Creating the Super Earth of Helldivers 2 with Arrowhead's Johan Pilestedt | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hey everyone, I'm Trent Custers, co -founder and studio director at League of Geeks, and this is the Game Maker's Notebook.

Today I'm chatting with Johan Pielerstedt.

He's the chief creative officer of Arrowhead Game Studios and was game director on Helldivers 1 and 2.

This episode is a two -parter.

So in the first part, we talk about the early days of Arrowhead.

We talk about Johan getting into games, his time modding, his time meeting the first folks who would become the Arrowhead team, student developers, and getting their start on Magicka, their first game.

So finding their feet as an indie game developer and the astronomical success that came from that and setting up a business for the first time in their home country of Sweden.

Cut forward to a month and a half later, where we are now, And Johan, sitting in Sweden and myself in Melbourne, we reflect on his wins at the Dice Awards and then we start talking about the two games that bridged the gap from Magicka to Helldivers 2.

We talk about how that informed how they leave the studio moving forward, some missteps there, some successes.

And then we talk about Helldivers 1.

We talk about how they came up with the seed of the idea for what would become a huge franchise and success for PlayStation and Arrowhead Game Studios.

obviously astronomically successful title last year uh what does it mean to create a helldiver how did that even come about where did that seed of brilliance come from where was the first snippets of excellence in that game design and a little bit about the development too and then we quickly move into helldivers too we talk about the storied uh seven year 11 month and 26 days of game development on that title and that's not even counting all of the post -launch support that they've had since the game has been incredibly successful there's a lot in here whether you're a helldivers fan whether you're

a game developer you're an indie studio head or you're on the publishing side we talk a lot about their relationship with playstation like i said it's a long episode but i enjoyed it immensely johan and i could have spoke for another three or four hours easily and i only hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as we enjoyed having it.

So without further ado, here it is.

Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in -depth, one -on -one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, A member -driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.

Johan, thanks for joining us.

Thank you. Welcome to DICE.

Thank you. This isn't your first DICE.

You've been before?

Now that I've said thank you two times in a row, I kind of felt the urge to say thank you a third time.

Did I just answer a question by saying thank you?

Brilliant podcast where just every response is thank you.

Yeah. So this is my second time it dies.

Last time, Helldivers won.

We were nominated for Action Game of the Year back then, and Handheld Game of the Year, which we won.

Yeah. So I hope this time around, that we're going to be able to bag the Action Game of the Year.

But who knows? Otherwise, I'll have two nominated flags at home.

No wins, right? Yeah, exactly.

What are you nominated for tonight?

No six categories so it's um audio design music uh this you know you should never list things right because you always this you miss some yeah just give me a few yeah give me the top hits yeah exactly this list is going to be five long it's six categories but it's uh outstanding achievement in game design which is the one that i care most about exactly that's you yeah exactly you and the team yeah and um game of the year of course and then we have online and then there's one more cool i love it the mystery award will be announced on the night yeah mystery six nomination i'll get surprised maybe

we win that one i also love the fact that you like you come to dice just to do the victory laps as well it's like every game so we'll see you again for a hell divers three or the next project victory lap of nominations yeah exactly no and i'm in the middle of the sabbatical now that i've so wisely chosen to take um Um, so, but when I decided I was going to go on the sabbatical, me and Shams talked it over.

And I told him, it's like, well, I'll, I'll absolutely, I need to go.

I need to take some time off, but I still really need to go to some things.

BAFTA, DICE and so forth.

Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah.

It's a great night.

The Dice Awards are so much fun.

I'm glad you're here.

Thank you. Uh, okay.

So we got, we got a ton to talk about.

I'm really excited.

Um, obviously we'll talk about the sabbatical.

We'll talk about Shams, right?

right? That's amazing.

Shem's coming in as CEO. But let's take it all the way back to the start, to young Johan.

And tell me that moment where video games lit up your brain and sort of put you on a trajectory to spend your life investing in them.

Do you have any earliest memories of the video games?

Yeah, several, which is strange because when I started thinking about what's my first recollection of video games, there's like three or four instances, and I don't know which one is true so but but the one that i like to you know the canonical one yeah is that uh in maybe when i was five or six or something like that so that would have been uh 89 90.

my dad got me a nintendo massive like sophist loved that thing i played it so hard but the funny the funny thing about it is that dad got it and we were having Christmas with uh celebrating Christmas with um my mom's cousin or her uh husband and my dad and Sture whose name is just started playing and they I couldn't I wasn't allowed to play they were they were playing the out of it so I was just sitting there and because they got annoyed by me is trying to jump in Mario by janking the controller.

Classic. Yeah. And it's brilliant with Wii, and with the motion controllers.

That actually worked.

I haven't watched a kid play video games recently.

I'm not sure if you have kids, but you might.

Does that still happen?

Do kids jerk around all over the place while they're playing Fortnite?

Because they play on their phone.

So I don't know. It seems kind of impractical.

Yeah, it's kind of counterproductive to keeping your eyes on the screen.

I remember my brother falling off the top bunk because we were playing Super Mario World and he jerked around that hard like trying to jump over and fell to the floor off the top bunk.

Falling off things when playing video games.

I think that's peak video games.

Yeah, that's it. It was a different time.

It was dangerous activity back then.

Yeah, I remember my friend actually fell off the chair playing the original Alien vs. Predator.

You know, when they had the jump scare facehugger.

He just launched out of the chair and just hit his head on one of the tables at home.

Crazy times. I think that kind of love of video games it was threefold maybe again back to listing things so one thing of course was just the the realization of these kind of digital worlds what the potential of being somewhere else and exploring a place or being being somebody else that kind of escapism uh was something that that really captured my my imagination it's like i know that you know i before that i was as all kids really into space and dinosaurs and it's classics yeah and it's two things like that you'll never ever be able to to well in your life you're you will never be able to see

a dinosaur yeah but they're both real right it's interesting they're both real things but like like we'll never see a dinosaur and we'll never we'll never go to space exactly yeah but in video games you can and i think that's that's sort of the reason why i got so taken by video games is that it allows us to experience things that are so far beyond what this the normal world is able to offer and i remember having this sort of there's probably a german word for it that's kind of sorrow of everything being known yeah if you know what i mean yeah so i was looking at a world map or i remember a distinct

conversation with my mom we were looking at a globe of the earth and there's so many stories where you have like you know the adventures going into the unknown uh discovering new places but being a 90s kid most of everything was already known yeah like there's no i mean of course the deep sea but all land has already been discovered there are no unknowns sort of on earth and i think that kind of sort of when when that became apparent to me as a kid i felt like that kind of feeling of like i want that sense of mystery still um so i think that was an integral part of uh why i fell in love with video games

the second part to that was that mom's cousin's husband, Sture, he and I really bonded over playing Zelda.

So he lived in a different city.

So I had to do long distance calls to just get the latest hints on like, how do I find this cave?

Or like, how do I defeat Ganon on the second playthrough?

How do you find the cave?

Where do you need to plant the bombs?

So we had that kind of...

It was a fundamentally...

social experience of playing playing video games back then I mean internet wasn't you couldn't go online and find the answer yeah I almost bankrupted our family by calling the Nintendo helpline I didn't have a mum's cousin husband to just call and ask it was the Nintendo hotline at like a dollar or five dollars a minute or something yeah and if you're looking for that key in the water temple they can't explain it in a minute as well so all right you're on the phone for a good chance It doesn't matter.

It's like water temples.

It's a curse. Any water level.

Water level, water temple.

I think that's why I have a little bit of fear of water.

It's just transferred directly to the real world.

It's like from a mountain town and then never really having proper experience with oceans, and then also having horrible memories from playing Zelda and water temples.

I love it. It makes sense.

It checks out. out yeah so i guess my list of three is actually that list of two it's like the sense of sense sense of doing something that we can't do and solving that problem and then the second component is that that can deeply social yeah element it's amazing because you know um we've been you know chatting about your gdc talk as you're preparing to you know present it at gdc this year and um it sort of mirrors so much of the helldiver stuff that we've been talking about um there but interestingly interestingly, I'm keen to hear then from that.

So it's, it's captured you like these worlds and everything, obviously as a gamer at what point did you start interacting with video games, like as a hobbyist thing or programming or actually making games, modding them, whatever.

Um, and sort of when did that sort of reveal itself as like, oh, this could be actually a job.

Yeah, it was actually pretty early.

Uh, so just a couple of years after maybe two years around when I was eight or nine maybe.

I remember my mom used to work in the library, so she used to borrow books and magazines from the library for us to read, and she brought home a book about computer graphics.

That issue of computer graphics was just how 3D software works.

I mean, it was early days, of course.

And in particular, there was a, the center spread was about how to make dinosaurs in 3D.

It's like right on the money.

And that, I think that's where it really clicked for me.

Yeah. You took the Venn diagram.

Video games and then dinosaurs.

Let's go. Yeah. So, so I, you know, I, I can't remember when this was, it was, it must've been.

yeah 93 94 maybe yeah okay so you're like eight or nine or something yeah so it was just around the time of ursa park yeah yeah it's all making sense it's all falling into place and i think at that point like i i was i mean regular computer user at that time my dad was really um an early adopter of a lot of technology worked in it to some degree uh and then he changed him into cars well yeah running a car dealership but uh but i i remember downloading like 3d studio max like one of the earlier versions pirate of course uh sorry autodesk um and and just trying to figure out how does this work and it

was such a mind -blowing experience of actually being able to create whatever in that and i think to some degree it was helped by you know the relationship with my brother we used to you know record movies and we wanted to do special effects so we did added lightsabers to like yes forward sticks and then uh frame by frame painted lightsabers into it and i got like a four second sequence after painting lightsabers for what is it a a hundred frames yeah it's like oh that's so cool but that it's the kind of act of creation uh i think is uh it's so rewarding especially when you do it together with other

people um because the it's that kind of you feed off the other person's optimism and desire to uh to just be creative and which i think we started like like modern games, the timelines are a little bit fussy here, but, you know, started making maps for Doom, for Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, and eventually Half -Life, but that was, what, 98 or something.

But it was me, my brother, and a couple of friends that we sort of made a map and then played it online or just, you know, showed it to each other.

so there's there's some so everything is a little bit fussy here but there's one one thing that really made me realize that you could get into modding before so it's like map making was one thing yes like you had map editors and whatnot but the first time when I realized that modding is such an interesting way into actually unleashing full creativity is a friend of mine back in the day his dad had downloaded the aliens total conversion for doom oh wow okay which was i mean i i was a massive aliens fan i accidentally watched it when i was like eight or nine or something um and after that like you

know i was obsessed obsessed and really really afraid of it's funny how much kids like i was the same as a kid like being like things that are scary are actually so like alluring as well it's like i remember we went to the video store one day and we got this film it was like a chimp like with a suit on on the cover and it's called link and i was like well this looks awesome and we put it on and when we got home my parents realized it was like a horror film actually and i was like oh what and we thought it was a family film so we did something else for family video night but then And like the next day

I like snuck in and watched this film basically where this chimp just kills everyone, this pet chimp.

And I was like – it was like some magical object that I just could not stay away from.

Like they could have put it under lock and key and I would have like busted in there and watched that film.

As soon as I learned it was a horror film, you know.

Yeah. How are you with zoos these days?

With zoos? Yeah. Okay.

It's actually funny enough.

I'm actually – my thing is – okay.

So I'm actually going to go completely off script for this podcast and just give a quick anecdote on this.

because my fear is witches like even as an adult I had night terrors as an adult as witches and they started off nightmares as a kid like Scooby -Doo style witches you know green with the wart on the nose and everything and then as an adult they turned it into this like really hectic like existential anxiety like dread like they just I didn't I wouldn't even see the witch in the end it was just like this presence of a witch that would be overwearing and I'd wake up in like cold sweats yeah anyway the reason why I am like that is because when I was a child and I was first scared of witches my father

instead of saying don't worry witches don't exist he said don't worry come over here and he would show me next to his bed he had this big steel pipe and he's like see that that's my witch whacking pole and i'd be like there's witch outside and then he'd go outside of the house by the back window and be like make these noises bang the pole against us and he'd be like and he'd like actually one time put green paint on the ground it was like see i got the witch it's fine had a can of what i now realize is brute deodorant but he made a label that said witch spray on it and so every night in my room

he would spray witch spray in the room to get rid of the witches so he just cemented this idea that witches are real and gave me this lifelong fear in night terrors as an adult and that you need to have a weapon by your bed all because he just wanted to be the hero of my life right yeah anyway so yeah a little bit of trauma built character exactly i think so too so it's not zoos it's witches but i appreciate you asking so i think aliens is uh is an interesting topic for me uh and i mean you can see that in helldivers i mean the clear references there as well eight years old i think uh went over

to to to that same friend who whose dad had downloaded the aliens total conversion for doom uh they were having a movie night he and his wife and for some reason he was like super laid back so it's like they were going to watch aliens and they're like well let's make some popcorn the kids sat down in front of the tv i mean i was eight this friend of mine is it was actually my brother's friend he's two years younger he's six years old i love it so we're sitting there in front of the tv and i'm watching it i can't just take my eyes off it and in retrospect the movie that i watched at that point

is no not at all the recollections of several scenes that terrified me don't actually exist in the aliens movie which is crazy it's like i have this distinct memory of the xenomorphs crawling and masked through an an air duct but there's no such scene i mean there's a there's there's things like it but yeah your mind made it this massive like exaggerated when i close my eyes i can't i can't see it clearly even to this day and i mean how that's 32 years ago yeah and i think we have a we definitely have a habit of doing that as humans like you know in our younger years because i remember going back

to zelda rock arena of time which was my favorite game and you know i just played all i finished like eight times when i was a kid around you know we're a similar age so it came out when i was around 13 14 or something like that right and i get it and i played a bunch of times and then i go back to it as an adult probably the first time i revisited it i was like 25 or something like that and it was so tiny you know in regards like when you get into the world and the scope and it wasn't didn't have but in my mind palace has like the experience as a child it felt like something similar to the witcher

3 or something now you know it was much more so it makes sense right that you're picturing these xenomorphs in mass through the ducts yeah And I wonder if it's worth revisiting the things that you loved as a child, because to some degree, the memory of them may be superior.

Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, it's tricky, but at the same time, we want to sort of get that reality check of realizing that, well, it's rose -tinted glasses and nostalgia.

Yeah, yeah. So it was a Doom, it was an Aliens Doom full conversion that was the first time you were like, oh, shit, there's something here.

Modding is a thing.

Exactly. idea because because i had i never really considered what how i mean when you're that young things just exist yeah right there's no i mean now i realize that the reason why aliens exists is because chimpanzees travel out of africa yeah right it's a butterfly effect of civilization and everything has a cause and effect in a massive branching three uh but at that point it was like things just exist uh i no thought on where anything came from yeah or the motifs behind it and all that yeah so so everything was just static to some degree and of course i mean you don't have that perception of time

has as a young young person uh but but once i realized that total conversion is like right so they took doom which is super scary game which we also you know, same same dad yeah it's like we were in his like the house in the yard and he had the computer he worked for a software company or hardware company can't remember yeah and he had a computer there where we played doom as like eight years just traumatizing the whole village i love it yeah it's like super crazy when i start thinking about it But there is another element as well.

