A group of former Avalanche Studios developers (ten to be precise) has set up a rival games company in Stockholm. The company, operating under the name of Elemental Games, aims to solely focus on systems-driven open-world games, the type of titles that were the bread and butter of Avalanche Studios, with the company being famous for games such as Just Cause and Mad Max.
To say this group of former employees are experts in the open-world genre would be an understatement, and this new company will allow them to home in on this genre and create otherworldly projects. Among the people involved with Elemental Games are former founding partners of Avalanche Studios and brothers, Linus, and Viktor Blomberg. The rest of the team consists of former Avalanche employees as well, such as Oskar Blomberg, Kristofer “Loffan” Labedzki, Robert Krupa, Martin “Kritan” Bergquist, Christian Nilsendahl, Emil “Humus” Persson, Andreas Tillema, and Tobias Ekholm – the nicknames make them sound like a team of Avengers. Not only do they all have a history with Avalanche, but several of them have credits working for EA, DICE, Ubisoft, and Epic Games – a well-rounded team of individuals it seems.
One-half of the brothers, Linus Blomberg, recently spoke about the aim of this newly created company by saying, “We will continue to evolve systematic gameplay and the huge open-world genre, using all the knowledge that we have gained from working on many of the Avalanche Studio games, and the varied knowledge of our team as well.”
After reading into it a bit more, it seems that one of the reasons the brothers decided to break away and build their own company was to gain some creative freedom, after becoming frustrated with trying to work in a publicly-traded company, where investors are more interested in money. It’s one of the reasons the brothers have also made Elemental Games a privately owned company as well.
Linus went on to say, “In that environment, it is quite challenging to do explorative development and to be innovative. It is difficult to advance the medium in areas such as gender stereotypes and romanticization of violence.” It seems like a positive step for the brothers and their new team, so let’s see what titles they bring out in the near future.
