The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 120

One of the fi rst private actors within the Swedish computer industry was
SAAB. Their subsidiary DataSAAB developed computers for military and
commercial use from the end of the 1950s. Their fi rst mini-computer was
the D2 (SANK in military use); it could be connected to an oscilloscope
which could be used as a display. One of the programmers, Göran Sun-
dqvist, was assigned to make a game application that allowed the player to
shoot a cannon-ball at a target. The program would be used when military
oi cers came to look at the use of a computer. The player would enter three
parameters: cannon-ball exit speed, angle and wind speed. The computer
would then display the ball arch on the oscilloscope. If the ball hit the target
successfully, a small animated explosion would appear on the screen. Later,
Sundqvist started to explore and expanded the explosion animations and
eventually developed them into digital art pieces (Svensson 2000, 66-67;
Ernkvist 2008).
The fi rst real game companies were established in the U.S.; a few years
later others were established in Japan during the early 1970s. The com-
mercial gaming era started with arcade machines in 1971 ( Computer Space
from Nutting Associates) and the fi rst console in 1974 ( Odyssey from Mag-
navox). The industry sprung out of the consumer electronic industry and
the development of new integrated electronic circuits (Kline, Dyer-Withe-
ford and de Peuter 2003, 90-93). Sweden did not have any larger domestic
consumer electronic industry that invested in game technology. Somewhat
of an exception is the consumer electronic company Luxor that manufac-
tured the Channel F home console (originally called Video Entertainment
System and Luxor Video Entertainment in Sweden) on a license from the
American manufacturer Fairchild. The Channel F was the fi rst console that
used cartridges, but only about twenty-fi ve games were released and only
some of these were released in Sweden. 4
As a result there was no commercial game development in Sweden dur-
ing the 1970s except for one potential exception. Computers were still
bulky and expensive in the 1970s, so timeshare solutions were often used.
A number of users shared a computer and paid for the time they used the
computer. For the Swedish universities, a timeshare central was established
in every region. In 1977, while visiting their parents who worked at the
facility in Stockholm, three young boys used to play with the computer.
They were young Olle Johansson and Viggo Eriksson, who were in their
early teens, and ten-year-old Kimmo Eriksson. They developed a text base
adventure game named Stugan (The Cabin). The interesting aspect is that
the game in a somewhat backward way became semi-commercial. The cli-
ents would have an account at the central, paying only for the time they
used the computer. Stugan was available for everyone to play, so the engi-
neers and computer scientists that used the computer would often play the
game for fun. The result was that the clients would be charged for the time
they spent gaming. The central got higher revenues and in return the three
young creators got free accounts to the computers. When the superintendent