I'm... Playing Half-Life https://www.twitch.tv/wexxstreamz

Are you ready for today? Tune in around 12PM Pacific time in the Guerrilla Collective for Frogun Encore's new trailer and release date reveal! 🐸🩵

I have previously written about the book Svensk videospelsutveckling (“Swedish video game development”), written by Thomas Sunhede and Martin Lindell, which is an invaluable resource for information about Swedish game history, and one of the major inspirations for why I started my blog. At the end of this exhaustive overview of the subject, the authors try to sum up and list what they consider to be the most important factors behind the growth of the nowadays very large and profitable Swedish video game industry. Since today is the National Day of Sweden, I thought it would be fitting to make a translation of this list, with some explanations and additional notes from yours truly. Sunhede and Lindell lists the important factors in a somewhat chronological order, so I’ll do likewise:

“The climate is made for working indoors for a good part of the year.” I guess that one stereotype about Sweden, and the Nordic countries in general, is the supposedly cold and dark climate. I can assure you that we have warm summers and plenty of reasons to go outside, however. And the way things are going with the climate, well… I remember a few years ago when our national weather service noted that the southernmost part of Sweden don’t seems to have what’s considered meteorological winters anymore.🙃

“Neutrality has made it so we can work without being interrupted by wars.” Sweden has officially not been at war since 1814, and the country’s official neutrality in all international conflicts has been promoted and celebrated by most Swedish politicians since then (though we do have a few skeletons in the closet). Of course, the country’s proud tradition of neutrality basically came to end this year when we joined Nato, but Sunhede and Lindell couldn’t have known that when they published their book in 2016.

“Education has traditionally been free.” I’m not very well-read on Swedish education history, but this sounds about right.

“Inventiveness has a long tradition in Sweden, with may world patents.” Yep, there are Swedish inventors behind such wonders as the adjustable spanner, the modern zipper, the blowtorch, dynamite, the three-point seatbelt, and, uh… Spotify. Sorry about that one.

“The government was early with computers, laying the foundation.” I’ve been doing some reading on the earliest Swedish computer history, and one of the earliest computers constructed in Sweden, SMIL from 1956, had its construction financed by money from the government, partially because one of the constructors was good friends with the Swedish prime minister. I’ll be writing more about this computer and its place in Swedish game history in the future!

“Arcades showed the best and latest games as inspiration.” Unfortunately, the Swedish arcades had a fairly short history compared to those in many other countries, due to a moral panic over supposed criminal activity in the early 80s leading to new laws that basically made it impossible to run a traditional arcade in Sweden. I might write more about this in the future as well.

“ABC 80 was the first widely spread computer in Sweden.” You can read more about the history of the ABC 80 in my blog post on the subject, or try out my guide on how to emulate this fascinating early Swedish home computer.

“Home computers were cheap and common in homes during the 80s.” Most of them weren’t created in Sweden, but were imports such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

“School computers were available early in in many schools.” The previously mentioned ABC 80 was a pioneer in this regard, being the first computer that many future Swedish programmers came into contact with in school during the 80s.

“Piracy allowed many people to find many games easily.” I can confirm this from personal experience. When I grew up, my family’s first home computer had many games on it that originated from, uh… various sources. I’m glad that the authors of the book don’t try to deny the important role piracy played in the spread and popularity of games in Sweden.

“The demoscene made youths compete in having the best computer skills.” As with many European countries, Sweden had/has a large demoscene pushing machines to their limits in order to get the best possible graphics and sounds out of them. Many well-known current Swedish video game developers, including DICE, have their origins in the Swedish demoscene.

“The web existed early via BBS and later in a well-developed broadband.” As I noted in my blog post about the game Sociopolitical Ramifications, the first Swedish website was possibly also the sixth website to exist in the whole world.

“The Home PC Reform made it so that many could afford to buy a PC via their job.” The Swedish Home PC Reform of 1997 (or 1998, according to some sources) meant that any Swedish employee could rent, and later buy a home computer cheaply via their workplace. Some Swedish labor unions had created similar arrangements a few years earlier, but in 1997 it became an official government reform that remained in place until 2009.

“Game education now exist in many places in the country.” I have read some claims that some Swedish game development educations are or have been less serious than others. Whatever the case might be, there sure are a lot of them (including at least one in my home town!).