On 26 March 2014, a trailer for a video game appeared on YouTube. The first thing the viewer sees is a closeup of a goat lying on the ground, its tongue out, its eyes open. Behind it is a man on fire, running backwards in slow motion towards a house. Interspersed with these images is footage of the goat being repeatedly run over by a car. In the main shot, the goat, now appearing backwards as well, flies up into the first-floor window of a house, repairing the glass it smashed on its way down. It hurtles through another window and back to an exploding petrol station, where we assume its journey must have started.
This wordless, strangely moving video – a knowing parody of the trailer for a zombie survival game called Dead Island – was for a curious game called Goat Simulator. The game was, unsurprisingly, the first to ever put the player into the hooves of a goat, who must enact as much wanton destruction as possible. It was also the first massive hit to come out of a small city in Sweden by the name of Skövde.
There’s a good chance you have never heard of Skövde. There’s an even better chance you don’t know how to pronounce it (“hwevde”). Historically, it which is nestled between the two largest lakes in the country, Vänern and Vättern, has relied on Volvo for much of its employment. But, for the last 25 years, there has been a shift. Skövde has managed to produce some of the biggest and most talked-about 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, there are almost 1,000 people studying or making a living from video games there – by comparison the entire gaming sector in the UK amounts to 28,500 people. How can Skövde punch so far above its weight?
I am sitting in an office in the university where a revolution took place. At the turn of the century, Skövde implemented something that would separate it from the surrounding cities of a nation already getting a head-start in the gaming world. In the late 1990s Ulf Wilhelmsson wanted to study for a PhD in video games in Sweden. Various universities, he says, told him: “You can’t study computer games, that’s just silly.” He went instead to the University of Copenhagen and had his work funded by the University of Skövde, whom he was working for at the time. In 2001, seeing a lack of students entering the university’s IT programmes, he proposed a video games development qualification. One of the things that made senior staff reluctant was that there were no game companies in Skövde. “I’m quite stubborn,” Wilhelmsson tells me at the university, “and I said: ‘If we build it, they will come.’”
It was difficult at the outset, when the degree began in 2002. “Since we were among the first educational programmes that did this,” says Sanny Syberfeldt, the director of the design programme, “we had no guide or no model, so we have had to make them up as we went along.” The degree is now hugely popular, attracting multiple applicants per seat. “Our aim has never been to help students to fulfil the short-term needs of the games industry,” says Wilhelmsson. “It has always been to change the industry, create something that has not yet been done.”
His colleague Lissa Holloway-Attaway, who wears a pink multicoloured jumper with tigers on it, tackles gaming’s hinterland, asking the students to reflect on how gaming can intersect with subjects such as gender, identity and grief. One project involves them creating the prototype for a game that revolves around a historical environment or object.
Science Park Skövde, another crucial player in the city’s continued nurturing of game developers, is right next door to the university’s gaming department. Outwardly an unremarkable white building, inside it feels light and airy, with colourful chairs and jigsaw pieces dotted on the wall. The team at the Science Park run a three-year programme called Sweden Game Start-Up, which incubates teams looking to turn gaming into a viable career, helping them to find funding for their works-in-progress. One colleague says they “loan out self-confidence”. “The goal is for them to exit with a sustainable company that will hopefully live on after they leave the programme,” 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 involves cinnamon buns – I meet around 30 of the developers in the incubation programme. They range in age from 22 to 45 and are incredibly warm and articulate. With a great deal of pride they show me their games in a big open room. There’s Home Sweet Gnome, in which you are a gnome who runs a bed and breakfast for creatures from folklore; horror golf game Club House on Haunted Hill; and Muri: Wild Woods, in which you are a mouse who goes on a cleaning adventure. Some of these games have been funded and released; some are still in development.
It’s invaluable to be here, say the developers, 99% of whom studied at the university. One says that in Stockholm the game companies don’t care about graduates because there are so many of them; in Skövde, a city with 1/20th of its population, everyone knows everyone and scratches one another’s backs. “The size of this city is really to the community’s advantage,” says Louise Perrson, the head of the university’s game-writing programme. “If you come here with the thought of getting into the industry, you also come here knowing – or at least finding out – that you’ll be part of one big community.”
