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I guess one of the key reasons was that I was contacted and asked if I could come and do a talk. When I started out ten years ago the Swedish games industry was almost non-existent, I didn't really know about any developer other than DICE, so I was surprised to find a job.

But down through the years my key inspiration came from being down at a GDC in Australia in 2002 and seeing how united the game developer community seemed to be in that country. They have a lot of things that we, in the Nordic countries, also have - being in a different time zone to American publishers, being small countries, and just having lots of small things to overcome before being on the same terms as everyone else.

To me it's key that you get together, you share success and you share mistakes, and you unite as a development community rather than go after each other as furious competitors.

It's a small world up here, and we don't have that many people to shuffle between the companies. In the long run you import a lot of knowledge from other countries. A week after I started at, what was then Refraction Games, ever since then all meetings and documentation has to be in English.

We do have lots of people from abroad, but in all if you want to stay in Sweden but work in a different company to try something new, then it's a small world. People get around - there are game developer pubs where people get together and talk about stuff they do, and to be honest there's no real reason to be hostile. We're all trying to do the same thing, and what always strikes me when I meet other developers is just how humble and accessible everybody is.

We definitely have a strong gaming community, and I think on the PC side we were - if not on the forefront - definitely up there. The Swedish government had a good initiative with bringing computers into all homes, via subsidised prices on rental. Having good broadband connections as well has helped the community to grow strong, and especially on the Battlefield franchise we have a strong community.

I was fortunate - I had ten years of working experience in totally different areas, and decided to use my drawing skills to get into the games industry. I came in with about one year of development left on a game called Codename Eagle, which was the predecessor to Battlefield.

I guess the vision when the company was founded was to make a multi-player game where soldiers and vehicles of all different types meet and clash online. You can definitely see that in Codename Eagle - it's not a high-rated product, but we quickly grew a strong community that loved the multi-player, and I think the team's passion was definitely in the multi-player too.

Already when we made that game, and during that first Spring when I came in, we played it a lot and loved it - and definitely saw the potential in it. So in that Spring of 1999 we did an enormous push to create a demo of what we saw as the natural next step - Battlefield 1942. We built a level in the editor from Codename Eagle, and we added Tiger tanks, fighters, B-17 bombers, submarines and battleships... we had everything.

We saw that our community loved it, but we didn't get big recognition for it - mainly because the single-player game definitely wasn't as strong. And I guess even online gaming wasn't that big at that time.

Yes, and even though the initiative from the start was to focus on the multi-player, we had a publisher that brought us back to reality and told us that we probably wouldn't be able to sell it without a single-player component.

I guess the team didn't have the same passion for the single-player - it was extremely ambitious, and with our knowledge... there was a lot of ambition and good thinking put into it, but time, money and experience didn't take the single-player part all the way.

But multi-player was what we played every day, and that one got quite solid - if we were having fun giggling and screaming every day, then we felt most likely other people would to. And we were right - and that stuck with us.

We went in the Spring of 1999 to E3 and showed that Battlefield demo, but people hadn't really seen Codename Eagle at that time so they didn't really know what we were showing. They just saw this demo, and didn't really believe it could be technically achieved. We had to go home and basically put it to one side while we finished Codename Eagle first.

But in early 2000 when we were done, we'd then been bought by DICE, and with more money, more self confidence and more knowledge in the company we started making the engine for Battlefield 1942.

Indeed, and sometimes I have to pinch myself. Here I am looking out over a sunny Stockholm, and we've got probably the loveliest view you can get in the city. From where we were sitting ten years ago, in a tiny, sweaty apartment trying to get our first game together... it's been a long ride.