So aliens, of course, had such a profound effect on me in also being able to show a world that doesn't exist, like space travel in that level.

And also aliens. Another is take that box of dinosaur space and aliens.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And it really made me almost obsessed around what it would be like to face off something that's that terrible.

And I think the xenomorph and dinosaurs have something in common. What's the scariest animal on earth?

And of course, it's humans, but really it's like a tiger or a lion or something like that.

Probably maybe a polar bear.

But it's also like a little bit disappointed by that.

Like as a kid, you want dragons or chimeras or...

We can do better here, sure.

Yeah, exactly. I guess it's just...

I mean, unfortunately, it's just because of the perspective that we have that the things that we all really have...

If we had xenomorphs as wildlife on earth, we would go like, I wish there was something more scary than a xenomorph.

Xenomorph, yeah, exactly.

It's just a regular xenomorph.

Yeah, the same at the zoo, yeah.

Exactly. There's a petting zoo for exactly yeah yeah no and i think there's so many influences you know a lot of people when you start sort of trying to break down what makes somebody build video games there's so many things that fall into place and so many influences that that impact impact that kind of decision making uh like i mean i had a massive love for warhammer around the same time like eight 8 to 10 to 12 years old like warhammer 40k uh loved and still love that ip um played so much role -playing games tabletop role -playing games the swedish version of dungeons and dragons called dragons

and demons but it's swedish like bootleg yeah it's kind of bootleg yeah i don't want to say that it's bootleg but yeah it's pretty much Yeah good, we've got it.

We have Dungeons and Dragons at home.

But yeah, but it was I think adjusted a little bit to the Swedish sort of culture.

A little bit more of a folklore, because I mean, Sweden as a country has...

You can't tell by just going to Sweden and looking at society like that, but there's so much folklore from you know the viking ages that still persist today yeah uh that uh where you know there's you know the regular monsters in in swedish culture is like the uh forest rates everything's nature -based yeah like trolls john bauer's style yeah those celtic style like um pagan yeah religions and stuff exactly so but anyway like well uh my cousins since they were big into both tabletop roleplaying games and miniature games.

And I think that's also, like, miniature games is also the act of creating.

Like, it's creating and playing and then making stories, make belief together with other people.

And my cousin, he was a really good game master.

And I was always, like, excited to hear sort of the stories that he would tell.

and we had so many laughs together like i remember like getting on my bike biking over to his place and then playing role -playing games it felt like through the entire night but as a kid it's probably until like three hours yeah one game night yeah felt like an eternity but uh from that i i started i started the dming as well because i was so inspired by what his sort of showcasing us being allowed to take part in his imagination so i wanted to collaborate storytelling yeah yeah exactly uh so i think all of these things came together so like wanting to tell stories and and specifically make stories

for others because i saw it as him giving me a so i wanted also to give a gift to somebody else for them to be entertained yeah yeah so a lot of of it you know no matter if it was playing like 40k or playing role -playing games the goal was never like i've never been a competitive gamer i always just try to um try to make the best experience for whoever i'm playing with like i want them to have a really good time yeah it's kind of yeah same reason as like when you cook a good meal for somebody and they yes and they yeah i love cooking that's the same like it's one of my ways definitely that i show

my love like like, you know, a dinner party with friends, sharing food together and laying out a big spread is just so much fun.

Yeah. And especially, like, you know, it's a question of, like, are there any selfless acts or is everything selfless?

Yeah, exactly. And I struggle a bit with that.

It's like, sure, I want to do good for other people.

But I sort of feel good when I do good for other people.

So therefore, it's not good.

And now I come to the realization it's like, no, I'm addicted to making other people happy.

And it can still be good, even if it's for you too, you know, right?

Like it can be a, like a, what'd you call it?

Like a chaotic good or unlawful good.

Well, yeah, exactly.

And if we want to find the answer, we just have to go back 2 ,000 years to Greek.

Ask one of the philosophers.

So you've now realized that like modding is a thing, you're DMing and stuff like that as well.

um you're actually so i'm imagining you then took part in the modding scene right and everything and so did you um did you have any stints in games video games before arrowhead like professionally or did it just go so tell me about let's just quickly spend like 10 minutes or something talking about the the modding before we get to arrowhead and like that little period yeah for sure so around after half -life was released uh that's sort of when i really got into modding so and that became like a newfound passion and especially because of the collaborative nature of it so i actually maybe it was quake

it was just quake half -life because i remember somebody was working on a 40k mod for quake oh cool which was like i was once again like mind blown it's like i really need to play this game but you know it's like modders about back in that day they had this sort of idea of like sort of mimicking the games industry so they they had you know closed beta tests and yeah okay so you couldn't just download them all because it wasn't done yet so i was like how can i play this so at that point it was irc um forums and like if i'm if i just apply myself maybe i can get into contact with these people and maybe

if they're benevolent they'll let me in as a tester or something maybe a level design or whatnot so i just started badgering them uh for just just talking to them chatting them up and and eventually they're like yeah you know take part in this weekend's beta test and they're of course based in america or somewhere and it's like late night uh america which is not late night in europe yep yep so it's like I stayed up all night waiting for the beta test start and then I connected to it and with a 56k modem so it's like I had 700 ping or something like that but I was like oh this is gonna be so amazing

which is kind of fun like I can't remember who who made that mod but after that it's like I was like so I can actually join mod teams because then I became a regular tester gave feedback hosted tests in like in my friends group with that as well and then after a while it's like but i i want to do more than just play it i wanna i was i want to start building because i when i whenever i saw some decisions i was like ah i don't feel like that's right yeah like i think it should be a little bit different and then i started you know either starting mod projects and you know gathering together a couple

of people online to just build something or alternatively just joining mod teams i think during those days i was probably part of 20 or 25 mod teams yeah uh which is i think one of the best lessons that i ever learned in game development yeah so you'd be in a few at any given time yeah exactly so making maps making 3d models so it's like it's had this sort of yes man attitude yeah it's like somebody's like oh we need a weapon model for this gun or something like I can probably whip that together I couldn't but yeah it's like eventually got better and better and like my level design skills they

were so so like I lost interest in in level design just because it takes so much work to finish a full level yeah the iterations and everything yeah yeah and but my heart was really in you know core mechanics but you needed to be able to code and i couldn't code so it's like trying to dabble a little bit and managed to learn that way later but i think the lesson learned from those kind of 2025 mod projects that i was part of is that i think all but three failed wow and the reason why they failed is something that i took with me it's teams that didn't collaborate teams that didn't move fast forward

and weren't result salt oriented to speak in corpo terms but really the desire to play the game play the next iteration of the game is what set game teams that succeeded apart from the games that failed the games that failed they a lot of good people that had like really good ideas nice people terrific people the best people well so but but they were in it for just noodling around and yeah and and and modding but the ones that succeeded they wanted to play the finished product yeah you know it's like would you say that they were sort of like again corpo speak but you know like they were sort of product

oriented or they just actually wanted the thing finished so they could play it themselves yeah it's it's just that passion for wanting to play that yeah right seeing their vision realized yeah completing the project and being able to engage with it in that form yeah And then one of them that actually succeeded, that at first it was fun to see how this shifted.

So a mod that I was part of that was going nowhere.

So everybody was just finagling and doodling and doing stuff.

And there was no proper direction.

And then they changed who was responsible for the mod project.

So the guy that started it, he sort of was a little bit on and off.

And then another guy that really wanted to make it happen, stepped into that role and basically took over the project.

And that really drastically changed the outcome of it.

Yeah, wow. And managed to actually make it into something that was shippable.

I quit earlier than that, but I followed them with, and I was a tester for a very long time.

Oh, great. And that was Day of Defeat.

Wow, there you go. The name drop at the end is so good.

Like, it's great. Yeah, Day of Defeat.

because I was gonna that was gonna be one of my next questions is like what are some of these mods is there are they some that stand out that you worked on that might so the one that I worked the most on was a mod called frontline force mm -hmm so frontline force was created by a guy called Adrian final who's now at valve really cool guy but he really what this game was is you know the original announcement trailer for Team Fortress 2 which was that military style gameplay that they dropped like five clips of and everybody was like oh it's going to be amazing.

Team Fortress 2 with Robin Walker in the sort of military style in the Half -Life engine.

It's like going to be the best thing ever and I was obsessed with that game.

So Frontline Force was basically trying to beat Team Fortress 2, that version of Team Fortress 2 to market in Half -Life, which is a bizarre thing to do.

Yeah, and it's a fun game, it's like three classes.

Light, Medium and Heavy or Recon, Assault and Support I think it was the names of them, where you had, it's a team, two teams versus each other where you had a proximity effect, like if we're up to three squad members in close proximity to each other, we got certain buffs like we moved a little bit faster had suppression, so whenever you get shot, you got a bigger spread, but if you had other people around you, that effect would be reduced so there's a lot of cool concepts that were in there and spent ton of time you know making levels making uh models and all all kinds of stuff for that game

uh and so like then with so you you've done a bunch of modding so tell me about the the inception of um of arrowhead so you was it folks that you'd work with in the modding crew like how did that sort of idea come about to go you know what let's make this make this actually like a commercial thing and so how old were you around that time as well yeah so I so after high school no which high school is it's gymnasium for you right yeah exactly gymnasium for us it's always it always freaks me out it's like high school seems like you're there's no americans here josh what's the the um the top like

the last part of high school in america what's it called is it no elementaries earlier and what's the last one before college yeah senior senior amazing thank you josh after high school because to me high school is uh what is called middle school or junior high junior high yeah we're getting it we're getting the nods from the producer yeah so so to me it sounds won't say or strange to say that after high school uh of course like a lot of swedes did Conscription for a little bit more than half a year or two thirds of a year and after that it was time to apply to college and to do a full loop back

to getting that Nintendo that guy that I talked about, Sture he was a technical professor and he worked in the education and he saw the need from us playing playing video games that game development as a career is gonna be a thing yeah so he he worked together with one of the universities in his hometown to create a game development uh masters so i find he's just like teeing you up like he's laying down the tracks in front of you something like that so i applied to that got in and then in college like those first three years it's a three years like i don't know what it actually like the english

term would be but it's like a like a bachelor or something yeah a bachelor in in uh computer science with uh like a specialization in into uh video games right so and that's that's amazing because i mean i know that in the uk and the nordics there were like games courses long before they were in australia and stuff like that um and especially ones of like really considerate you know considerable notes so it's early days for you know like you say some of the the first time right in sweden it sounds like there was one going on yeah yeah yeah so like during i think my my passion for modding sort

of started to wane uh sort of just around the time same time as conscription sort of because i was when you're in conscription sweden you're off you're you're of course in the military on, well, all week nights, and then maybe the weekends as well.

Right. Okay. So at that point it's kind of, it's kind of hard to be reliable as a teammate on a mod project.

For the country, very reliable for a modding team.

Not so much. So at that point it's sort of like, uh, and also like the, um, uh, the frontline force team had broken up because, uh, Adrian, uh, of course got a job at Valve.

uh and so everybody sort of scattered it sort of fizzled apart at that point and this was 2003 yeah 2003 did they hire him so that he you didn't beat them to launch was that they're like you know like cut the head off the leader and the the troops scatter into the wind something like that yeah no i i just think val was really uh impressed by by the work done on on frontline force yeah They've got such a long history of hiring from modding teams and everything.

It's such a brilliant thing.

It's like the perfect job interview, right?

You've already worked on the tools, you've worked on the engine, you've built a project of your own desire with no pay.

It's like, do you also want to get paid and keep doing the exact same thing?

Yes, exactly. And funnily enough, it's a Team Fortress mod, but Team Fortress is the mod itself, right?

And Robin and the crew were hired out of Australia and went across.

also side note robin's a massive aliens fan as well yeah they it's it's in the blood for all of us yeah yeah so yeah team fortress 2 is team fortress classic as well such a good game and also like so innovative innovative for its time but anywho so during college i i mean i as a growing up as a kid all my life was just about video games constant video games and then when I got a college you know it's a lot of partying and a lot of just hanging out with friends and doing normal college stuff so a lot of that took like the front seat.

So I sort of in between you know courses in college and then hanging out with friends and partying and whatnot, I sort of started falling out of love to some degree with game making since I've been doing it for like 10 years yep yep um and for three years i was like i was considering like do you really want to make video games is that my calling in life like i had to just to start rethinking it part of being a game developer a successful one as well as actually having that period in your life for sure as well like do i want to do this oh my god yes it's right yeah so and i i was so into college

like i had such a good time.

They learned a lot of other practical skills.

I ran the bar in college.

The student union had a bar, so the student union appointed something that was called like sex mester.

Sexi is an old word, Swedish word for party.

So, so when you say you're a sex master, that's so, that's, it sounds very much like college campus culture.

Do you have, you have fraternities and stuff like that in over there?

Yeah, sort of. We have them in some parts of like Northern Europe and stuff as well.

Yeah. We're gonna have them in Australia.

No, it's, and it's not a fraternity in the same sense as the American fraternities.

this uh it's more of um they're they're called a corps like a military corps oh corpse yeah and um they they were earlier based on uh the different regions in sweden so so you have like the upsala nation is one of them more like technological that the the yeah the what's technologue science we'll take it technologist yeah core or you know so it's either by region or by what you're studying and so forth and they're really they're a fraternity in the sense that that there's a lot of partying and there's a lot of culture and there's a lot of tradition within them but they're also the representation of the it's

almost like a student student union yeah so it's both a party vessel and a student union a little union body uh and that's why like you have the you had the fraternity sort of board uh that dealt with you know pretty serious things as you know misconduct by teachers or whatever it might be and also ran the bar so you appointed somebody that ran the bar so i did that for a couple for I don't know maybe a year or so but learn a lot of like you know interesting skills in in just organization from that time you know setting up a schedule yeah calling people can you work tonight yeah that kind of stuff

and and then later I moved up to sort of be the chairman of the of that kind of union fraternity yeah the core so it's just like I went 100 % into that kind of college role, college kid.

And after three years, I botched my studies hard. I was partying too much and so forth.

You were running a bar.

It was bound to happen.

I don't think anyone who's run the bar didn't graduate that college or whatever.

Exactly. I was just too busy having a good time.

But at least I learned to code and make some hobby projects and whatnot with friends.

And I met a lot of really good people.

um so and after that like i wasn't done with the college so i applied for a second masters which was in computer graphics because i was like i really want to get like get get my skills in modeling uh 3d modeling and texturing and whatnot animation up right so it was an art course as opposed to like a computing three graphics yeah so i got into that uh and and was really excited it's like yeah finally it's gonna do this and it's like like, you know, a lot of traditional art and stuff like that.

The first year, like, I got in, was really happy about that.

And after, like, maybe four months, I was like, I'm done with college.

Immediately I was done with college.

That's enough college for me.

I needed three years and four months.

What am I doing? Yeah.

And I think it was that kind of traditional art that sort of made me realize that what I really want to do is make video games.

Yeah. So me and one of my college bros We saw that a competition called Swedish Game Awards Was coming to town to present the competition And it was a competition for students in Sweden It was basically an indie development competition Make the best indie game and get a cash prize and get some recognition.

So I was sitting next to ML, who happens to be one of the founders of Arrowhead.

And we're like looking at each other.

And I asked him, I was like, should we do this?

