“If we build it, they will come”: Skovd, the small town that helped Sweden’s video game boom | games

HeyOn March 26, 2014, a trailer for the video game appeared on YouTube. The first thing the viewer sees is a close-up of a goat lying on the ground with its tongue out and its eyes open. Behind him is a man engulfed in fire, running backwards in slow motion towards a house. These images are interspersed with footage showing goats being repeatedly run over by a car. In the main shot, the goat now appears backwards as well, and flies up to the first floor window of a house, repairing the glass it smashed on its way down. It rushes through another window and back to an exploding gas station, where we assume its journey must have begun.

This silent, strangely poignant video — a parody of a trailer for a zombie survival game called Dead Island — was intended for a strange game called Goat Simulator. Unsurprisingly, the game was the first of its kind to put the player in the hooves of a goat, who must carry out as much brutal destruction as possible. It was also the first massive hit to come from a small town in Sweden by the name of Skövde.

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Skövde before. There’s a better chance you don’t know how to pronounce it (“hwevde”). Historically, this city, located between the country’s two largest lakes, Vänern and Väternn, relied on Volvo for most of its business. But over the past 25 years, there has been a shift. Skövde has managed to produce some of the biggest and most popular video games on the planet – not just Goat Simulator but titles like V Rising, Valheim and RV There Yet?.

In a city of 58,000 people, there are nearly 1,000 people who study or make a living from video games there. – In comparison, the entire UK gaming sector employs 28,500 people. How can Skövde punch so much more than its own weight?

I’m sitting in an office at the university where the revolution happened. At the turn of the century, Skövde implemented something that would separate it from the surrounding cities in a country that was already starting out in the gaming world. In the late 1990s, Ulf Wilhelmsson wanted to study for a doctorate in video games in Sweden. He says various universities told him: “You can’t study computer games, that’s just ridiculous.” He went instead to the University of Copenhagen and received funding from Skövde University, where he was working at the time. In 2001, due to the small number of students enrolling in university IT programmes, he proposed a qualification in video game development. One of the things that made the senior staff hesitant was the lack of gaming companies in Shkovd. “I’m very stubborn, and I said: If we build it, they will come,” Wilhelmsson told me at university.

It was difficult at first, when I started studying in 2002. “Since we were among the first educational programs to do it, we didn’t have a guide or model, so we had to make it up as we went,” says Sunny Seberfeldt, director of the design program. This degree is now very popular, attracting many applicants for each seat. “Our goal was never to help students meet the short-term needs of the gaming industry,” Wilhelmsson says. “The goal has always been to change the industry, to create something that hasn’t been done yet.”

His classmate Lisa Holloway Attaway, wearing a multicolored pink jacket with tigers on it, tackles the hinterland of gaming, asking students to think about how gaming intersects with themes like gender, identity, and grief. One project involves creating a prototype of a game around a setting or historical object.

Science Park Skövde, another important player in the city’s ongoing patronage of game developers, is located right next to the university’s games department. On the outside, the building looks plain white, but inside it is bright and airy, with colorful chairs and jigsaw pieces dotted on the wall. The team at the Science Park runs a three-year program called “Sweden Game Start-Up”, which incubates teams looking to turn gaming into a viable career, and helps them find funding for their works-in-progress. They “lend self-confidence,” says a colleague. “The goal is to emerge from a sustainable company that we hope will continue after you leave the program,” says Jennifer Granath, who works in communications at the Science Park.

Over fika — the Swedish term for a coffee and cake break, which in this case includes cinnamon buns — I met with about 30 developers in the incubation program. They range in age from 22 to 45 and are incredibly warm and articulate. With great pride they showed me their toys in a large open room. There’s Home Sweet Gnome, where you play as a gnome who runs a bed and breakfast for creatures from folklore; Club House on Haunted Hill golf horror game; and Muri: Wild Woods, where you play as a mouse who goes on a cleaning adventure. Some of these games have been funded and released. Some of them are still under development.

It’s invaluable to be here, say the developers, 99% of whom studied at university. Someone says that gaming companies in Stockholm don’t care about graduates because there are too many of them; In Skovde, a town with a population of 1/20 of the population, everyone knows each other and scratches each other’s backs. “The size of this city works to the advantage of the community,” says Louise Pearson, head of the university’s games writing programme. “If you come here with the idea of ​​getting into this industry, you also come here knowing — or at least discovering — that you’re going to be part of one big community.”

