There’s a spot in Medborgarplatsen, the ‘citizen square’ at the centre of Stockholm, from which you can see the logos of Avalanche, DICE and Paradox all at once. This single office block represents perhaps the greatest concentration of power in triple-A game development, and serves as a reminder of the city’s outsized influence on the industry. Yet Christofer Sundberg, a co-founder of Avalanche and instigator of the open-world movement as director of Just Cause, remembers a far scrappier time. At the turn of the millennium, during the “happy dotcom days”, he became one of the first five employees at Paradox.
“There didn’t seem to be any plan for what we were doing,” he says. “There were new things every day: today we’ll write the pitch for a new strategy game, and tomorrow we’ll write the pitch for a new action game. And that’s what pushed me to start my own company – Iwanted to see if I could do it better. Because the way the company was run, it shouldn’t have been very hard.” Alas, it was. Funding ran out within three months, and without the ability to travel, pitching to publishers became a problem. By late 2002, Sundberg had sold his company to Starbreeze in a deal that quickly went bad. “I put the company out of business the same day my eldest daughter was born,” he says. “So I was broke and a dad on the same day. I felt that I just trusted the wrong people, and they put me in that situation where I almost ended up, with my little daughter and my girlfriend at the time, on the street.”
On one occasion, Sundberg had to choose between buying food or nappies. But soon afterwards, “fuelled by revenge”, he put together the concept for Just Cause, and pitched it to Eidos – whose publishing team loved it, even on paper. “I had willpower to make this happen,” Sundberg says. “But the fact that I was also very lucky is something that I don’t forget. What I learnt is to take nothing for granted. It’s what I live by.”
You must have thought about that a lot, going through the founding phase again with Liquid Swords.
Yeah. It’s a well-funded