It's like, let's make a video game.

And he's like, yeah, it's like, I don't know how.

I'm like, I know. I'll show you, yeah.

It's like, I have some experience in this.

But I mean, never from scratch, like as in, you know.

Not modding something, right?

Yeah, exactly. exactly when you mod something you have you're like standing on the shoulders of giants like on the shoulders of yeah yeah exactly valve specifically as well yeah and and also like the half -life engine is id yes as well that's then improved by the by valve so it's like didn't really realize it's just giants on top of giants on top of giants yeah exactly so So, but let's start from scratch. So, so, uh, I was like, like after that, we got really pumped up and I was like, yeah, we gotta, we gotta start building, building this game, but we need more people.

Like we need somebody that's really good at programming.

And as luck would have it, I, I, since I did my computer course, I, I knew some really good programmers.

Started talking to them.

like some people that are either a Voldred graduate or they were still still around or just one class below me, so they were still in school or doing their third year or whatnot in college so I think we managed to get eight people together that were really excited yeah of which four are still with the company.

Incredible! Yeah so we had our Our whiz kid engineer, Anton, who's just brilliant coder all together.

And he's had that kind of experience of, you know, growing up just coding and just being tech savvy.

His dad was really tech savvy as well and so forth.

They're brilliant kid.

And then Malin, who's like really solid, you know, traditional artist, but also had a lot of historical knowledge.

Yeah. Like did a lot of, you know, uh, sort of the equivalent to the U S audience would be like a rent fair.

Yeah. Uh, but in Sweden it's more like ultra traditionalist in that it's historical reenactment.

More, more like it.

So together, and then we had, you know, other, other people that were from, uh, just student pals, uh, that got together.

I think when we we then sat down it's like okay what kind of game are we gonna make it's like well let's make something that's inspired by Zelda like that was the first thing that we went to is like something Zelda -esque but also like we were really into Lord of the Rings like the movies had I mean recently relatively recently dropped it's like we love that scene in Moria with you know the cave troll and everything it's like but what if what if we're it's a local co -op game because they don't make local co -op games anymore and it's for wizards uh and it's kind of Zelda perspective and you cast

spells and then Emil he had sort of like this desire to make he's like maybe we could have you know spells that you had to you have to like do circle movements like Naruto was also really big at the time it's like you know the ninja techniques it's like what if we could emulate the sort of the emotion of doing hand gestures with a controller i'm like that's such a good idea let's let's go for that and but let's let's also i just give people the building blocks of the different spells that they're casting so it's like if you want to cast steam you have to combine water and fire you know to make

steam and it's like is that doable i'm like i mean it's super simple like right it's just it's hard man we can do anything yeah exactly Exactly, which is one of the brilliant things with games.

You can do anything.

What is that quote?

As long as it's not prohibited by the laws of physics, it's possible.

And even then, you can kind of cheat a little bit in games sometimes too.

Yeah, exactly. We're quantum mechanics or something.

Smooth the edges off that.

So we really got into building this game, to the point where all of us just stopped caring about college.

Again? Again. Now your apathy towards college has infected seven other people.

I love it. Yeah, exactly.

Well, I think it was five of us that really stood out, that really went for it.

So it's the four people that are still with the company.

And then we had one other guy who came up with Vlad the Vampire.

Well, this vampire that was obviously a vampire, but told everybody that he wasn't.

But also always slipped up.

So it's like, yeah, I'm going to suck your, no, wait.

Come closer. I won't bite.

Yeah, right. Come closer.

I won't bite hard. Characters.

Yeah, it's fun. So this game that you're getting towards.

So some people may have played this game but not realize that it's from the same studio that did Helldivers, right?

Because they've just come along at the end.

Yeah. And the one that you're getting towards, right?

This is Magicka, right?

Exactly. And so you won the competition, I'm guessing.

Yeah, exactly. So they had three categories.

They had game of the year, innovation, and execution.

So we're absolutely going to win innovation.

Execution, probably not.

And game of the year, probably not.

So we had Orvar from, what's it called?

The NCA or something?

The compere? Well, the announcer who's famous in Sweden.

He's like a celebrity metal singer.

Have you ever heard of a band Entombed?

Yeah, I've heard of Entombed.

But he loves video games.

So he was presenting the show.

So I was like starstruck.

It's so Scandinavian to have a metal singer announcing the awards ceremony.

I love it. Super cool.

but so he went when we yeah we're sitting there in the audience of Swedish game awards really hoping that we'll win uh of course like we were super excited when we got the nomination I was like oh this is gonna be amazing and then innovation goes to another game and we're like we're so mad we're fuming and it's like we didn't care about like we were you know it's it's sort of that feeling of you know the entire world is collapsing, you're all dazed, defeated.

Yeah and then we weren't even paying attention to Game of the Year.

And then when when they announced the winner, it's like, and the winner for Game of the Year is Magicka.

It's like it's like everybody went up because we're so fucking mad.

Your whole party got raised, yeah.

Yeah exactly. And then we had the summoning sickness all over, so we're starting, there are stages...

And there's this wonderful picture online of us, the the eight of us like kids holding like plaques and what not but you know we were so sure that we were going to win innovation that we had bought cigars prematurely and it's like well if we don't win it will have to be like a grave cigar or something but yeah so crazy times and you know by chance like the jury of Swedish Game Awards was four people from the games industry so it was Jens Andersson from now Machine Games who was the design director of Indiana Jones who became sort of a mentor to me after that when it comes to game developing and game

design. And then we had Oscar Burman who was the COO of Avalanche.

Tobias Sjögren was was some an agency the the ddm or something i can't remember um i think there was one more yeah you won something for shell or something from microsoft so it's like really like people that actually knew what they were talking about so they came up to us after that and we got a little bit starstruck because we played a lot of their games uh and they're like they they just gave us one recommendation it's like okay great that you won this but don't see this as the end this is the first step now you just gotta get to it and make this a reality we won like maybe it was $5 ,000 or something

good amount of money for our students like we're living out of $720 every month so $5 ,000 would go a long way so but and of course the first thing that happened is that we were kind of we crunched hard so everybody sort of went back to college yeah again um and and that became sort of like a stark realization sitting there after with a victory and it's like let's let's sort of do college and game studio at the same time yeah yeah it's like that's a bad idea so we started seeing like you know progress on making the game you slow down and everything is grounded to halt vault and I got a flashbacks

to those mod projects that failed yeah I was like this is exactly it this is failed project waiting to happen yeah because we are not in it to achieve something we didn't have a goal so we're like we have to force ourselves to have a goal yeah so I told that I went I went to rest of the team I said like guys this this doesn't work we have to make decision now.

We have to drop out of college or abandon this game.

And of those eight people, four came with.

So it's Malin, Anton, Emil, and me.

I don't know why I start listing things.

I suck at it. And then we got another guy that joined the team as well and who i was a good friend of ours that studied you know uh music production yeah but he had some similar skills in like you know finance and administration and so forth which he didn't get to do we got the script because we needed more developers and we didn't need somebody that had uh you know did the business thing but anywho so i think we needed a second opinions we went to the dean of the of the college and we asked him it's like hey uh so we got this opportunity and this this and this is going on it's like we're kind

of thinking of maybe not continuing uh college and he's like such a great guy he's like you know college will always exist yeah this is once in a lifetime opportunity yeah wow great advice yeah do it and that i think that we needed that permission yeah from from somebody that was in an adult role even though we're i don't know 25 or something 23 20 i don't know how old we were um and at that point it's like okay well okay let's drop out of college and you know everybody we talked to i was expecting heavy resistance from everybody like from parents and everybody but everybody was just like yeah

go for it yeah it's like such i was really surprised by sort of the support that we got during those times so we got like uh the college even gave us a you know uh room uh it was it's like the size of this table almost for five people to sit in you're together you've you're actually now founding this company right and you've got magica there is this well student project effectively that's won this award yeah yeah i mean the biggest hurdle at that point and this has been the story of arrowhead for 16 years it's like we didn't have money yeah it's like that that's been if if i could just summarize

arrowhead it's like we needed money but we had a plan we had a really strong plan so there was a grant called Nordic Game or Nordic Game had a grant if I remember correctly you could get up to $60 ,000 and I was like that will cover it that will cover development for us and especially with our perfectly laid production plan nothing would go wrong we would make a great demo we would submit it we get sixty thousand dollars and then we would be able to finish the game we would get rich and then we could make games without worrying about money the indie dream yeah and like yeah and what year was this now

that we were talking about 2008.

yeah so it's also happening all around us as well like at that time you know the indies that are breaking through getting onto storefronts because the saturation wasn't a thing at all then exactly if you had a decent game like magicka you did have that cut through right yeah so it was uh so you're not Not crazy, essentially, having these thoughts.

No, no, no. It's the time of, you know, Braid.

It's the time of Castle Crashers.

Yeah, Gone Home, all these different things.

So many good titles that came out during that time.

And it's also a time, much like today, where you had stagnancy in the industry.

It's like everything had converged to a focal point where everything was about accessibility and to get as many people to play games as possible.

And each game. So every game was for everybody, which means that every game was for nobody, which is incidentally also the slogan of the subtitle of Arrowhead.

A game for everyone is a game for no one.

And I think our ambition with Magicka in those days, it was a counter reaction to the games industry.

We didn't feel like we as gamers got the games that we wanted to play.

yeah we wanted to play something that was a little bit like challenging just pure fun like laugh out loud fun uh and something that didn't hold our hands like where we could fail and we had this thought that like just and and also games that allowed you to do things yeah yeah right guard or guard rails off or actually guard rails on the level of the death star it's like we want the pits that we can fall into yeah exactly why don't i have empire no guardrails it's like yeah well it's a galaxy far far away so i guess there's no guardrails yeah totally they forgot to invent that part um but yeah

let's see where was i going talking about magicka the team together oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so so we we submitted like our application to get those six thousand dollars of course didn't get it uh for because we were an unproven team hadn't done anything and who instead got it was all right wow okay for some reason to make some game and he was a you know celebrity director movie director in sweden so of course he got the money it's like it's like say say for betton like Like five college kids that, well, not college kids anymore that dropped out of college.

College dropouts. College dropouts, yeah.

And, you know, it's like Sweden is crazy in that sense.

Like we get paid to go to college.

It's like you get a grant.

Everybody gets paid education.

And really the way that that works is that education is free, but you also get some living costs covered.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

So, you get like $300 a month, and then you can get a student loan that's, you know, a low interest, 0 .5 % loan or something like that.

Because you are a student, so you just have access to financing.

But that's limited to an additional, or was during our time, like an additional $420.

So, it came to like $720 total.

so but the way that the swedish school system how the swedish system works is that if you fail your courses uh you get a letter saying like you failed courses therefore if you don't correct this you we will you will not get uh the money that money yeah right so what we did it was that when we dropped out of college we didn't you know tell anybody we just stopped going to classes.

Just walked off base.

Yeah, yeah, okay. And then we of course got zero, didn't take any, complete any courses, so we got a letter saying like, hey, if you don't fix this, we will take your money away from you in three to six months' time.

Right, okay. So I was like, oh, yeah.

And then... So you're looking down the barrel of going back to school, basically.

Yeah, and then, well, no, really, it's just plans.

Like, let's just accept that, because really what we got is six months of runway to start to...

as a right you knew okay yeah so it just became the system yeah uh so and then eventually uh like six six months down the line after we were uh developed magica and that was actually like the we needed the money from that six months out yeah to just be able to survive uh so we started hoarding that cash uh that we got us a tuition or whatever i don't know what to call it it's called in swedish is called the studio bidag like a grant or like yeah like a student welfare sort of thing yeah so three months in uh first letter it's like yeah you have to fix this right on schedule yeah that's like fine

and then submitted it to to nordic game for getting approval uh wait to hear back from that got it i got a no and then got the final uh letter from the saying like well now we're actually gonna stop payments to you because you haven't completed of your courses even though and you didn't redeem your failure yeah and then there's a third there's a potential to get a third uh experience and we have a third dream of yeah yeah i'm sorry my brain is starting to go a little bit it's the vegas air conditioning don't worry it gets us all yeah it smells of perfume but uh and that we call it to write a sniffed

bread uh write a a sad letter.

So it's like, oh, but I've gone through such a hard time and this is the reason why and blah, blah, blah.

So you write - It's very effective.

All of these - That's what I do when women break up with me.

It's the same thing.

So you write the saddest story that you can come up with on why they need to extend it for an additional three months and give you yet another chance to rectify your mistake.

Yeah. mistake yeah unfortunately they they were like on to us like no it's like they're reading the magic of forums or they know what's going on pretty much so so we're like in a really tough spot at that point it's like we developed the game for six months we knew that we had at least six months left on development and we're out of cash yeah it's like we got a small grant of like i think it was uh maybe an additional five thousand dollars somewhere around there that They could keep us a little bit afloat.

But we're like, let's use this as emergency money.

And let's just, you know, let's start being smart.

Let's go. Let's start eating way cheap.

It's like, you know, noodles and meatballs.

It's like pasta and meatballs.

Every day, same thing.

It's like the shittiest meatballs ever.

And then eventually we couldn't afford that.

So it was just pasta and hard bread.

Dry pasta. Yeah, it was like crazy times.

And so where's this sort of game at this point?

like as you it's a like a vertical slice playable uh now you're just like needing the money to close out the content yeah yeah yeah well but half the game wasn't built half of the systems weren't built over that third maybe oh two thirds maybe but so we're like okay we're really running running out of money we need we need we need money and at that point paradox um it came out with uh a new initiative called i can't remember what it was called but it was basically an indie publishing like arc paradox arc was that it yeah it was way bad it was called something like game something fred announced

it in i guess this must have been 2009 yeah cool uh and it's like i guess like let's see if we can get something get designed so we spent some of that money flew down to stockholm to meet with paradox and meet with fred um and uh he's like yeah but we were asking for $120 ,000 at the time to finish the game and we we thought like let's let's really crank this up and it's like $120 ,000 more money than we've ever seen and we had a you know poorly laid out business plans and everything like that and a demo that was SoSo.

And let's see here.

Fred was immediately, it was like $120 ,000 for a company to spend $120 ,000 on a small game that may or may not make it.

It's like the easiest business decision ever.

But we were like really nervous about it.

But yeah, got the promise that we'd sign it with them.

We went back, super ecstatic.

It's like, this is going to be amazing.

But that's not the way that game development business works.

It's like we were waiting for the agreement.

And we got promised by one of the guys over at Paradox, yeah, the agreement's coming, we are going to sign, we are going to sign.

Shams. Classic Shams. This was actually before Shams. I'm not going to name names.

Of course, it was a tricky situation for Paradox as I come to realize in retrospect.