It’s significant that the three game studios that have helped to put Skövde on the map – Iron Gate, Coffee Stain and Stunlock – have all stayed in the city. Josefin Bertsson, a community manager at Iron Gate, says: “Without the incubator, the company most likely would not have existed.” Iron Gate’s premises have a sleek, lavish feel: lots of dark wood, plum-coloured sofas, a huge lighting fixture in the shape of antlers. Various swords are dotted about the place; and there is a large model of Sauron’s eye atop a black Lego tower.
The studio is most well known for making Valheim, a Viking survival game in which players are placed in a kind of purgatory and must attempt to ascend to Valhalla by proving themselves to Odin. Its preview version sold around 5m copies in its first five weeks. It may be Skövde’s most successful game. “I think that when you’re in a town that is this small but you have the amount of game developers that you have,” says Bertsson, “it’s easier to form a kind of game development community than in, say, Stockholm. It’s easier to congratulate your friends on something because they’re right next door.”
Coffee Stain, whom we have to thank for Goat Simulator, work out of an extraordinary space that was once a bank. (Studio manager Robert Lazic calls it a “bank palace”.) Over several floors there are features like a gym, a massage room, a board game room, and a huge wood-panelled meeting room full of fake trees. Lazic was part of the university’s first cohort of students – “at the fumbling beginnings”, as he puts it. The studio is now focusing on Satisfactory, its latest game, which puts players on an alien planet and tasks them with building factories and increasingly complex infrastructure. Success in Skövde breeds success, he says. Satisfactory has sold 5.5m copies.
At Stunlock I meet Ulf Rickard Frisegård, the company’s CEO, and Tau Petersson, its PR and event manager. It’s shoes off at the door, as in many Swedish establishments. There are velvet teal curtains and board games in cabinets around the place. Stunlock created V Rising, a game in which the player embodies an awakened vampire and builds a castle for them, defeating bosses and swerving garlic along the way. V Rising sold more than 1m copies in its first week. Frisegård and Petersson were also students at the university and are in no doubt about the unique prestige of the city. When you are pitching yourself to people, “you jump through a lot of hoops telling them you’re from Skövde”, says Frisegård. Industry bigwigs make a beeline for it. Frisegård remembers an extremely powerful games industry figure, who he declines to name visiting their offices to take a look at V Rising: “He had a cab parked outside here all day – one person sitting and waiting for him – and then driving him, what is it, one kilometre to the train station.”
Nationally, Sweden is a towering force in the video games arena. It is the home of multi-billion-pound giants such as Minecraft and Candy Crush. In 2023 the revenue from Swedish game companies was more than £2.5bn. The country was quick to install high-speed internet and it made subsidised computers available to its population – perfect conditions for games design. I arrived, therefore, under the impression that Sweden’s status in the gaming world meant the national government was very supportive of the industry. Marcus Toftedahl, business coach in game development at the Science Park, says: “Weeelll … that is not true.” It’s a sore point. While the municipality of Skövde has been proud and supportive, the national government has not: “Sweden is lacking a national strategy and lacking a national support system for the games industry, even though we’re super-famous for our games all around the world.” This summer the Science Park went from receiving around £240,000 a year to £80,000 a year from the national government. There is a lack of understanding about game development, Toftedahl says, and the government has shifted towards more research-heavy areas such as AI.
Despite these worries Skövde continues to rightly blow its own trumpet about its gaming successes. But one of the priorities for people in the industry is to ensure that its locals know about them. “It’s well known outside Skövde – maybe not as known in Skövde – that we have this huge international industry that is really successful,,” says Theres Sahlström, the chair of the Skövde Municipal Executive Committee. “So we’re trying to bring attention to it.” She’s talking to me as we’re standing by the Walk of Game on the city’s cobbled high street – a newly created series of reminders of Skövde’s achievements in the gaming world.
When people ask Toftedahl if Skövde’s success is replicable in other places, he says that while the short answer is yes the long answer is less encouraging. “The smallness helps,” he says. But even other small Swedish cities haven’t been able to emulate Skövde. On the island of Gotland, for example, there have been university courses on gaming since 2002. But for Gotland, which has almost exactly the same population as Skövde, tourism is the main industry, so the region hasn’t directed as much support towards gaming. You could follow Skövde’s lead – ensure that your town taught video game development at its university; host events where game developers could showcase projects; organise networking events where people felt safe exchanging knowledge – and you would cultivate something special. But lightning simply might not strike twice.
