Founding members from Avalanche Studios have launched a new studio, Elemental Games, which is also located in Stockholm and has been in operation since last year.
Elemental Games is led by former Avalanche Studios co-founders Linus and Viktor Blomberg, and their mission is to make “high-quality open-world experiences from a creatively and financially independent position.” Their first game is a totally new IP, and it’s currently in active development.
Founding staff worked at companies like Avalanche Studios, Ubisoft, Epic Games and DICE, and have worked on titles like Just Cause, Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront series, as well as Mad Max, Fortnite and “numerous other blockbuster games, engines and films.”
Here are the founding staff:
- Linus Blomberg
- Viktor Blomberg
- Oskar Blomberg
- Kristofer “Loffan” Labedzki
- Robert Krupa
- Martin ‘Kritan’ Bergquist
- Christian Nilsendahl
- Emil ‘Humus’ Persson
- Andreas Tillema
- Tobias Ekholm
Here’s a message from co-founder Linus Blomberg:
We will continue to evolve systemic gameplay and the open-world genre, using all the knowledge we gained from Just Cause, Mad Max, Rage2 and other Avalanche games.
Our years in the AAA games industry have been rewarding and given us much experience, but it has also been frustrating at times. Large companies are often constrained in their ability to break the mold, due to investors’ focus on short-term financial goals. In that environment it’s challenging to do explorative development and to be innovative, as well as to advance the medium in areas such as gender stereotypes and romanticisation of violence.
Our ambition is to bring together the best of both AAA and Indie development, by having a team with extensive blockbuster experience, but driven by their personal passion for the craft, and with complete creative and financial independence.
We’ve seen in the past how technology, art and design are often in conflict rather than elevating each other. So we are creating an environment where none of these disciplines dictates to the others, where we use our experience and craftsmanship in a truly collaborative way so that opportunities open up that we wouldn’t even have considered in isolation.
The team consists of developers who can push the boundaries in their fields, and we will take advantage of that to develop proprietary open-word technology. But we also don’t want to reinvent the wheel or spread ourselves too thin, so we work with external partners in areas that we don’t think we can add value to. More on this will be announced during GDC next week.