But for us, it was like we were active, you know it's like it's like a strategy game when you're in the negative and you see your cash reserve you're like about to find out what's below pasta without meatballs yeah it's like what could possibly be below that exactly yeah uh social welfare and welfare uh but anywho so we were like really getting really frustrated like we were working on the game but it was hard to get even a reply to an email yeah and for us it was every single day i sent an email minutes like hey what's going on hey what's going on can we sign can we sign can we sign and after a while

it's like okay we need to we need to do something this is clearly not working it's like what is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results so we're like what are we going to do and it's like let's announce the game let's announce the game because that should hopefully make them let's smoke them out yeah yeah so we put together a trailer uh in a generic fantasy world yeah only up to four wizards at the power to save it something like that um good fun like you know really amateur stuff at the time but there was something that really resonated

with players and we uploaded it to game trailers uh sent out press releases so we took i can't remember which company maybe it was EA or Activision or somebody one of their press releases and we just rewrote yeah remove Lord of the Rings and then just put like yeah Magicka and that is like a quote from executive it's like quote from me saying something yeah and it's like and let's send this to all game outlets so Robin uh who's the administrative business guy he has got a lot of the like hunted down every game journalist he could find and got their email address yeah and then he's had like this email

prepared with bcc on everybody and then just this the statement the press release and it was ready to hit send as we uploaded the video and as the video was uploaded here it's like send and 24 hours later that that video had like over a million views wow on game trailers oh my god which was crazy so i knew you were gonna say a big number but i didn't think it would be like that No. It's like from nothing.

One day. And the day after, I got an immediate call from Paradox.

It's like, ''Hey, do you feel ready to sign?'' And you're like, ''I have altered the deal.

Pray I do not alter it.'' I wish that I had, because that would have been a smart idea.

But at that point, we were running so low on cash.

We couldn't even pay an attorney to read through the agreement.

We didn't have enough money.

Sure it's fine, I'm sure, like yeah.

Yeah, it wasn't fine.

It was probably one of the worst game development deals ever signed.

Well, you know, it's funny how we wander into that stuff when we're younger and everything.

And like, even just like you say, but like looking back in retrospect about like the situation Paradox was in and everything, you don't even have the perspective at that point in, you know, in the industry and in your career to understand, like to place yourself in their shoes, like really effectively.

Yeah, of course. And for me, it's like Paradox.

They've done games, and therefore, they should have a lot of money.

But that's, I mean, Paradox at the time, they were just getting started with the publishing business and everything like that.

Yeah. So we signed with them.

And then the next thing started.

It's like first milestone payment.

It's like, hey, I think it was $12 ,000 that was going to be paid to us on a certain date.

We're checking the bank account.

It's like nothing. And it's like the day after, nothing.

started sending emails to Fred and to the other people it's like hey where's the money and no reply it's like hey where's the money like we're still we're still running we had signed an agreement but we didn't receive any money it's like okay what the hell is going on and later I learned that Paradox was they the money that they were going to get from one of their distributors was withheld from them yeah so it's just going down the chain exactly I thought they just had the money on a bank account yeah but of course you want to move the money yeah it needs to circulate yeah they're not just being

jerks because they're jerks it's like business it's money coming down the chain and you're at the bottom of it unfortunately so they were involved in like a lawsuit in new york or something like that it was like it's crazy you're just like i just need my meatballs man let's go yeah exactly i need twelve thousand dollars i can get some meatballs yeah yeah okay um but yeah magical development was before i mean it's it's chaos like we don't know what we're doing like we know we knew sort of how to build the game like that That wasn't a big problem.

But how to ship a game is a different thing.

Yeah, it's like just finishing up everything, all of the levels that we need to build, all of those, everything.

The bugs, how to handle that, how to track that, how to do the project planning.

We had a Scrum board, which was just post -its on a whiteboard. And those post -its, the glue was really shitty.

So the post -its sort of started dwindling down and they fell into the ventilation system.

So we lost tasks to just grab it.

that's it and it's like weren't we supposed to do where's that task and it's like oh it's down here in the air duct you like a pull out the vent and then there's another month of work in there yeah so in the first scene in magic owen you start in castle alderon uh alderon uh it's the castle name such a long time ago uh that's fine we'll put we'll fix it in place yeah the castle but yeah because the uh it's just a play on words on like a retirement home in swedish Olderheim, or something like that.

Mhm. Anyway, the first scene is Vlad the vampire teaching the wizard something, or saying something, like recapping the story of Magicka.

And on his blackboard there's post -its, and you can see them in a pile underneath the blackboard as well, just as a tribute to what it was like.

Fantastic. But Magicka really...

The development sucked.

We crunched for like a year.

year. The development plan that we set originally, I think it was off by 400 -500%.

So we're like, five people a year.

And there was 10 people.

Five. Yeah, two years, or two and a half years.

And then eventually, Paradox, they ran out of patience with us.

They're like, you guys have to ship this game.

It's like, yes, we're We're working as hard and as fast as we can.

We're doing 16 -hour days, seven days a week, just like during a period.

And then the final, and we're going to ship the final milestone.

It's like me and Robin, Robin who's supposed to do finance stuff, he is now a scripter and level designer.

So we're sitting back to back, and he's working on one of the bosses, Parker, the giant spider.

And I'm working on the last boss, Haster, the king in yellow, so Cthulhu stuff.

Very cool. so he's like I'm done with this boss I'm gonna turn around my share and it's gonna look at it and the spider you know it's like proper g -lob crawls out of the cave and then just as the fight is about to start the spider falls through the ground and it's like oh my god we've got a bit defeated and it's like this is like the final milestones in this game it's just it's going to shit and then it's like well look Look at what I've done.

And we turned to my computer.

I was going to show him the last boss fight.

And the battle begins with, you know, this demon descending from the skies and then the battle is supposed to start.

And as the demon hits the, you know, the point where the fight is about to start, he comes down and then he suddenly went up off screen and then came back down again, halfway and then went back off screen and then a third. And then eventually just the tentacles were dipping in to the top of the screen.

Literally teasing you.

Video games, I mean, Lisa, our old producer, once said to me something.

happened and she just turned to me and she's like video game development is an abusive relationship i mean that we were like we started laughing it's like this is it we're fucked yeah it's like yeah we'll go back to college and that will be it yeah so anyway skip forward to uh to to release day for magicka we we knew that it was released was in in the milestone agreement where it said like we're going to release on whichever date it was somewhere in january or february but we talked to paradox and said well the game isn't ready we need to we need maybe a month more to finish it and fix all the bugs

and then suddenly i see i get a message from somebody no i see i see one of my friends it's like you're on steam it's like it's now playing magica i'm like what the fuck is going on I open steam and it's like checking the news page or the front page and it's like new newly released magica like this game is in such a broken state like I hope that nobody is going to buy this like because it's embarrassingly crashy and buggy and I started we started seeing like you know sales numbers and it's like the first day is like 30 000 copies oh my god I was like what is this gonna mean what happens if this keeps

up and so we said we're selling 30 000 copies for like a full week i was like that's 150 200 it's like 10 days 300 000 maybe that's like this it's it's it felt like you know standing in front of a crowd with your pants down i was like a very big crowd yeah and then like my uh uh uh patrick who's the one of the um designers over at Arrowhead he was going to come in in a community manager role and he called me and was like yeah we're talking about it and he's like yeah at release you'll come in and help work on the game and just manage the community and he calls me up like you're right let me try

to get the story straight so we're sitting there with our pants down it's like shit i hope nobody notices how broken it is go to the steam forums and it's like you know post after post after post of like this game crash crash crash crash it's like this game's shit it's so broken and and i get this call from from from fluffy or patrick he's like hey i read the steam forums you want me to start tomorrow i'm like yes please come in and then it's like we're sitting down it's like what the fuck are we're gonna do it's like because we can't we have to do something uh because we can't let this just go

to shit because of because of how buggy it is and we're like in paradox for calling us it's like what the hell is going on it's like this game is selling way way better paradox i thought it would sell 50 000 copies total yeah right first day 30 000 yeah it's like okay we were like okay what if we put out a patch every day like yes continue to do it yeah yeah not not you know know just wait until we've fixed everything but just showed that kind of incremental progress because it works so well in modding like you get the community to come with you on the journey of building the game yeah so we're

like let's let's put out a patch every day so we started patching like monday tuesday all through the week and then over the weekend we took two extra days and worked through the weekend to release a major patch on monday instead yeah so we did that continuously.

I think we came up to 20 patches or something.

So pretty much what is a month straight just fixing, fixing, fixing.

And what happened is that the community really went from really super negative to this game is getting better by the day.

Like they could see that kind of progress.

And it was, it even came to the point where, I mean, the game was sold at $10.

We had, you know, people are making - cracking the game.

I think after update 12, they wrote like, this will be our last crack for Magicka.

These guys are patching the game so frequently that it's taking up all our time to crack this game over and over and it's 10 bucks, just buy the game.

Oh, that's amazing!

It was like, okay, I'll play it.

The pirates. The pirates are literally actually promoting the game.

yeah telling people to buy your game incredible first first week was 300 000 first month i think was a million copies of magica and now i think it's wow a million in a month yeah i think it's sold around 10 million copies to today incredible yeah yeah and it's like we were like yeah we're rich this is gonna finally play it out now we're gonna be just be able to focus on making video games but unfortunately the agreement with paradox coming back to that it's like it's not the greatest agreement.

Paradox is rich. Paradox is rich. Arrowhead, not so much. Because apparently all of the marketing costs, all of the anything associated with the project was seen in this agreement as a royalty advance.

It's got to be recouped.

On our part of the royalties.

With those 30 % we recouped the stuff and then the rest of it was just pure profit for Paradox.

Which is something that, I mean, it says so in the agreement, but if you had read it.

there yeah we needed meatballs there was no time to read that agreement it's like that's the aside yeah isn't it interesting though and you know you probably could have redlined that and change that around or something if you went through it and stuff yeah all right well hey magicka's just sold a million copies in a month or something it's on its way to 10 you're you've got this team now in an actual company and success is in your future but i think right now we have an awards show to go to here guys where you're nominated for five categories and a mysterious six one which of of course we're not going

to attempt any more lists so we're gonna we're gonna break here actually and we're gonna give you time to go upstairs get ready and obviously look beautiful for the award show um and we will come back at a later date and we will talk all about helldivers one and then helldivers two and their journey there which sounds like a part of helldivers two is similar to like the chaos of you know it's like it's it's the same story over and over again we'll do episode two and three next time exactly uh it's pleasure pleasure uh talking to you uh We're really excited.

It's going to be kind of fun, like breaking now in the middle, and then the next one we'll know how it went.

How it went, exactly.

There'll be commiserations or congratulations.

Yeah, exactly. All right.

Well, hey, best of luck tonight, and we'll see you when we chat next.

Thank you, man. Johan, welcome back.

Thank you, Trent. It feels like it was yesterday, but it's been ages.

I think it was a month since we recorded the last episode.

Now, actually more, like a month and a half almost. almost and when we left off you were walking almost immediately to the we had to stop because you were going to the dice awards and you said i just want to win action game of the year i think you said and what did you end up winning action game of the year there we go also online game of the year audio and music as well right yeah yeah we love a clean sweep yeah it was it was an amazing night and especially you know of course getting that kind of recognition but at some point it It started getting ridiculous.

Yeah. It's like you were up there time and time again.

You were like the Nintendo guy the year that Breath of the Wild was nominated or something.

So no, we were very happy to have you up on the stage.

It's obviously a wonderful game and happy to have you win, finally take home your coveted Action Game of the Year.

So congratulations.

Yeah, thank you so much. And I mean, the reason why that Action Game of the Year meant so much to me is uh that it was one of the first big forum nominations that we got in the games industry like after after we did magica it was you know that that could have won a lot of things especially at the you know in the shows and whatnot but we we weren't wise enough to submit it for for judgment or for for for the potential to win we didn't we thought that somebody would just notice it and then and then they go like oh you guys win no you're in it to win it joan you know the rules yeah well i'm kind

of surprised there were i figured this out after we had that list of like which things are we actually gunning for and then i go like ah that's why we haven't won that many awards in the past yeah i've definitely had those moments at the studio where you're like did you submit for the thing no i thought you were submitting for the thing did you no oh no you know like emailing folks trying to get it online i think it's a cultural thing though uh because for for us as uh northerners developers even submitting your game for judgment in any sort of award show it seems like a little bit of an arrogant

thing to do you see what i mean That's very Scandinavian of you.

Like, no, humbly, I cannot submit my game for an award. Like, yeah, God forbid someone would be able to see me do that.

Exactly. It's like, by doing this, are you bragging?

Very good. Just adjusting the mood lighting in here.

All right, let's dive into it because we left off.

We charted the early days of Arrowhead.

So thank you for our Arrowhead history lesson.

and that was very enjoyable diving into that with you over in las vegas dice and now that we're on uh you know firm ground of our little home home nations on opposite ends of the globe um you in the morning and me in the evening let's uh let's hit that bridge in between so we finished up in the last episode talking about magica right the time you had on that let's now talk let's cover off quickly that bridge between magica and the hell divers ip and we'll talk a little bit bit about Helldivers 1 and Helldivers 2 but I'm keen to spend a little bit of time hearing about the years in between because obviously

they led you to Helldivers 1 and you've you tackled Gauntlet and Showdown so I think probably maybe a good way to get into that is like how did Gauntlet come about after was it Gauntlet first it was and then Showdown right?

Showdown first and then Gauntlet right so yeah tell me tell me about that and how you sort of come into that um your time spent on those projects and things learned and then sort of how how they led you to helldivers so showdown effect was actually originally intended to be you know two people making a video game based on sort of a premise of leero wasn't that a great game uh and and it was created it did from sort of the the depths of a business discussion over a paradox or sort of business i don't even know if it was discussion but i've thought around that and then we took it on ourselves to

do something with that uh very small and we had another uh game running at the same time that was more of a you know true to form uh co -op game that we had to cancel because of the agreement that we signed on showdown effect uh to develop this sort of like two -man project and once resources were diverse the like deallocated from the game they were originally making to showdown effect vs finn wrapped that up the project grew in size and it became something that we actually started paying more attention to um but then again it's like i mean side scrolling pve a pvp only uh kind of shooter it's not our

forte even though we so recognize its value um and had a lot of fun developing it like it's i think it's the one of the games that so we've had the most fun playtesting of all the games that we made.

But unfortunately, Shodown Effect didn't really pay off or it didn't pan out as we had hoped due to many reasons.

I mean, PvP -only side -scrolling shooter with an innovative shooting mechanic.

It wasn't meant to be.

Interestingly, you were modders that then made a shooting game that won a competition that then went on to you your first game was a mega hit with magicka and then your second game your sophomore title kind of you know stumbled once that starter gun was fired was that i can imagine that must have been quite a humbling experience to go from the heights of that mega hit to then on your second title um kind of stumble yeah no no it absolutely was and we sort of had this perspective of like whatever we will touch turns the gold um and i think to some some degree we worked as hard on children effect

as within on madriga but we really didn't stay true to our core beliefs on exactly what we wanted to do uh with that game like there is a lot of external influences that came in and said well you have to develop games this way like this the the way that you've done it before it's basically it became a children development was a lot of throwing the baby out with the bath water uh sort of style the development i'm not saying like but we're perfect in any way or that that the formula that we have is the way to go but at least it it worked well for us i think showed on effect we we thought that we

would be able to you know mostly do what we do and then and then be successful But it turned out that we can't just throw everything out and then try something completely new and then hope that it will be as big a hit as Magicka.

