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Published: 1 Nov 2017

We met Jimmy Hådén during International Games Week

This week is called International Games Week and in Mid-Sweden it’s celebrated with an ambitious program at Kulturmagasinet (the culture house in Sundsvall).

One of the highlights this week was the seminar with Jimmy Hådén – a game developer who has worked with Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront. Around 40 people came to listen to Jimmy on Monday night October 30. During one hour Jimmy inspired both young kids dreaming of a career in the game sector, and people already working in the field.

Arcade games, Commodore 64, Amiga and computer magazines catched Jimmy’s attention during his childhood. His interest in games and computers grew bigger and lead him in to 6 years of programming studies at Mid Sweden University. Before he started to develop games for real he was a teacher at a programming school. He saw students start their own business or become employees in the game sector and he found out – it’s not impossible!

2009 he started his own company, Ouch Games, with some of his students. When they won Swedish game awards for their game Carpet wrestling he felt like a new door was open.

“We got a lot of publicity and we had the chance to meet Microsoft.”

According to Jimmy there is plenty of jobs in the game sector, but not here in Mid-Sweden. He applied for a job when Dice needed support to finish Battlefield 3 and he moved to Stockholm for a while. Now he lives in Sundsvall again, but a couple of days every week he travel to Stockholm to meet his colleagues at Dice. Very soon they will release their new production, Star Wars Battlefront II.

– I got two big interests, Star wars and games, Jimmy said. So when they asked him if he wanted to work with Star Wars: Battlefront, the answer wasn’t too hard.

Game developing contain a lot of opportunities, hard work and joy.

There is many opportunities in the game sector, you can work as a designer, programmer or a producer for example. Jimmy’s advice to you who wants to learn how to make games is: check out Unreal engine and Unity. He also says that being a game tester is a good way of entering the business. Maybe not the most fun and well-paid position but it’s a good chance to get to know the business and show your skills.

Even if the big Swedish employers is located in Stockholm and other bigger cities there are a lot of smaller constellations working with game developing all over the country. Here are some examples from Västernorrland we want to present:

Studio Starmon
Corncrow games

Atomic Elbow
R&P Games

At the end of the year R&P Games will release a new game called Rhoky hockey manager, on Steam. Look out for game news from Mid-Sweden!

We thank Jimmy for new insights in the game sector and wish him and all other developers good luck in future productions!

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