The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 122

a contract to develop the Spectrum game Fairlight , which was released in
1985 by the company Softtek games (later Edge Games). Jangeborg also
developed the sequel Fairlight 2 and the graphic tool The Artist , but moved
back to Sweden after a legal dispute with the publisher. He later worked
within the computer industry, but not with games.
Other Swedes worked in Great Britain as well during the 1980s and 1990s.
Two examples were Karl Hörnell, who worked on many games developed by
the British companies Player and Interceptor, and Andreas Tadic, who moved
there to work at the developing studio Team 17 (Ernkvist 2008).
In Sweden a small number of game developing companies were estab-
lished during the second part of the 1980s, but they were small and
short-lived. As a result of this, no lasting industry evolved. One of these
companies was Greve Graphics, established in the middle of the 1980s. At
the time, a game company was conceived as something extraordinary. One
of the computer magazines published an article about the sensation that
the people at Greve Graphics were actually “working full time creating
games!” (Kaiserlidis 1986).
Another company from the middle of the 1980s was the game publisher
American Action. This company published games from Greve Graphics, and
also from dif erent foreign developers. American Action had economic prob-
lems and was acquired in 1987. Shortly after the acquisition the company
changed direction from games to regular software. It seems like a general
trend that the early Swedish game industry was not attractive or lucrative
enough so the individuals and companies found opportunities in the growing
commercial computer industry and ceased game development.
FORMATION AND EXPANSION 1990-2001
There had been short-lived game companies before, but it was from the
early 1990s it became possible to identify a continuous domestic game
industry in Sweden. Many of these early companies were to a large extent
infl uenced by the computer hobbyist subculture that had emerged around
the personal computers. Levy (2002) describes a new generation of hackers
(third hacker generation) that arose alongside the new personal comput-
ers. It was often young males that developed an interest in the computers.
Learning about computers was a fun distraction but also a preparation for
the future (Nissen 1995, 56-57). Eventually many of these young program-
mers became enrolled in commercial activities, and it was often these that
started venturing into game development.
One part of this subculture that emerged in Sweden was the “demoscene”
a nd it se em s to have b e en a bre ed i ng g rou nd for m a ny f ut u re ga me develop ers.
Demos were small, advanced and graphically impressive computer programs.
A demo would display digital art often consisting of advanced geometric
objects together with a music score. The programs showed some similarities