But anywho, so Shonen Effect, fun to play in a LAN setting, like that kind of classical 90s LAN party style.

but when it comes to like a commercial product so so yeah you know there were so many you know news it's like twitch integration in -game store and leagues esport all things that we generally have a really i mean it's faff on top core fundaments of the game actually being enjoyable how we spent more time doing that rather than you know ticking boxes saying like this is the way that games are successful from you know the the worst interpretation of of the games industry or games business um i think maybe could have gone better like if we skipped twitch integration and we skipped the in -game score

the store and instead made you know a co -op campaign or something like that i think the appeal of children would have been much greater but but really like at the end of it uh really what came out of it it's like okay we have to we have to make what we believe instead of what business partners think that we should do yeah i think we've all made that mistake before as developers i remember apple giving us advice at one point that was just objectively terrible and i'm sure they thought it was great advice at the time it sounded great to us they even had the stats to show us but you know it's some

people just get it wrong sometimes yeah but it's telling picasso to paint more realistically more like rembrandt yeah yeah like yeah or or you just leave around leave because to do what picasso does and rembrandt to do what rembrandt does so how do you now let's sort of move on to gauntlet now so now you're stepping onto gauntlet with these i'm not sure if because some lessons aren't learned immediately right sometimes it takes time to digest these things how did you approach gauntlet differently or how was that project set up in a way or did you sort of continue to sort of repeat the same mistakes

until you found yourselves that held those sort of uh we both we after shown an effect we were we were talking about making three games so the the games on there we had potential to create were magicka 2 gauntlet and hell divers so all three at the same time so the one that i personally thought was the one that i really really wanted to do was of course hell divers but as close second was uh magicka 2 doing a proper sequel so we actually negotiated with paradox after the showdown effect to create a sequel for magical but we're you know one of the things that we weren't happy about was the business

arrangement on a magical side so I kept pushing and pushing and pushing like for a better and better a better deal for magical but event at the end of it I think that I sort of in my heart had this concern of making making a sequel to Magicka like we the relationship with Paradox had gone from optimistic like when they supported us in our student or drop out the days to build Magicka to the day when sort of the check finally came and sort of the business, we saw the end of that business arrangement.

But to back off a little bit, I think it's important to sort of recognize the context.

Children Effect didn't pan out.

We were strapped for cash.

We don't know what to do.

through a mutual through a friend that we met in the games industry we got a connection with Playstation we pitched Helldivers to them, they were super excited, so we had that ready to go Magica 2 we of course knew the people over at Paradox, it was a natural conclusion to make a sequel to Magica And then we went to E3 for a meeting with Warner Brothers.

You know, it was a meeting where it said, like, Warner Brothers Digital Initiative.

I was like, okay, interesting.

And Warner Brothers wanted to, you know, get in on the indie game.

They wanted to get small studios, build something small that they could then develop further.

murder sort of the same with playstations uh the reason why playstation was interested in in hell divers in the first case so we were juggling all of these three and at some point we sort of settled that okay let's let's push for hell divers let's get that signed but since since since we're a studio now we can probably make a couple of games at the same time the infamously hardest thing to do is in indie studio is like yeah so so we actually signed hell divers and then we were discussing what's our second project can be magical 2 or gauntlet um and after some a lot of conversation with within the studio

we decided that like while gauntlet is super interesting and it's one of the source inspirations to magicka uh we we should really pursue making magicka 2 as well i'm gonna have We have one team in Magicka 2 and we'll have one team on Helldivers.

Magicka 2? Yeah, Magicka 2 and Helldivers.

Yeah, Magicka 2 and Helldivers.

Yeah. So we told Warner Bros., hey, thank you for your trust in wanting to give us the Gauntlet IP.

But unfortunately, we've decided to move on with a different project.

And then I told Paradox, like, yeah, let's go ahead with Magicka 2.

magicka too but i really think that uh royalty rates or something i can't remember i made some kind of demand on them it's like i'm ready to sign if you just give us this as well and this this was like a fifth iteration of demands that i put on the agreement with paradox uh making magicka too so at that point like i told the studios like hey everybody we made up our mind We've just told Warner Brothers no, and Helldivers is already signed, we're going to start that very soon, and then Magica 2, that's the game that we're making.

But I'm just going to try for one more thing during negotiation, and at that point, Fred came back.

So Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox, he came back and said, you know, I often make...

I almost always make business decisions with my gut.

And what my gut is telling me is that the relationship between Arrowhead and Paradox has gone sour over the years.

And I think that we can't start a business relationship on these grounds.

So therefore, we have to say no to signing.

signing. We have to stop negotiations.

And we have to say no to developing Magicka 2.

So, there we were, a studio of, I think, we had grown to, like, 20 -something.

And we had signed one project, so Helldivers with PlayStation.

That covered sort of half of the burn, so So the cost of the studio.

We had said no to Warner and got a no from Paradox on making the next game, which meant that we were overstaffed.

But in Sweden, you can't just lay off people.

Everybody has a pretty long notice period, most of the time between two and three months.

and i went back and did the financial calculation where i saw that no matter what we do if we lay off like almost everybody at the studio it would still eat up the all the available funds that we had even with the money coming in from hell divers and it would actually crash the studio yeah because all of the benefits and retrenchment payments and everything like that exactly Exactly.

So really, what we had done was that we had signed Helldivers 1 with the PlayStation and then promptly we were going to go bankrupt.

And then then basically just do the best impression of us as responsible business people in the games industry just before we'd even started to kill that project that they would have had signed.

I just gave a talk on this at GDC.

It's amazing how fast this stuff can like if you don't know how you shut down costs.

costs like you can be operating like weeks or months into like you know Beyond you know insolvency it's it's it's crazy and it it jump scares a lot of devs like it jumpscared you so what okay so you've got you've now you've obviously gone back to Warner Brothers and you've done a done an about face and said actually we'll take it were they just ready to come to the party no so the only sensible thing to do at that point because we told them I'm very firm no like we unfortunately that we don't think this is working so i i looked at i talked to ml one of the co -founders and i was like what the fuck

are we gonna do and uh we did the only sensible thing we went out drinking uh and in the middle of business plans are forged yeah three beers in i got a call from uh from one of the executives over at warner and i picked up the phone and he's like i don't accept your know you like you make the gauntlet that you want to make because there you know there was a lot of talk about mobile game and so forth we were like this is getting into showdown territory where there were a lot of executive decisions made that they influenced the game in such a way where we wouldn't be able to realize what we wanted

to make but he called up and was like you know what I'm ready to gamble on you just getting a carte blanche on whatever you want to do and I was like wow okay this actually turned out all right and we had an agreement signed basically the day after to make both gauntlet and hell divers yeah you're like that sounds like a fantastic idea and we're an incredibly stable and well -funded studio with you right now we're not at all in not at all in trouble so it learned so after that like the the there's a swedish term for it called uh Gravöl it directly translates to well, grave beer but it's kind of like

it's the last beer you drink together with somebody that has passed away so you know, at the post -funeral or if somebody has passed away you drink it to their honors so we were basically having that for Arrowhead and then it turned into a celebration of signing Gauntlet it's amazing this was the best we can get to the end yeah this of course prompted the next challenge challenge after challenge after challenge I think the games industry is starting a game studio is It's kind of like, if you remember Star Fox, where you want to get to the secret levels and you have to pass through those rings.

You have to consecutively fly through these rings that appear during the level.

And if you miss one, all of the ones behind disappear.

And the games industry is kind of like that when you start a studio.

have to you have to thread the needle at each step and be successful uh or successful or lucky at each one anything else is failure yeah um and it's so lucky there are more lucky rings than success rings as well right yeah and each ring is like yeah it's a 50 chance that you'll uh get it or maybe 75 chance let's say let's say 50 but it compounds so 50 then maybe two rings turns into 25 % to 12 .5%, and so forth.

And the more hurdles you have to jump through, because everything, you bet all on black, at every turn.

And hopefully, you start off with a little bit of money, and then eventually it grows, and that money is of course representative of the time that you have until your demise eyes on the amount of people that you can bring on so uh it's um it's a challenging business it's a very challenging business it certainly is so you're cashed up now we all at least you've got contracts signed one with playstation one with wb you're actually now making two games parallel you're doing the difficult indie studio thing yep let's uh why don't we just let's actually just dive straight into Helldivers.

And like, if there's any sort of anecdotes about sort of Gauntlet or the team or anything or sort of along the way while we're talking about Helldivers 1, but let's close off this period of Helldivers 1 because obviously Helldivers 1 went on to be a success.

I mean, I remember playing with our co -founders and having a blast and it sort of arriving onto the scene as like almost like the next spiritual successor from the Magic crew.

But you're obviously setting, laying the groundwork for what would become this essentially like a cultural phenomenon you know like the hell divers too um being a gdc this week there are a ton of folks there that were like super earth soldiers you know like clearly you'll have like part of your community wandering around the ground so it's still strong today so let's let's dive into that hell divers one um time period and setting up the franchise because i know johan you know i worked with you on your gdc talk you know i was there as as well when you gave it you speak a lot about the fundamentals

of hell divers 2 and the fundamentals of arrowhead as a studio um and the themes and everything but obviously i imagine a bunch of that was laid the groundwork was laid with hell divers 1 so yeah let's kick it off tell me about hell divers 1 and sort of how it came about and that seed of inspiration and um how you got off and running yeah so hell divers was almost a counter reaction to to sort of what we perceived as the well the failure of show them so one of the things that we really wanted to do is let's return to form and let's really embrace the philosophy that we have making magica um and we

we split the studio in such a way where have we tried to separate like we if we had four good programmers two went to hell divers and two went to gauntlet and really tried to split it like that it's like everybody gets it's kind of like you know a draft in in school where everybody picks one person it's like i'm gonna have this on the team this one and then unfortunately leads to last pickings but whatever we really try to get it as close as possible and gaunter was more embodied by the sort of the philosophy that was in children effect and sort of with the creative leadership on that uh still

with more of magicka and then held i was was full -on like this is what we believe in as a studio and uh held ours at its core was just the thought of can we can we just make a shooter with sort of the the philosophy that lies at the heart of arrowhead um top -down shooter um and and what would that be what are the themes that we would tackle uh what are what are the gameplay mechanics that we would tackle and the theme of hell divers came sort of you know a lot of people of course do the immediate parallel between hell divers and starship troopers and of course it's a big inspiration and big reference

uh but that you know that actually came game some ways into development original inception of of hell dares was yes that thought of can we be a henchman of a totalitarian state where morals are i wouldn't say objective but we want we knew that we wanted a game where you sort of were the baddies in this war like there's this great Mitchell and Webb sketch where there's two Nazis and they're starting to doubt themselves it's like are we really the good guys of this story have you seen the skulls on our hats exactly that one and really that was the original inspiration for Helldivers can we make

that game where you fight for something and then you're a little bit like but we seem awfully bad based on like you know iconography and that's the reason why the the logo for hell divers is skull comes directly from that skit that's amazing yeah i knew that i because obviously in your gdc talk right like um you have that gif of the are we the baddies and then it's like that plus a bunch of stormtroopers like blazing into a room right and uh and it's like hell dive is essentially this these two things But I had no idea that the actual skit went, not only that the skit was there at the seed of Inception and that you

hadn't just sort of like, you know, oh, this is a gif that kind of makes sense with our game and you use it in your GDC talk when we were chatting about it, you and I, but that it was actually the seed, but then that it's the inspiration for the logo.

It's crazy. Yeah, no, so after we'd done the first couple of versions of Helldiver, sent them over to PlayStation for like, review yeah they came back and said like you know guys well i can't have this game it's called killzone all right yeah and it's like oh we have to do something different and they're like yeah unfortunately it's like it's because it was very close to you just being one of the hell guests the original builds yeah and it's like what can we i think we need to up so playstation offered a lot of help to you know rediscover what the ip was us and at that point like as we always

do at the studio we just go back to what we like and it's like what do we like i thought you were gonna say we went on drinking as we always do the studio that's the process uh but but the fundamental belief is like let's just go back to our childhood and let's do something that we really like and you know those references are terminator aliens, worm 40 ,000, etc, etc, etc, etc. You know, sort of everything that that built us as developers or us as founders.

So, and we have sort of a shared view of what that is and it's like, okay, let's just, what if we just make it less, you as a, basically hell gassed shooting, uh, zombies, which was the original thought on what the game would be.

Let's make that into Helghast shooting bugs.

But it's still Helghast style.

And then one of our art director, maybe didn't even have an art director at the time, but one of our artists is like, what if it's less Helghast and it's more like you know superheroes uh superhero themed and i really really enjoyed that thought and it's like yes you know what that's exactly what we need and he and he drew like you know the the picture of uh the hell diver character that we had but with a cape on that's like oh that's so great because it played into one of the things that i really appreciate about you know military history most of the time when special forces are formed it's not because and the way

that they recruit it's not because you know people wanted to be special forces it's more of a shallow more shallow thing it's like a dire or an additional dollar here and there to be part to be doing something that's ridiculously dangerous and stupid and then you get a little bit of a bragging right by you know naming that unit an elite unit so the hell divers unit was came out of that sort of thought of like super as totalitarian regime what if the has told you well you're elite soldiers you have a cape but you're not really elite that like you're still normal human regular person with no better

abilities than anybody else but you have a cape And then we just lean into it and tell the players, like, you're so good, you're so awesome.

You know, the classical trope that you can see in almost any sort of American fiction versus European, where it becomes the single savior that's supposed to save the day.

what if you use the same mantra but the person itself is extremely extremely fragile uh what would that do to the ip and we just laid into that and uh and came up with that hell divers unit like the we changed the logo a little bit so that it became more inspired by by american iconography uh that's where you know the sort of an entire trope of like freedom liberty democracy came from it was it was the original memes back in the day where it's like knock knock who's there democracy and it's like five american soldiers you know kicking in a door yeah i remember the means yeah and um just i think

it naturally evolved evolved into that space based on who we were at the time who who were there and who we were at the time and i think all games are a little bit like that if you're 10 people each puts a piece of their soul into the game and the game becomes a product of those who were there at the time yeah it's almost like a time piece yeah yeah it's like a little time capsule right yeah it's so true yeah so anyway Hello Eris development after everything we learned from from developing Madriga and Showdown at the time and also some of the knowledge from Gauntlet you know who mentioned Gauntlet

like the the studio we thought we were going to be able to do two projects at once and we sort of were but what happened is that the we got two studios really like we we originally had this great plan of like let's share technology you know research knowledge resource sharing yeah but then we got stuck in building the games and we never talked even though we're they were literally in the other room next next to us this is the this is me on our last two projects as well making two strategy games and with two teams started them the same time and everything and there would be times if something's

happening i'm like why are we why have we remade this for both games you know and of course 90 of the time or 70 of the time there's like a there's a very valid reason for that and 30 is just like because people didn't put their heads up and ask you know such a there are so many challenges in this multi -team practice yeah i mean the first thing we'd set up was what we called the arrowhead foundation which was going to be a collection of shared resources between we in games we kept that going for i think two weeks out of two years development and then after we branched off into two completely separate

paths so yeah great intentions yeah exactly great intentions in practice so so see what we need to realize is actually developing parallel teams and games is really just about the friends we make along the way not the tech that we share i agree i agree but helldiver's development in general was super smooth and and it was you know the the return to form i mean a lot of people think about games being you know the the creative uh mind behind it or the creative the creative that leads to a great game but i really believe that it's more about the way that you develop rather than what you you develop

that makes a great game so in that just to jump in there for a second the way that you develop instead of what you're developing obviously a lot of you know what people would assume the magic of Helldivers is is the what and you know we spent a lot of time just talking about the concept but what in particular about that Helldivers development made it so successful or the way that you developed it that sort of brought that secret sauce that you're alluding to so one thing is that we didn't have conventional production um we came into the office every day played the game between nine and ten and then

we had our stand -up our morning meeting where we talked about what we just played we talked about is this as good or is this better than it was yesterday and if it was worse we threw out all the plans that we had for the day and fixed it so that tomorrow's playtest would be more fun than it was today it was always a focus on ensuring that we had a better time the day after than we had the day before sometimes you know we had really long things those things that took a lot of time but we never allocated more than half of the team working on something that wouldn't improve the game for the next

playtest. And it was always getting to that, like next playtest, can it be more fun than we have today?