It is significant that the three game studios that helped put Skövde on the map – Iron Gate, Coffee Stain and Stunlock – have all remained in the city. “Without the incubator, the company probably wouldn’t exist,” says Josephine Bertson, community manager at IronGate. The Iron Gate buildings have a sleek, stately look: lots of dark wood, plum-colored sofas, and huge, horn-shaped lighting fixtures. Various swords are spread around the place. A large model of the Eye of Sauron sits atop a black Lego tower.

The studio is best known for making Valheim, a Viking-themed survival game where players are placed in a kind of purgatory and must attempt to ascend to Valhalla by proving themselves to Odin. The preview version sold about 5 million copies in its first five weeks. It may be Skövde’s most successful game. “I think when you’re in such a small city but you have so many game developers, it’s easier to form a kind of game development community than, say, Stockholm,” Bertson says. “It’s easier to congratulate your friends on something because they’re close to you.”

Coffee Stain, which we have to thank for Goat Simulator, operates in an unusual space that was once a bank. (Studio director Robert Lazic calls it a “bank palace.”) On several floors are features such as a gym, a massage room, a board game room, and a massive wood-paneled conference room filled with fake trees. Lazic was part of the university’s first class of students — “off to rocky starts,” as he put it. The studio is now focusing on Satisfactory, its latest game, which places players on an alien planet and tasks them with building increasingly complex factories and infrastructure. Success in Skovde breeds success, he says. Satisfactory sold 5.5 million copies.

At Stunlock I met Ulf Rikard Fresegaard, CEO of the company, and Tao Petersson, Director of Public Relations and Events. It’s shoes at the door, as is the case in many Swedish establishments. There are teal velvet curtains and board games in cabinets throughout the space. Stunlock created V Rising, a game in which the player embodies an awakened vampire and builds them a castle, defeating bosses and scrounging garlic along the way. V Rising sold over one million copies in its first week. Friesegaard and Peterson were also students at the university and had no doubt about the city’s unique status. When you’re promoting yourself to people, “you’re jumping through a lot of hurdles to tell them you’re from Skovd,” says Vriesegaard. Industry bigwigs are making a beeline for it. “He had a taxi parked outside here all day – someone would sit and wait for him – and then he would drive it, a kilometer from the train station,” recalls Frisegård of a very powerful figure in the games industry, who refused to give his name when he visited their offices to look at V Rising.

On a national level, Sweden is a huge force in the field of video games. It’s home to multi-billion pound giants like Minecraft and Candy Crush. In 2023, Swedish gaming companies had revenues of more than £2.5 billion. The country quickly installed high-speed internet and made powered computers available to its residents – ideal conditions for designing games. Therefore, I arrived under the impression that Sweden’s position in the gaming world meant that the national government was very supportive of the industry. “Well…that’s not true,” says Markus Toftdahl, a business coach in game development at the Science Park. It’s a sensitive point. While the municipality of Skövde was proud and supportive, the national government was not: “Sweden lacks a national strategy and lacks a national support system for the games industry, even though we are famous for our games all over the world.” This summer, the science park went from receiving around £240,000 a year to £80,000 a year from the national government. Toftedal says there is a lack of understanding about game development, and the government has shifted toward more research-intensive areas, such as artificial intelligence.

Despite these concerns, Skövde continues to unleash its successes in the gaming space. But one of the priorities of those in this industry is making sure the locals know about them. “It is known outside Skövde – and perhaps not as well known in Skövde – that we have this huge, really successful international industry,” says Therese Sahlström, Chair of the Skövde Municipal Executive Committee. “So we’re trying to bring attention to it.” She talks to me as we stand next to the Toy Walk on the city’s main cobblestone street — a newly created series of reminders of Skövde’s achievements in the gaming world.

When people ask Toftedal whether Skovd’s success can be replicated elsewhere, he says that while the short answer is yes, the long answer is less encouraging. “Small helps,” he says. But even other small Swedish towns have not been able to emulate Skovde. On the island of Gotland, for example, there have been university courses on gaming since 2002. But for Gotland, which has roughly the same population as Skovde, tourism is the main industry, so the region has not directed the same amount of support towards gaming. You can follow Skövde’s example – make sure your city teaches video game development at its university; Host events where game developers can showcase projects; Organize networking events where people feel safe sharing knowledge – and you’ll develop something special. But lightning simply may not strike twice.