The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 121

at the central wanted to revoke the free accounts the creators threatened to
remove their game. The superintendent, realizing the economic disadvan-
tages of this, decided to extend the agreement.
One could argue that this, in one sense, was one of the fi rst Swedish com-
mercial games based on a subscription model. The game was later released
for PC computers in 1986. The young creators did not continue with game
development. However, the time they spent playing with computers seems
to have been well invested, because Olle Johansson went into the computer
business and both Kimmo Eriksson and Viggo Eriksson became professors
in computer-related fi elds (Ernkvist 2008).
EARLY STEPS TOWARD AN INDUSTRY 1980-1990
Without domestic electronic companies investing in game development, it
was the introduction of the personal computers in the late 1970s and early
1980s that made a Swedish game industry possible. The barriers to entry
for people who wanted to program their own games basically disappeared
with the advent of the personal computer. It would, however, take a while
before any long-lasting game developing companies were founded.
The fi rst commercial games developed by Swedes were programmed on
the fi rst generations of personal computers in the early 1980s, but mostly
outside Sweden and not by Swedish companies. A vital hobbyist computer
culture quickly formed, which spread knowledge about games and pro-
gramming, but there were no companies to absorb the often very young
talents. Sweden did not have the environment for game development yet,
but the computer industry in Great Britain was more evolved.
The British computer industry had evolved rapidly at the end of the 1970s
and in the early 1980s. The industry was well developed and the personal
computer had an especially large consumer penetration in Britain. Compa-
nies like Sinclair and Amstrad had some of the most popular computers on
the market (Haddon and Skinner 1991, 436-437, Aphra's chapter in this
volume). Game companies had also been established alongside the early
British computer industry. Young Swedish developers were to some extent
absorbed into the British game industry.
In Sweden, the company Luxor also made an attempt to get established
in the personal computer market and developed the ABC 80 computer. It
did not reach any large success; however, it was used in many schools in
their computer education programs (Emanuel 2009).
One of the early Swedish game makers was Bo Jangeborg from Goth-
enburg. He had fi nished high school and worked on the assembly line at
Volvo when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released. Jangeborg and his
friends imported the computers from Great Britain. After a confl ict with a
supervisor about learning programming at work, Jangeborg quit and even-
tually decided to try his luck in England. He moved to London and signed