And so what do you do in those moments in a game where, and maybe you didn't have this in your development, but you know, usually most of the time in development, there are periods where the game does need to go through a bit of a rough rough patch to come out the other end you know maybe there's some like some major systems that are coming in or something hits it's a little bit awkward that needs to get into the build you know needs to hit master but is not quite there yet what do you what do you do during during those times did you have any of those periods or did you did you just sort of integrate

them into this process absolutely we we had those but they came only after the point where we we play the game it made it better uh like always like we need a new enemy we need to do this we need to do that And it was always in the interest of making the next game's playtest better.

But after a while, we came to a point where it's like, you know, we need something fundamentally new to make this exciting because we're sort of sick and tired of playing the same thing.

And at that point, we kind of decided to break the game to then make it better again.

So we implemented, you know, built a massive system or implemented a new faction or whatever it might have been.

takes a little bit more time.

But as soon as we could play it, we started playing it again.

And then the process continued.

So at first we only had the bugs in the game.

And then we added the cyborgs and then the Illuminate.

So when we added the cyborgs, we basically paused for a week or something like that.

Two weeks. We still played the game against the bugs.

But as soon as we had an inkling of being able able to play against the cyborgs we only play them and and then we do the same thing it's like oh well we need another unit we need to do this thing or we need to change this or whatever it might be and it was always iterative everybody played or everybody was at least in the room while the game was played so everybody heard all of the conversations and were able to like fully align on every piece of decision that we made um and because everybody was sort of involved in all of the conversations everybody had in their head sort of the the chronicling

of why one decision was made the next and the next and the next subsequent decision and we didn't ever ever have to sort of backtrack to explain why decisions were made in one way or another and that was our i mean our stand -up our stand -up meetings were actually sit -down meetings so between between 10 and 11 like it was originally supposed to be between 10 and like 10 10 or 10 5 or something like that but sometimes those meetings were between 10 and 12 just talking about like what what are we doing with this game everybody was there they they knew all the decisions made and therefore we could we

could be very precise with what we were building and what was the team size at the height of production you're still like 20 or something like that yeah a little bit less than 20 i think 17 or 18 at the height of production uh but then hell divers never never really had production in that in the true sense of the word it was always this sort of the this spiritual you know the prototype mentality lived throughout the entire development of hell divers wow and at the end when the game was done uh like we just iterated upon it to get to to a point where it was completed even uh i guess towards the end

you got a little bit more into production where we knew we had to ship on we had sim sim ship on ps vita ps3 and ps4 uh and at that point it's like okay well we just need a little bit more muscle to to actually push through and realize um sort of the technical requirements yeah or common technical requirements and then once the game was done uh we played the game played together together with PlayStation, like our wonderful friends over at PlayStation.

And they gave us some really sound advice or sound feedback.

And they did throughout the entire development because they were also playing it every day.

So once we got together and discussed the game, it was just pure, like, what about this thing in the game?

It's not right there.

But after the game was done, we looked at the entirety of it and feedback from PlayStation was that this game really needs some kind of progression and we had just made it as a one off, like, let's get more like, you know, overcooked where you play a session without actually having any character progression.

But given how aligned the team was, it was super easy to coming out of the meeting with PlayStation, PlayStation deciding that we're going to spend three more months working on this game and then we'll release it came back to the team and said hey everybody um PlayStation perspective is that this game needs some kind of long -term retention or long -term progression mechanics we talked to him and we agree what can we do and then the team we talked for maybe two hours three hours and came up with sort of the progression system that exists in hell divers where it's like level up sis level up unlock

uh upgrade your weapons that was that was the key of it um and stratagems were i can't remember what stratagems were before but we basically tied stratagems as rewards to completing planets oh great and then yeah right and then that's how how we set our minds to it, developed that, and actually had that implemented within a very short amount of time because that kind of alignment and that process of what is it, what is not was so smooth.

And then after that, it's like rather undramatic release in the sense that we didn't have to crunch to get the game out.

I mean, a little bit to get some of the technical issues out uh out of the way there were no major like our I mean we had a significant backlog of bugs but a lot of it was like ridiculous stuff that yeah you already found yeah it's like you know the the slide on the pistol only locks back four out of five times stop the pressers we gotta fix this yeah yeah no and then yeah so but but hell divers is hellers one is probably the the easiest time i've had making a game ever um and and the most enjoyable one even though i mean we had some internal conflicts you know there were there were there was a lot

of discussion a lot of heated arguments but all of them were were made in what's it called like um with a foundation of trust between everybody that was on the team yeah in the interest of the title right your surgeon's talking about the patients on the table as opposed to arguing with each other right exactly exactly and then moving on to hell divers uh two uh which is an interesting one so after hell there was one and i assumed that that was actually what you're gonna yeah i was just gonna say because you've like obviously you've had some degree of success for then PlayStation to turn around

and be like, okay, let's do it again.

Like one 20 X, sorry, 10 X, five X the budget or something like that.

And let's go. So how did you tell me about how that sort of that bridge came about to hell divers too and how it, you know, cause there are some fundamental things.

Obviously the big one is the shift in perspective from top down to third person.

Um, but like, tell us about those internal conversations that came with the success after the successful launch of hell divers that you had with playstation so after the launch um which went really well like we got a pretty good metacritic score uh sold a ton of units but there was always this sort of thought on the playstation side that hell divers has probably reached its potential in the space that it lives like what what would the what would actually arrowhead be able to do in a third person sort of like more conventional or or more like mass appeal not necessarily style of game but yeah but yeah

style of game as well um at least when it comes to like you know high fidelity the visuals and all of that all of those bells and whistles that would make it easier for somebody to go like yeah maybe maybe I'll really get into this game and maybe I'll like it because top -down shooters are always a little bit of a hard sell for for some people it feels archaic and it feels a little bit old school yeah so only the people that are into indie games or most mostly people are into in the games or or have that nostalgia to top -down shooters we get a top -down shooter over a third person shooter so there

was that question of like well what would what would hell divers or some a similar game be like uh made in the sort of the arrowhead way so we pitched we actually pursued a different title first after Helldivers and tried some other avenues where it's like maybe we want to do this maybe we want to do that but after release of Helldivers we were still releasing updates and doing a lot of stuff for that game we had some time to think about what the next game was going to be and then after a while we came back to playstation and said you know what let's just work on helldivers let's make helldivers

2 because even though the helldivers production was sort of easy it still was kind of draining so it would be nice to do a sequel because it would be so easy and be pretty fast so therefore we could make another game afterwards and you know the game took seven years 11 months and 26 days to make uh our original projection was that it would take maybe two years to make a sequel to hell divers in in third person because we had basically all the answers from hell there was one yeah so therefore uh we we made a little prototype and that was super easy like it was just tellers one in in a third -person perspective

worked out exceptionally well and that gave us even more confidence given that we made a small prototype type in like two months or one and a half month that looked amazing it would be so easy to just make this game i mean it's such a such a such a terrible terrible misunderstanding of what game development is i mean at that point we're working together for such a long time it's your fifth game or something right now yeah so yeah exactly exactly and we just got it so wrong but but we we went back to playstation and said okay but you know what and they were a little bit hesitant about the other

things that we're with that we wanted to do you know to spin off games on hell diverse there was a you know the dungeon crawlers and whatnot yeah and when we were like the easiest thing to pitch the easiest thing to sell the easiest thing to make is just hell divers again but in a different format and let's see what how how high that that game can fly came back to playstation said okay but we're ready to hell divers too and this was this was just before dice awards and that's why the um the uh award best action meant so much to me is that we told playstations like well we we really want to do

helldivers too and they said unfortunately we our budget is already fully allocated because the fiscal year over at playstation starts in march yeah or april yeah they've already fully allocated all of the games that they were going to make and we came back to them maybe in february saying we want to do this game there was one i can't remember which game it was that ran out ran over budget and needed some additional funds it was one of their big titles um so they so they told us like unfortunately like we we can't fund this and then went to dice awards we won best handheld game and were nominated

for best action game that year i mean the category for best action game even this year uh did not that did not contain like an indie shooter right so we were going toe to toe with i can't remember what it was you know they like so battlefield call of duty and whatnot and then you had health and then you had hell divers in there so after we had won best handheld and got the nomination and plaque basically for for being nominated for best action game we sat down together with two of the senior vps of Playstation and started talking about the success and the future and really the meeting was about them

telling us that unfortunately we can't fund another game with you and at that point it was the scare and threat of bankruptcy once more Spectre raises its head once again I remember that dinner well it was a five hour dinner like i was originally just intended to be two hours but the conversations ran long and the first thing uh that one of the svps over playstation said you know the courteous conversation that you have before you get into business and talking about serious stuff it was oh so i heard you're getting married uh and and i was and i replied with it yeah originally i was but given

our financial situation we had to postpone the wedding so it's like that the first courteous you know like talking about anything but business turned immediately into a business conversation yeah yeah but and i mean there's so much heart at playstation and i think that was one of the strengths of playstation back in those days is that they just wanted the studios and talent and the people that you're working with to have a good time and to be successful.

So Helldivers, the original...

There was no more room in the budget, but one of the things that we promised dearly after that long business dinner was that we would absolutely make Helldivers 2 into a VR game, because there was room in the vr budget right and then they unlocked funds through that just to get us started you know with a small team and whatnot and that then turned into after like a year a year later when the new budget process playstation happened we were able to then finally get the the original sort of scope on the hellevius two budget that we intended and um and at that point unlock the potential and at that point

like the vr promise was scrapped yeah okay out of curiosity was the initial vr sort of promise was that still third person or was it meant to be a first person okay wow it was a third first person somewhere said well Well, maybe we'll have a first -person component in VR and so forth.

I mean, the people over at PlayStation, they're super lovely and they really, really just wanted to help us.

But of course, within the constraints of a bigger organization, you have to play ball with what is given to you.

So even though... And I'm dear friends with both the SVPs over at PlayStation that actually made Helldivers happen.

uh yes because they were so creative they knew that the game had to be made um but the organization couldn't uh based on various reasons it's really amazing how much you know and this is something that like quote unquote gamers you know although the um the game playing public don't see a lot of the time i think even some developers that don't get a chance to interface face with like you know some of these folks or for whatever reason don't have internal champions and that's the success of so many games and developers like can boil down to internal champions yeah no it absolutely does i think it's

i think it's more of a rule uh than an exception yeah yeah i would i would completely agree and they come up from like time and time again you you know, like developers talking about particular people that publishes that are navigating them internally or, you know, guiding their creative, like, you know, with almost, you know, no credit or public facing idea that, you know, these folks are helping some of the most successful games, you know, not just be the successes that they are, but commercially, but also creatively, but then also ensure that studios like yours exist to see the next day.

We've had it too. We've had internal champions that have ensured that we didn't go the way of the dodo at particular points in time, you know?

Yeah. And that makes me sort of wonder, like, I wonder how many games failed to find that champion that are, you know, like, fully viable, like awesome games?

Yeah. What are those games that never, never got to see the light of day that had the potential to be like a smash hit or like a breakout success?

There's even another question that's interesting there, which is how many people working at these organizations don't realize that they can be so effective as internal champions you know that they that you know with some creative maneuvers internally and you know like you say finding funds in a vr budget instead of you know a flagship sort of pot of cash uh how much it can actually well then turn around into what playstation's most profitable title or something like that all right so you've got the project now um you're like in year one or whatever you You're heading into year two.

You've got the flagship funds.

The shape of the game at that point in time, did it resemble what shipped six years later?

In a lot of ways, yes.

I think Helldivers 1 was the thought of what if we do a top -down shooter, but that's really a third -person shooter.

A lot of the detailed mechanics in Heldivers 1 is straight from like Ghost Recon or whatever it might be, you know, Battlefield or those kind of games, you know, like the way that you have ADS in a top down game.

As soon as you push the stick in a direction, your character lifts their gun, your movements become slow, but your fire becomes more precise.

Heldivers 2, on the other hand, I mean, we couldn't keep the same formula.

but really what hell divers one was is trying to get people to play a more complex game than what is shown on the box or or the visual art style dictates um so hell divers 2 in a lot of ways was the thought of like can we get people to play a third person game but tricking or play a milson while just tricking them that it's a regular horde shooter yeah um so we we experimented quite a bit with how hardcore were we gonna go with uh hell divers too so in the original sort of concept of the game i think it was a little bit more uh a little bit more milsim a little bit more armor and then we went

back to form with some of the sort of simplistic mechanics that we had in in hellers one such as you know throwing strategy and balls uh in the first version we had you know a laser pointer uh that you used like a like um a laser targeter that indicated where you wanted the stratagem to land So, in the top -down format, it made sense to just chuck an object and then wherever that lands, that's where the stratagem comes in.

But in the third -person game, we thought that distances would be too large.

So, I want to be able to call in an airstrike on something that was maybe 100, 200, 300 meters away.

way yeah um so i think those kind of like it was a little bit more middle same a little bit more appropriate for the third person perspective we went back and returned to to what we had done and uh and and really tried to to get that to work in third person instead which really was the right thing to do yeah there's something really interesting about that that that you maybe this is something that you found along the way but the thing that immediately jumps out to me as to why the reason for that might be is when you're looking at a top -down game you're coming up with solutions that fit within the screen

space right but even hell divers 2 like if i think about videos from hell divers 2 you know all of those amazing videos that came out from players like when it launched and everyone was discovering all this crazy shit that was going on there's hardly ever a video where someone's like engaging folks 200 meters away and that's like they're posting that on the internet right it's all of the proximity stuff that if you took the camera in that hell divers 2 video and you made it top down they would all be in that screen space right of top down so it's interesting by going back to those mechanics and tools

that utilized in a top -down sense you're you're kind of bringing the design of a third person game which is usually fought and at range you know at least shooters right you're bringing it into a much more closer proximity intimate um shooter that's led to this like controlled chaos that we see yeah exactly and uh and i think that just came out of necessity and and sort of the way that the game evolved like we pushed combat distances in quite a bit from that from those like that original like two -year mark yeah that was a contest thing that you were doing trying to bring in that proximity it was an iterative

thing i think yeah like your combat distances originally were like maybe 300 meters uh and then it was 275 and then 250 and then 125 or something like that it's like kept closer and closer and closer until it like this actually feels good yeah great but you know the the one of the biggest laws in that early period of hell diverse is that we were we stopped iterating in the same way as we did during hell there is one so one thing one thing that happened is that to be able to make hell diverse we took the gauntlet team and the hell diverse team and we smushed them together and if you remember i

said that the gauntlet team was basically its own studio and the hell diverse team was its own studio do it's merging two cultures that made games in a very different way and trying to get them to work in unison in in one unified way and the same the problem as well is that both teams have grown individually to become 17 man teams at 18 man teams and running a game development team of less i normally say this like if you if you can still make a reservation at the restaurant and fit the entire team it's manageable yeah scope size wise yeah but as soon as we combined the hell divers and the gauntlet

team we were no longer able to do so and we failed to realize the complexities of having that many developers on the game at the same time we had also forgone the prototyping phase of making a game because we knew what hell there was was we already made hell there's one and this was just going to be a third person version of that to some degree so we thought we could jump straight into production i mean the pre -production that we had was just establishing you know art style and sort of what what is the lore what are the developments since the last game so it's never about you know the technical

challenges that we need to overcome or actually even playing the game and is it fun in third person because we were so confident that it would be and this is something that that bit us business in the in the behind or you know years on years because we skipped that kind of crucial gate of ensuring that with a smaller team the game is fun um we constantly were in production and prototyping at the same time trying to you know distill what made hell divers too too special in a third person environment while producing the final assets for the game.

