As the Göta river winds into Gothenburg, it slows and widens, opening its mouth to spit triumphantly into the North Sea after a 470 mile journey. It’s a geographical feature co-opted to keep people apart for hundreds of years.
Stone Age settlements sprung up by its side, using it as natural protection from rivals and predators alike. Frightened Medieval Swedes met on its Eastern bank to discuss how to stop the Black Death moving in their Norwegian neighbours to the west (it didn’t work). And today, two of Europe’s most exciting developers take up residence, one on each side, like two little armies of warring nerd Vikings, waiting for a low tide so they can wade out and bash each other to death with mechanical keyboards.
It’s details like this that seem to perfectly position Zoink Games and Image & Form as rivals. The two Swedish studios make very different kinds of games. Zoink (until recently) focuses on comic narrative adventure, while I&F crafts meticulously mechanical 2D treats. Sweden’s development scene is growing rapidly, meaning talent is naturally spread more thinly. They’ve even had staff move from one studio to the other across the river. Surely this is the textbook recipe for a nemesis.
Which is why it’s a little strange that Zoink’s Klaus Lyngeled and Image & Form’s Brjann Sigurgeirsson describe themselves as “practically best friends”. These are the CEOs of growing companies - they should be plotting to drive each other out of business. Instead, they’re driving across the bridge to each others’ offices to grab a coffee and compare their secret next projects.
In an industry so often characterised by screamingly worded NDAs, watertight contracts and fierce jealousy, it’s exceptionally odd and refreshing to see - and yet it seems as though that spirit of cooperation is exactly what’s helped propel both studios from licensed game workhorses to two of the most exciting games developers in Europe.
Zoink began as a passion project, but after its first game, The Kore Gang took a staggering 10 years to hit release, the studio slipped into a long period of taking on work-for-hire projects. That was until Lyngeled and his team created the brilliant Stick It to the Man (recently re-released on Switch), and cemented a style it continues with today - mixing a grotesque, sparky sense of humour (helped along by Lyngeled’s own deformed, hand-drawn art) with the spirit of classic point ‘n’ click games.
Image & Form, on the other hand, didn’t even start out as a games company. As Sigurgeirsson puts it, after segueing from software development into making licensed games for “f**king terrible people”, he began to look for someone new to hire his fledgling studio. In a retrospectively insane series of events, Sigurgeirsson found the name of Nintendo’s Swedish partner Bergsala in a newspaper, called them up on a whim, and eventually had 50% of his company bought by the owner. Bergsala’s interest in I&F’s own ideas, rather than licensed products, led to the creation of the consistently wonderful SteamWorld series.
Gothenburg’s relatively tiny dev scene meant Lyngeled and Sigurgeirsson were bound to meet, but their complete cooperation once they did is a little more surprising.
Per Sigurgeirsson: “The first reaction after we met was-”.
Lyngeled interrupts: “What an asshole.”
Sigurgeirsson laughs: “Not quite ‘what an asshole’, but he was adamant on not agreeing with anything I said. It's really true, that was my first impression.”
But it was that candidness, the willingness to state an opinion that has led the two to become near-inseparable. “When we started working together,” says Sigurgeirsson, “I really wanted to be frank about everything.”
In their own words, the two “share precisely every bit of knowledge we come across with each other” - in visiting both studios, it’s immediately clear that that’s no exaggeration. Game directors from each team test the others’ games, marketing departments swap mailing lists and useful contacts, Airbnbs are rented together, conference meetings are shared.
Meanwhile, Brjann and Klaus candidly discuss their upcoming projects, the successes and, more importantly, failures of their previous ones, and near-constantly make fun of one another in the way only friends can without being punched in the mouth. I never expected to find the only way to describe the way a company CEO acts as “cute”, and now I’m doing it about two of them.
As testament to how far that cooperation goes, it was Sigurgeirsson who made introductions for Lyngeled to his co-owner - who promptly bought half of Zoink, too, helping fund its future work. The sheer force of friendliness between their CEOs made Zoink and I&F sister companies. The partnership has only gotten stronger.
“I definitely think other developers should try to do what we do”, says Sigurgeirsson. “It's not a recipe for surefire success or anything, but it's just so comforting to have someone to discuss with. You don't know if you're thinking the right things every time. Just to have someone to toss ideas back and forth with - both in terms of game design and how to run a company.”
Even the rivalry they do show is characterised by how productive it is - Sigurgeirsson makes very clear that he’d now like I&F to have two new projects on the go... just because Zoink does. “It doesn't feel like we are competing against each other,” says Lyngeled. “We never really felt like that. There's so many different games out there, so many different users.”
If you want proof of how well all this cooperation has paid off for each developer, you only need to look at the their latest projects. This year, I&F’s SteamWorld Dig 2 became the company’s most successful release to date, and one of the Nintendo Switch games of the year. Meanwhile, Zoink has had enough success to begin developing two projects at once, simultaneously furrowing a familiar path with Flipping Death, a spiritual sequel to Stick It to the Man, while beginning down an entirely new one with the beguiling, gorgeous Fe. Every one of these have featured some input from the other side of the river.It’s probably unsurprising that both studios’ next step involves the other. Sigurgeirsson and Lyngeled are opening a new company, Thunderful. After so long helping each other out, it seems only natural that they’d make it official.
Thunderful is best described as a games label, not quite a publisher, not just a holding company. “Zoink has gained a lot of prominence recently, and so has Image & Form,” explains Sigurgeirsson. “It's not until we made SteamWorld Dig 2 that everyone said ‘SteamWorld is so fantastic, ever since the first game’. My ass! If they'd said that, a lot more people would have bought SteamWorld Heist. In the short term, both Zoink and Image & Form, the brands, are too strong to throw away.”
But in the long-term? Well, it’s not a surprise to learn that cooperation is key to Thunderful’s plans. If a project big enough came along, the teams at Zoink and I&F could converge for “A Thunderful Game” (think “a Spike Lee joint”). Then again, it could be that Thunderful extends its reach to cooperate with other developers entirely:
“We sometimes get asked if we can publish other studios' games,” Sigurgeirsson says. “So far, we've just said no, it's just not what we do.” Lyngeled, finishing his sentence, continues: “But you know, you find a small developer, you really like them, you think you could help them out - kind of like what Double Fine does with Double Fine Presents, I would say - yeah, I could see that happening.”
Thunderful is the marriage at the end of this odd-couple relationship - so fittingly the two companies are moving in together. “I think we would have benefited greatly from having moved together earlier,” says Sigurgeirsson. “But then there's that thing - you meet someone, you fall in love, you move in together too quickly... and then you realise this bearded guy snores, or he's obsessed with toenails.”
“You've got to find out how you work together first.” agrees Lyngeled, failing to address the toenail issue looming over us all. “It feels totally natural sort of ‘soft’ working together, and now it's about moving even closer together.”
If what we’ve seen from Image & Form and Zoink so far has been the “soft” version of their working together, I can’t wait to see what comes out of Thunderful. If they can conquer the mighty Göta, who knows what’s next. Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and here is a fun fact: in Swedish, Thunderful sort of translates to "thunder-ugly". This was apparently an accident of the pun. Follow him on Twitter.