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Foreign.
[Music]
Our first video game was a very ugly orange box that we plugged into our old TV. We played it literally until the whole thing blew up. It was a game of ping pong basically, so a very simple gameplay, super boring actually if you look at it today, but then it was amazing because it was something completely new. So I spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours to be better, to meet my brother, but also because I was just fascinated by gameplay.
[Music]
Games have always been super important to me and very attractive. It's a form of being, socializing, and competing. I played Monopoly. I loved Monopoly. It's a beautiful context and it's really competitive, and yet you're building things. And building things is another thing, besides competing, that has been very important for me. So that was captured perfectly in Monopoly.
[Music]
Song.
You also, this is a fantastic machine. This is the first programmable Texas Instrument 57. I made my first game on this one back in '78, '79. It was super limited. You have to be really, really lean and mean when you were programming in order to get the game into this small machine. It took too many hours and took attention from my school work, but it was worth it.
My father was a great inspiration for me. He was born and raised very high up north, well above the Arctic Circle. For generations there were miners, but my father was passionate about music. So during World War II, he moved as a 17-year-old from the Arctic Circle to Stockholm to go to the Royal Academy for music. And that inspired me because that passion and really the drive to do things that are close to your heart has been an inspiration for me throughout my life. Unfortunately, my dad passed away when I was only 24 years old, so that was really a blow for me. And my brother also passed away way too early when he was 49 years old. So that taught me to value the moments when you can have your inspirational people around you.
[Music]
Many, many years ago, I had the opportunity to learn about the internet, to be blown away by the opportunities that I saw and that we discussed, me and my friends. And when I was in this period of my life, I was so passionate about having the opportunities to look at building my own company. I learned so much from running my first venture, mine that was listed back in the heydays at the millennium shift. Things that I've brought into what I do today and how we operate. And one of the things was that team play is so key and how you take decisions. We were far too monolithic. I took too many decisions myself, which was obviously not the right thing to do because it was inside out, it was not interpersonal built. And I think that is a key learning. And to build what I call the modern company is the opposite actually. So use the maximum potential of the team and the teams that are in a context such as a company to take better decisions, to learn more from each other. And again, the interpersonal aspects is key for success.
[Music]
Thank you.
I had the opportunity to build the best game ever called OnGolf. It was to have a golf game perfectly represented on the desktop, both how you actually made the hits. We had thousands of mathematical parameters and formulas to represent a 3D actual physical complex thing on the desktop. It was amazing and was graphically groundbreaking. Well, I will describe OnGolf as the best game ever that unfortunately didn't work out. It was my first rodeo into the industry. That's when I started working with Jurgen, and we really had something great going there, but unfortunately we didn't have the runway to make it work. It was a very complex game. Commercially it flopped completely. It led me to really understand and evaluate risk and not be only driving your own conviction into that it necessarily will be a commercial success. So I got a different relationship to commercial risks basically. Passion will never make it on its own. You have to pair that passion, because that is a good thing, with also being humble about the other aspects of, in this case, this fantastic game. It needs to be commercially applicable or valid. We have applied that into building games, and I think many other much better game makers than I am and will be have been really good at this. So in the early years of what's the difference, Jurgen was really very much hands off as he had promised. He let us do our own things. We had quite infrequent calls where he gave us very, very sound advice. He would listen to what we planned with our games and really could talk about what our players wanted, as he always was one of the players, but also had a very, very good idea of how games as a business work. With Stillfront, we bring together the beauty of games with the vision of the modern company, which is people-centric and team-centric. The most by far important thing with the business is the people in it. When motivated individuals come also into teams and interact and apply their interpersonal skills, the results are outstanding.