I don't know how many times we remade both the Helldiver and the main antagonist, so the Bug Warrior, due to this decision.

Just constant iteration, trying to figure that out.

Yeah, we were always one or two milestones behind it felt like throughout eight years of development.

And not only that, like the original scope of Held Iris was supposed to be, you know, two and a half years, two years or something like that.

Yeah. But as soon as it became clear, like we're not going to be able to make this, we added another year of development.

so we were i don't think at any period during hell diverse development we were further than 18 months out from launch right yeah right and that for i mean for all the developers listening it's easy to see like okay so you're basically in closing mentality at that point that's all i was just thinking too constantly closing out a game for like six years is crazy crazy yeah no it's it's not great because it's really hard yeah and especially since the game was wasn't delivering so we had to like we're constantly closing the game and at the same time we're prototyping it yeah it's a crazy thing because like

if you had it like obviously in hindsight right or something if or in some magical land where this is even possible right if you just stopped and said we're restarting you know like let's just the game's gonna ship three years from now whatever let's start again go back to basics or whatever then you can get out of that closing mentality and maybe you close it out in three years but by staying in the closing mentality you're like tripping over yourselves at the end like trying to do things you're working actually slow almost you know perpetuating the possibility of actually extending the time

further and further which it sounds like is what happened right yeah absolutely and and i think the this came from us not having the cred or the the the gravitas to be able to say hey can't we s post development and then let's get it right because we were constantly worried that if we did we would admit failure and in that case and it would be an easy decision to stop production of the game yeah when we're new development like that fear of getting a project canceled or stopped is the same as a death sentence for the studio and i think it's something that publishers have a tendency to not or bigger

studios have a tendency to forget that uh for them it's like well we stopped this project but i mean the studio will just do fine they will find another project or do something else but most of the time the you puts invested so much into developing the game and you haven't had you don't have the time to focus on ensuring that you have a backup plan everything at the studio when you're getting started and trying to make it is about ensuring that the game comes as successful as possible and if you're not i think you're focusing on the wrong things like if i were out trying you know to set up a backup

plan to make another game in case this hell diaries were to fail halfway way through development i'm not spending my time developing the game yeah it can become a self -fulfilling prophecy it's always it's such a hard thing because again i think it's worth you've obviously got your phenomenal ceo shams georgiani now but like during this whole time right you're a ceo and game director of this thing yeah yeah yeah absolutely you know and we're in this situation especially for a lot of indie studio heads where that's the case you know and especially even working at scales that you're working at at this point

in time that's such a hard decision to make because like when do you step when do you stop working in the business and on the game and start working on the business you know uh in in these moments yeah yeah no i think i mean during those kind of like the entrepreneur days or the the building of a studio days you have to just commit it you have to take you have to recognize that the games industry as with all other entertainment industries are super risky and if you don't put all your time into the game or whatever you're making it's unlikely that you'll succeed it's it is unlikely that you'll

succeed even when you do that but spending additional time or resources on anything but making the best game possible is becomes as you said a self -fulfilling prophecy yeah i want to ask a question that i think a lot of people wouldn't usually get insight into and i'm sure you can only talk about it to a particular degree but you there are titles that you know are scoped out to take what was your initial time frame for the title was it two two and a half years you said two and a half years Okay.

But then you end up spending 7 years, 11 months and 26 days on it, right?

Tell me about those conversations with PlayStation.

How does this, what's the, what does this look like functionally?

How can you help other developers understand that, you know, say they're working with a publisher and obviously, you know, PlayStation is an incredible publisher and supporter of game developers, like you've just said, for this exact reason.

you know like giving developers the resources that they need whether it be first party studios like last of us or folks like yourself i'm sorry naughty dog working on something like the last of us or whatever whether it be folks like yourself working you know on a smaller scale on helldivers 2 tell me about those times when you went back to them and what was involved in actually getting this project extended for so long you know and i'm sure i'm sure you probably some of those conversations reached the point where you were you know just a just a hair away from having them sort of swing the accent

right absolutely several times um there were always like these voices of like what what are these guys and girls doing over here what are these crazy swedes doing with our money yeah yeah but but i think one of the things that we always have done as a studio is is that we always try to come in under budget, be a very affordable game to make throughout our history.

Because when you start looking at the spreadsheet of budget, and you go like, well, this game, it doesn't cost a ton.

So therefore, saving that amount of money is not going to help whatever situation you're in.

yeah and it's not like they're choosing between you know to invoke them again like naughty dogs next game in your game right yeah exactly yeah it's like the it doesn't even come close but i think at its heart it is the personal connections that we made with the people that made the decisions and sort of their willingness to take a gamble on this game and sort of the transparency, openness the desire, the passion that we were able to clearly articulate the antibody that made them sort of believe in us as people maybe a little bit more than the game itself and it's like it's also the seniority of the people

that we were working with that they understood like well we are an in the studio that now tries to go for like double slash triple a and that transitional period is gonna cost something it's gonna be an investment into the future and maybe it will pay off maybe it doesn't but it's still not enough money i mean it's it's it's enough money to to be to be able to take that sort of risk it's gambling money yeah yeah and the bet the size of the bed wasn't enough to get them to walk away from the table right yeah uh but uh and and the way that we navigated is just by we're by just having somebody over

the other side of the fence over at playstation that helped us navigate it like we had no idea when to pitch what when to do what how to sort of sell it and how to get an extension once more but the the production people and the the business people over at playstation they sort of walked us through it and I think it's such a favorable thing to do instead of getting cancelled because of a gotcha because we didn't submit a request for additional funds at the right time for that big meeting that the top executives or PlayStation had.

They were able to navigate that together with us and we provided materials made all of the reasoning reasoning but then it came down to them to actually you know time it right bring it up in the right the right angle uh to to get it approved the sandwich between their big success stories for the quarter yeah exactly our head needs a couple more million bucks yeah don't worry because we also made this much yeah okay so let's um let's talk about because i'm keen to dive into some obviously you've had a bunch of challenges with a ton of fantastic lessons that we can we can extract out for our listeners

here but i i want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the big victories on the project as well like it's a huge project as you said a very ambitious thing you're a small indie team that's making the leap into double triple a um and had immense success doing so but even the fidelity of the game like you were saying um you know uh the the visual fidelity was something the playstation you know initially talking about like what could what could we do with this license you know can it reach a new market if we increase the fidelity of you know the visuals that arrowhead can do and i

mean you delivered on it as well so i'm sure whether it's visuals whether it's design do you remember some big moments like some watershed moments during development that were like big success stories for you that sort of you know like rallied the the super earth soldiers you know I think the one that everybody at the studio remembers is it was early still and we were struggling a little bit with you know we were as I said like in prototyping and in production at the same time yeah and then it was part of one of those like the game is coming to a close but we're not ready at all and I can't remember how

it came about but Shuei Yoshida -san was coming over to the studio because he was like what is going on over there and we really needed to put together a build that succinctly presented what Helldivers in in a third -person perspective was.

And Yoshida -san is an interesting person, and I think almost like a kindred spirit.

Every time we sent a deck to him, he was like, send me a build so I can try playing the game instead.

Oh man, that's so Shu, yeah.

Yeah, he's one of a kind in the games industry to some degree, especially given his seniority and his sort of level.

He just wants to play games and he wants to have fun playing games.

So he was traveling over to Stockholm to just meet us, talk about the game, but also primarily play the game.

and i think that moment where instead of caring about what we were supposed to deliver according to a milestone agreement we had the singular goal of let's ensure that the game plays as well as we know that it can occasionally let's get that let's increase the probability of that happening when she gets her and place the game together with us so the the the singular goal that had a purpose a meaning rather than you know a couple of lines written in a contract that was that became like a rallying cry or a rallying point for the studio uh and i think that that was one of the moments where where we

were able to level up like the the visuals of the game the gameplay in general came together um the sort of the world generation everything before that was a little bit you we janky broke and it was crashing and was doing all kinds of things but because we knew sort of how hard shoe can be because he just wants to play a really really good game yeah he was really honest with his feedback exactly we presented him with like a build that was we all work it's it's a combination of you know wanting to do right by the money that they playstation invested but also not wanting to get scolded in front

of everybody from sugar who's who's a legend right like we yeah i grew up i i knew who shoe was before i properly got into the games industry of him being like this titan yeah so so we produced this build and it was actually a pretty pretty pretty great experience and people to this day talk about the shoe build the the title of that build was shoe shoe build shoe build that's awesome and i assume he he liked it he was happy with what was going on over there he was uh absolutely um i mean he of course he had had feedback but it wasn't you know like the horror stories of you know developers standing

there with a hat in hand and going like oh yeah sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry yeah yeah he is like yeah it's it's a diamond in the rough yeah great um yeah it was a a special feeling at the studio at that time and we're that big i think we're like 40 50 maybe somewhere around those lines you're saying you're a couple years in at this point in time yeah i think it was three years in two to two two three years in yeah so let's talk about maybe we can zoom out because you know seven years 11 months and 26 days i'm getting that right aren't i yeah yeah okay so let's because it's it's almost there

are game developers out there except for the caves of card devs who spent 17 years making their game but like there are game developers out there who won't even know what that looks like and we've spoken a little bit about it being in this closing period but can we maybe zoom out and can you give everyone kind of like a bird's eye view overview of like that time and how it's sort of broken up or how you would define the different sort of areas of development like because you scaled from you know what like these jamming those two teams together have been like almost 40 people up to how many were you

when you shipped uh 130 or 120 yeah which is like a huge achievement in and of itself like logistically and organizationally for a company to do that so yeah can you give us like an overview of like you know just that sort of those seven years 11 months like to get people's heads around what it kind of looked like could you put it into different eras or or was it just kind of like we we worked for two and a half years and then the last six months just went for the next five years yeah it's more towards the latter actually yeah more people yeah no but so the way that i like to think about is like

imagine the time difference between when you were 10 years old and when you turned 18.

yeah working on one thing day in day out wanting to make it big and putting everything that you have in that yeah i've we've as a studio had a lot of issues not only from like people at the studio because it's a strange relationship when you own a business and when you're the founders and you really you've made something successful so the studio had value before but especially for the founders we were sort of shamed together with the hell divers people at the studio could of course leave get a new job somewhere else if they didn't care for working on a game that long but we as the founders we

had a really hard time i mean we couldn't do that in that case we would be abandoning sort of legacy that we're trying to build yeah exactly so the responsibility everyone there exactly so i found i fondly i would say jokingly but remember myself waking up you know lying in bed just staring at the ceiling thinking like is this it feels like i'm in prison uh from from developing this game because there's no we've we're so far into development development that i can't remember the beginning and i can't see an end to it either it felt felt it feels perpetual yeah even on a two -year project that kind

of valley of death as i call it you know in between right before your alpha starts coming together you know you've got your high level concept and you're and you're waiting for it to all sort of coalesce and show you that this mad idea that you have is going to work out that even exists in a two -year project right but like i I can't even imagine being two years into that, just in the valley of death continuously, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's, I mean, there were phases to Helldivers, absolutely.

Like it was the optimistic settler days where we were breaking new ground for the first two years or first one and a half years.

And after that, it was, you know, the production slog.

log or is just about building them building building building and then after some time it was like like it's almost as if you've ever had the fee if you've ever been lost like in you know on a hike and going like where where even are we and it's that feeling of like i i i really can't find my way back yeah and it's like wandering around this sort of like you start self second second guessing yourself you can't see uh what kind of game you're making uh like six years in like it's it's impossible uh you don't know if any of the decisions that you've made are the right ones um and you you start getting

to the point where when you look at the game you can't tell like the things that people would tell you immediately like these are the great things about this game this game you don't even know that they exist they're just there you lived with them so long yeah you've lost perspective yeah completely lost perspective um and then towards the end like when things are actually coming together uh and you're actually going going through the finalization phases for real you you're filled with so much self -doubt not only as as people but as an organization that anything will ever come out of this i i

think morale at the studio was sort of at its absolute lowest the 7th of february 2024 24 and then on the eighth we released the game to massive success it's like the the spirit on the day before launch was not that one of excitement and like i wonder how you know that sort of bust that you have when you release a game it was one of like almost relief that we're finally getting let go your prison term was up right exactly yeah but you know you must have had i remember talking to maria right um your cpo about um the how much the testers love the game right like playstation's testers talking to

her about like this is the best game i've ever tested like i'm i mean i'm obsessed with this game right there must have been some some kind of signs that you were onto something always but you've lost perspective to the degree where you don't trust anybody like you don't believe it yeah yeah they're like oh they're saying that to kind of make us get to the end or you know being kind or you know they could see it's kind of like that i mean funnily the uh there's a meme floating floating around in the hell leverage community of like fighting on the bug front is, you know, throwing grenades and being

your Rico in certain groupers.

Fighting on the bot front is like being this traumatized Vietnam soldier.

And it's that kind of like, ironically, that kind of meme is exactly the feeling towards the back end of development.

And of course, like we had new developers coming in.

but unfortunately they quickly got sucked into like the the aura at the studio of like we are we're really going we're burning the midnight oil it's like the it's the bottom of the barrel kind of like just picking crumbs of energy up to to get us through to the next day to the next whatever whatever it might be.

How do you, in those moments as a leader, Johan, like you said, right, you need to show up every day because all of these people depend on you.

Adam Orth interviewed John Johannes, game director on Hi -Fi Rush.

And he spoke about, you know, stepping onto the project and, you know, he wasn't a founder at the studio, but, you know, every day getting up and like going, almost feeling like you didn't want to go into the studio, even though you had this fantastic opportunity because of the weight of the responsibility and everything right so as a leader you're showing up as a founder you can't leave how did you and you're talking about the morale of new people coming in what do you do as a leader in that point in time do you were you conscious of the like people looking to you for the morale you know and what to

do what how to feel about the project how do you have resilience as a leader in these in these moments where you're kind of in that prison and you've still got to lead this team and there are new people onboarding onto the team do you remember being in a in a space where you're able to consciously do that or do you kind of just put your put your shoes on and go to work every day and I mean some of the days I couldn't go to work because I was just you know frozen in panic anxiety staring at the ceiling but I think it's the one of the things that's special about Arrowhead is is sort of the honesty

and we're in it together like we go down with a boat uh sort of attitude within the studio like people we really care about making a game that other people will enjoy and i think it's that kind of like even though the going was was tough we never sort of lost track of creating a an enjoyable game experience for other people and that was that was what pushed us through like the toughest days was the collective sort of commitment to creating something wonderful something something that players hadn't played played before.

