). I managed 8 years at Luxoflux, which was acquired and shuttered by Activision. I guess a quarter of Bobby Kotick’s duration is pretty long!
So here are the highlights..
My favorite game to work on was Shrek 2! I had recently joined Luxoflux and started helping out a bit on True Crime Streets of L.A. and a couple of projects that didn’t pan out. Activision approached us about working on the new Shrek movie and our little side-team finally had a project we got to finish! And we could take advantage of the tech in True Crime while the team was working really well together. We got to visit Dreamworks and Jeffrey Katzenberg came to visit us. For a while the producer I had worked with at Disney with Pocahontas, Patrick Gilmore, was the producer of Shrek 2.
The biggest game – in square kilometers map size – was True Crime! 400 square km was a blast to drive around in Los Angeles while new enough in town to learn how to find my way around there in real life too!
The biggest – in number of intellectual property characters from different companies – was Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale. Funnily I’ve worked on more IPs used in the Smash Brothers game that came after All-Stars than the ones in All-Stars outside of working on the game itself. Kratos was the most convenient character to add since we initially worked on top of the mailroom of Sony Santa Monica and I could just walk down to the team and ask my friends questions.
Somehow I ended up at Yacht Club Games known for Shovel Knight for a while and got to work on Specter Knight which was one of 3 launch games on Nintendo Switch, and the card game including the opponent logic in King Knight’s game!
The most nostalgic project was getting back to the computer I first learned to code on – the Commodore 64! In 2016 I decided to make a strategy game inspired by the first strategy game I knew about: M.U.L.E. Two years later I released Space Moguls with Protovision selling physical cartridges and floppy disks with the game!
I can’t stop making Commodore 64 games, so one of the smallest games is Bullshit, a 4 kb game I made for a game jam that resulted in the 50+ games cassette. Bullshit is a lawn mowing game based on minesweeper with full audio and 5 difficulty levels and can be played in a browser here: https://spacemoguls.itch.io/bullshit (the very smallest is probably a minesweeper I made for a 1kb Amiga bootblock).
I’ve made lots of friends over the years, I’m still in touch with old colleagues from Funcom, Luxoflux, Namco, and all the other places! This summer I visited friends in Denmark and Spain, although I didn’t get to Norway but will try harder this year once it is warm enough for outside beer!
The absolutely longest project, based on start date and still ongoing development, is the Toaplan arcade Shoot’em-ups I’m bringing to PC/Mac/Linux! Over 25 years ago Magnus Danielsson had Flying Shark, a 1987 arcade game, partially running and asked me to help. This became the Shark! Emulator that we worked on for a few years, just for fun.
A few years ago another friend I visited in Stockholm, Martin Lindell, asked me if I’d be interested in working on the games for a commercial release and right now I’m finishing up the last few games for release! It has been a fantastic road being the first team to emulate and share these games to meeting with the original developers and making them available for everyone!
Thanks to the Toaplan project I have been able to visit Retrospelsfestivalen in Malmö, presented the games at OLL 2023 in Norwich and Retro Gathering 2023 in Västerås!
Last year I missed Funcom’s 30th anniversary party (didn’t hear about it until the day before!) and Luxoflux’s 20th (I was too busy and flying back to Los Angeles would take a lot of time) but I did make it to Bitwave’s 10th anniversary! To all my friends I’ve worked with: I’ll try to visit you some time. Please don’t move too far away before I get a chance 🙂
Space Moguls 