And... I wouldn't say that it's to get approval of others, but it's kind of like, this is our moment, and we're in it together, no matter what happens.

I think it became so clear after launch. Like I was talking to...

I mean, we had so many server issues after launch and uh i was sitting up one night on discord with uh our back -end lead tim and we our server capacity i mean there were 800 900 000 people trying to get in but our servers could only hack like was 150 000 originally but at that point we had managed to increase server capacity and and like optimize the back end so that maybe 400 000 were able to get in and tim was sitting there and and trying convincing me that we should go for broke and try to get a few more in because his perspective was that 50 people are still 50 people like if we could get

100 people more in it would be the entire size of the studio more people that could get in and it individuals that would be able to get into the game and most of the time I'm in that position saying like well we have to do this because think of the gamers at the end like sure this is us going to the office working on this game but in the end think about like the joy that we'll be able to spread people like dads that are going to be able to play with their daughter or son um friend groups that are going to be able to enjoy this together and forge stronger bonds of friendship and for for me to be

in that situation after launch where he was telling me that no we have to get more people in was such a like it's it's a testament to sort of the uh the character of the people at arrowhead of how how much they care and we care as uh of of the people playing our game hmm um well i think it ties into something and it's it's a wonderful answer and i think it ties into something that i've seen with arrowhead and even helldivers too right and they dovetail into each other perfectly which is you have a very very well articulated vision for your studio and for the game and it's like you know even down

to your who you make games for like this definition of connoisseurs and what that means for you you know and like even your studio mantra is like a game for everybody is a game for no one um the the way in which you johan talk about co -op games and the importance even the conversations we've had about you using the metric of how much people are laughing in playtests playing together as opposed to like like whether they're actually completing the levels and stuff like that or how many times they've died from friendly fire, etc. And then it floods its way into Helldivers 2, like with the very, very

sincere and easily understandable and grokkable razors and pillars that you have for that game as well.

And so I can understand how this team of 140 people or 100 people at the height of production, right, like are in this in the death valley marching along day after day with almost no sign of the end but there's still there's that north star not only for the studio and how they should act but for what the game is at its heart so when you say no no the studios you know we're here for the game and for the players then they can fall back on okay well what is the game well we know that too and they can march through those woods alone it sounds like you know that's the answer to the the question that you're

sort of giving here right is like would you say that would you agree that it's these those those principles sort of helped steer people and how they act and how they see things every day yeah mostly yes i mean compassion when it comes to making video games is is always at its heart uh the the toughest times what what really helped us through this this long long long journey of making L divers is the playtests where we were laughing so hard that we couldn't believe what we were playing.

Those moments they fueled another week of development or two weeks of development, and they happen quite frequently, and I think one of the strengths is that over over time they became more and more and more and more frequent um and it made it a little bit easier to continue developing the game Wireless on the flip side the longer development goes on for the harder it is to continue developing the game so they sort of cancelled each other out where it's like we we got into a little bit of a slump initially and then the game started getting getting more and more fun but we it was we were always

a little bit below sort of you know going to work having a great time developing video games we're always on the like oh we are we're just behind a little bit yeah and and to to uh to reference back to the previous conversation about yes you know pausing development and getting everything right that would have been a sensible so that the morale would be on a net positive, that would really have helped, because at that point the development would have been fine, even for such a long time, because the game was consistently getting more and more and more fun.

And we've had so many playtests.

I have so many memories of the various stages of development of the game, being in one format or another, another you know when we first implemented vehicles the first time we were able to play against the illuminate the first time we were able to play against the automaton and and even like the you know it's you go from feature to feature and then you get excited by whatever that is so i remember the first time i saw uh one of our engineers having implemented you know the crash mechanics for the automaton drop ships you know it was such a cool moment so we everybody was longing to you know get

into a game and just blow one of those up as it came flying in with with new with reinforcements hell yeah it's it's it's those moments and i think for a lot of people at the studio like that kind of joy of just playing the game is uh was the was the fundamental element to uh to push push forward a little bit more so i'm conscious of time here um in this episode i could honestly we can't keep on talking forever i know right like we could just go and go and i mean you and i have had outside of these podcasts we have had hours and hours of conversations about the game and your development i enjoy

them immensely um but there is i think on the sort of now that this sort of podcast episode has sort of taken you know there's there's a theme that's been set up here really which is like the the development of hell divers and the resilience of making it through and the trials and tribulations but i just want to spend a little bit of time closing out the episode talking about how that looks post -launch right because especially on the back of what you just said you these developers are sitting there day to day working on this stuff and then one thing comes in and it lightens up your day and keeps

you moving now notoriously as you just mentioned health hivers 2 had a huge launch that obviously had some issues because of the huge launch as well right so tell me about that that whiplash that you got from being thinking that you know the like you say the morale being at rock bottom a few days before launch then this astronomical success and i'm sure even blew sony's mind um and then how you as a team sort of rallied around after such a long stretch seven seven years 11 months 26 days right we'll say it again for the people up in the rafters And now you're actually, in a way, only just getting

started into this whole new segment of the game and its development.

So talk to me a little bit about how that morale shifted and how the players coming in sort of helped fuel you and keep the team moving forward. I think it's one of the things that I believe firmly when it comes to game design and making games is that game experiences are great because of the contrast that you have moment to moment like going from we are and I'm not talking about game development here but actually actually game experience yeah yeah when in Elden Ring or Dark Souls when you're going into a boss fight you managed to knock it down to half health you get hit you're down now you are down

to like you know the last sliver like one hp and you're like i'm gonna i'm gonna fail this miserably you managed to use you know some some the flask or whatever to to get back and then you get knocked back knock back knock back and it's like i'm actually gonna lose this it went really well in the beginning ending now it's going horribly and then you finally beat the boss through some kind of magic it's that kind of narrative and that really the interesting part is like the Delta between the highs and the lows the bigger they are the more but more memorable the experience is gonna be yeah and I

think there is no strong there's no starker difference than between the seventh and 8th of february 2024 in studio morale so team was i mean we were relieved that we were finally done with the game and that it was going to ship the indications that we had was you know forecasts based on previous data from other comparable titles and we didn't have any comparable titles so the best thing that we could get was some kind of like you know a rough number of like maybe we'll sell a couple of million units still good for for a game but but nowhere near the success that we had and we knew server capacity

like ccu wise we could handle 150 000 people and the back -end team were so wise as to set up on one monitor in the office or one tv in the office we had the tracking of how many players were playing the game or were actually logged in And on the other one, we had live streams from people actually trying out the game for the first time.

And the graph of people playing, we originally thought it was bugged because it just kept going up at such an amazing rate.

You know, at first it was like 10 ,000, 15 ,000, 20, 30, 50, 90, 120, 200.

hundred and it's like and he just kept going and it's like what is happening like and i everybody was just there in disbelief it's like is this bugged is there something wrong with this and it's like no this these are actual numbers and and just the fact that we were able to see it in real time and then eventually it hit like i mean the servers were meant to handle 150 000 i think around 240 000 the player count just dropped like a rock and it's like and we had you know it was a release party so we had you know we had hired a band to play at the office like snacks and everything like that and as

soon as the player numbers they just plummeted to zero it's like this is not good yeah and we immediately asked like it was this moment of like you know five minutes of disbelief of like what is this and then you know it started oscillating bumping jumping this number and it's like the servers are actually crashing how many people can play and you know somebody on the other screen were watching like record live streams as soon as you're in the game it's fine but then we started looking at you know reddit or whatnot and people were like I can't get in and you know all the memes of like let me in i

want to play helldivers and it's like oh shit we gotta do something uh it's it was uh it was an interesting and hectic time of like everybody's scuttling off to their computers nobody was everybody forgot to party to celebrate release and then we had this sort of ecstatic a combination of ecstatic enthusiasm of how well we were doing coupled with how could we have been so wrong in estimating how well -liked this game would be yeah um do you have any idea about that do you have any idea why it blew up to the degree that it blew up you know sometimes this happens in you can point to like it getting

picked up by streamers in some particular way or or like some, you know, like, I don't know, the game's just fucking rules or something like that.

Do you have any idea why it blew up to such a multiple of what you expected?

I think it's the same mechanism as to why Valheim blew up.

Yeah. I think it's partially released at the right time.

Like Valheim came out just when people needed to do things at the height of the pandemic.

Build a Viking village together.

and you know be in this fantastical land and escape reality hell divers i think had that element of creating unity in the community there were no toxicity uh necessarily i mean of course there's some but mostly the hell divers community is super nice everybody's fighting on the same team everybody's fighting for a common goal and we set our differences aside for the common goal I really think that that time period, and it still goes on to this day, people need more unity than ever.

I think Helldivers really resonate with that.

Like you can leave the real world behind and fight for this totalitarian state.

Even though that's not great.

yeah but but the sense of camaraderie within the community is is real like and i i really think that resonated so well with the community like we are all in this together that coupled as well with you know it's it's a hell divers is a gamer's game it doesn't try to be pretentious about what it does it doesn't try to like you know hand you moral cookies or do anything like that it's just play the game shoot some bugs have fun there's depth there's there's there's lots of that and there's a true interaction between the people that are playing and we give the players the responsibility of behaving

in the game or not say the guardrails the safety safety rails are it's called the safety guardrails moved yeah yeah and and i really think that just resonates with players because yeah they they're treated like adults and and people that can be responsible for their own game experience so i think it's it is those two things like the unity of the community and then uh the game not trying to do anything but spread joy yeah it really is one of those games that just like lights up the room when you're playing it together on the couch or you know um you can hear your headset blowing up when you're

playing online so it's something truly phenomenal uh to close this out do you have any memories from the community things happening you know like the classic with game developers is folks playing your game in a way that you never expected or something do you have any like stories from the community in those early days or you know when people started getting into the game that kind of blew you and the team away or that you personal faves of yours i mean there's two moments two minutes two minutes to mention actually like i mean one of the one of the i I mean, we have a channel that's called Helldivers

Too Hype on Slack where people just drop things.

That channel was filled to the brim.

Like it was a post every fifth minute of somebody doing something crazy in Helldivers.

Or something crazy happening in Helldivers where it's like absolute cinema.

cinema um and that's but but i think really it's a way of looking at game development uh where we just put systems together most of the time i mean we do ensure that there's an interaction between those systems but we we try to be as agnostic to the outcome as possible we don't want to design a puzzle that players have to solve figure out what the designer wanted instead we try to just build systems that will interact naturally basically a simulator and then we see the results and the variety of play that comes from that and i think that's one of the pivotal things about health services that you

can play it and and i'm still surprised playing hell divers and i played i played again for like six seven thousand hours yeah uh and when i get into a game something new happens i mean it it might just be a variation of what happened before but there's the the systems interact in such a way to create a multitude of outcomes that are unexpected.

And it's one of the reasons why Helldivers is as different to a lot of the previous horde shooters or PvE games that have come out.

They are they have a tendency to be a little bit more formulaic in you have to do this and then you have to do this while as hell divers is just this controlled slash uncontrolled chaos where where things just emerge moments emerge and people can try doing really really ridiculously cool things or fail doing so and that turned then it turns into into hilarious situations and you know all of this is sort of based on our days like the the og old school crew at arrowhead our days are our common collective experiences of playing dungeon dragons where everybody imagines like a session of dungeon dragons

being you know game of thrones or lord of the rings but it really turns into monty python the quest for the holy grail most of the time yeah the path from dnd the monty python is very sure yeah no exactly and it's like and really that's that's their entire design philosophy even though it needs to be broken down or how they actually achieve those experiences but really one thing that we try to build is that we try to build the game into becoming you know the replacement for the game master in a dnd session and then ironically we have a game master on top of that but but yeah it's it's allowing

people the freedom to do what want them and then to surprise themselves i love it i love it well i think you've been you know i don't know if you need me to tell you you've been very successful in achieving that so congratulations on all of your success johan um commercially critically culturally with this phenomenal title uh and of course congratulations on your 2025 dice award for action game of the year very important oh thank you so much it was it was a big one especially given that dinner like it was one of the low points low points in my career or or maybe high high points as well but it

feels good to come back eight years nine even nine years maybe even later and and actually get that get that in the bag i'm happy for you and look i think it's it's really important as well for folks to hear that you're not in this prison anymore of your of your own making that you are are on sabbatical so thanks for chatting to us what have you been up to on your sabbatical am i looking at miniature paints behind you absolutely so the buying some original warhammer art painting miniatures it's like uh just re collecting myself after this uh this sort of of marathon it's it's a marathon run at sprint

speed which is almost universally advised against in every sport it's like save your energy you know so you know what i've been painting warhammer miniatures i've been playing video games i've been hanging out with friends playing video games board games and whatnot same person and trying to figure out who I who I were before we got into this crazy ride so I can sort of get the same kind of energy excitement to start the next thing that I was doing yeah I mean very wise I just want to make video games and I want to spread that joy of playing video games together with other people well we want

you to make video games too johan so we fully support your painting of your sabbatical to paints and miniatures and hang out with your friends uh thanks for joining us tonight and also of course uh at the dice summit in las vegas earlier in the year i much appreciate chatting to you as always my friend thank you so much no it's been great uh as we said several times we could probably talk for for another four hours well we'll see what the people say maybe that maybe they'll want more of it yeah maybe and it feels like we have scratched the surface that's that's the craziest thing like there's

so many more moments of like you know game development philosophy like production there's there's so much to unpack then again we've already spoken to maria as well so we've covered some of that side too so areas we could have died dive into it dove into a bunch but i think as well It's worth telling folks, um, Johan, I, I worked with Johan for, uh, quite a bit of time.

Um, on his, obviously he did the bulk of the work.

I was just there going, yes, great.

Um, but on his GDC talk that just went down and it's phenomenal.

I was there at GDC.

I saw it, um, capturing lightning in a bottle.

Uh, so I'm sure it'll hit the GDC vault or be online.

I'm on YouTube at some point in time in the future.

Uh, perhaps when this episode is out, who knows?

Um, so I I highly, highly recommend catching that if you want to dive in, if you want to get more into the design and philosophy behind Helldivers and sort of how it came about and a lot of the pillars of the game and the razors that you used and some really concrete examples there.

It's a phenomenal talk you have. Thank you.

And, yeah, it's a pleasure being on.

Thank you so much, Trent.

Of course, man. man.

Happy to have you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for joining us for The Game Maker's Notebook.

For more information on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, our podcasts and our other initiatives, please visit www .interactive .org.

[The Evolution of Arrowhead: From Magicka to Helldivers 2]-[Creating the Super Earth of Helldivers 2 with Arrowhead's Johan Pilestedt]

📋 Summary

The Origins of Arrowhead Game Studios

The Magicka Breakthrough

The "Death Valley" of Development

The Helldivers 2 Phenomenon

Leading Through Resilience

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript