The Swedish Games

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about the 1990 Macintosh game Dubbelmoral! (“Double standard!”), which was the official game of the venerable Lund Carnival that year (and I later made a post on Cohost about my visit to the building in the city of Lund where the game was developed). Towards the end of the blog post, I mentioned that there was an attempt by the original creators in 2010 to remake the game for the iPhone to coincide with the Carnival that year, but that never came to fruition. However, for the 2026 Lund Carnival, the developers made a new attempt to create a modern version of the cult classic, and this time they completed it!

This new version has its own website at dubbelmoral.nu (which is the same URL used for the 2010 project, and that previous site can be seen on the Internet Archive). The site includes a history of the game: Its original development in 1990 (including some reference photos of the actual locations in the city of Lund that were used when making the game graphics), its spread as a cult classic among Swedish Mac users, the failed remake attempt in 2010, and finally how the two developers (Anders Bjerkén and Stefan Wiklund) got together again in 2026 to create this new version. I should note that the description of the 2026 development includes mentions of using AI for help in some capacity, though it’s not specified exactly how.

The remake of Dubbelmoral! is available to play directly in the browser on the website, and can also be downloaded for free for both iOS and Android phones (the Android version has, as of this writing, not been approved by the Google Play webshop, but can be downloaded on the website). The website and in-game text are all in Swedish, but for non-Swedish speakers, I’ll provide a brief guide on how to play: Click the link above, then the green button to start the game, and then the button saying “Starta nytt spel” (“Star new game”). You use the arrow keys to move the player character to the left and right and to climb and duck, and press the space key to perform various actions, such as jumping, picking up items (including the beer bottles), and interacting with the environment. If you play the phone version, you can move the player character by dragging your finger across the screen, or use the arrow buttons to the right and the action button to the left. You can read my previous blog post about the game for some hints on what to do in it, or just experiment on your own.

Overall, this new version of Dubbelmoral! feels very faithful to the original, with the same graphics and the same memorable sound clips (“digitally washed for stereo” according to the development history), and all the environments and things to do that were in the original game (which, for anyone curious, can be played in a Macintosh emulator at the Internet Archive). However, there are also several important additions to this version, which I generally think fit in well with the original content, with graphics in the same style.

The game controls have been slightly simplified in the remake; originally there were separate keys for walking and running, but now the player character starts running by himself if you move for long enough in one direction (unless he trips due to drunkenness, of course). The original game also starts with a memorable sequence where the player character is sitting in his bedroom, and you then select an option from a menu in the Mac operating system, which causes his to climb from one window on the screen to another. This was obviously not possible to reproduce in a version that doesn’t consist of a number of separate windows like on the Mac, so instead you start your adventure by simply pushing up, causing a rope ladder to appear for the player character to climb on.

Aside from the meters indicating your score, damage, drunkenness and bladder capacity that were in the original, the remake has a window on the left where different text shows up while you’re playing. This text contains facts and trivia about the different locations and characters in the game, and also some gameplay hints. This addition was perhaps considered necessary for newer, younger players, who might not pick up on all the jokes and references to 1990s Lund university student culture.

Interestingly enough, the new additions to the game includes some references to the 2026 Lund Carnival. Specifically, the two 2026 Carnival mascots Bodil and Rune shows up in various spots. Bodil will occasionally pop up in the trees (which you could climb in the original version too, but there was nothing to find up there) and throw out two items to pick up: A smiling sun that lowers all three of your meters, and a rocket that can be used when the player character’s angry mother inevitably shows up to scold you (and throw meatballs at you) for wasting your time at the Carnival instead of studying. If you’ve picked up the rocket, you can click on its icon then, and Rune will come flying through the air on a big rocket and frighten away your mother.

The most notable addition in the remake of Dubbelmoral!, however, is the addition of a fifth location, that the developers had been planning for the original version, but left out due to memory limitations: Tegnérsplatsen, a spot in central Lund with a statue of the famous Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér. Here, you can watch the classic Lund Carnival parade, which consists of people dressed in humorous outfits, or riding various wagons, each with its own humorous theme. In the game, several different well-known wagons from different years show up randomly and scroll past, each with its own music or other sound, and an explanatory text in the window to the left. While the graphics are still in the style of the original game, it’s obvious that this is a very ambitious addition, which clearly couldn’t have fit in the limited memory of the Mac version. It’s possible to interact with the parade as well, by climbing to the top of the statue and jumping onto the wagons as they pass by. If you stay on a wagon when it scrolls off the screen, you get a new game over message, a different one depending on which wagon it was.

It’s also possible to register an account on the game website, which is used in the game for a few different things. You can submit your score to the high score list (just like in the original, “high score” is spelled “hajskår”), and you can check various gameplay statistics, such as how many times you’ve done different things in the game. There’s apparently also a function in the game for chatting with other players, though I haven’t used it. More importantly, you have to be logged in to your account to use a function on the website called “Vagnverkstaden” (“The wagon workshop”), in which you can create your own wagon, complete with custom sound and text, that can show up in the Carnival parade in the game (as long as the developers approve it). This is a really fun idea, but once again AI rears its head: You can only design the appearance of your wagon by typing in a text description and having an AI tool generate the pixel art. I think it’s a bit of a shame that you’re not able to draw the wagon yourself, or perhaps put it together from pre-made pieces, especially since I don’t think that any of the custom wagons I’ve seen in the game so far look as good as the original ones that were (presumably) drawn and animated by the game developers.

Aside from the website, the developers have made accounts for Dubbelmoral! on Instagram and Facebook, where they have made various humorous posts promoting the game before and after its release. Some describe the various characters in the game (including the recipe for the meatballs that the mother throws at you), but there’s also a video showing when the guy who made some of the original voice clips (referred to as “Richard from London”) returns to record some new lines, and another video where they interview the “Carnival general” of the 1990 Lund Carnival, joking about the fact that the Wikipedia entry for that particular Carnival only mentions him and the existence of the game (so presumably nothing else of note happened that year).

For those who are interested in the Dubbelmoral! remake, it might actually be a good idea to follow the social media accounts, since the game has received a few updates after its initial release (including an additional wagon in the parade with the famous Lund University Male Voice Choir), and it’s possible there might be more updates. After all, as of this writing there’s still a week left until the 2026 Lund Carnival begins, so they might decide to add something extra still!

I have previously written about the game The Talkshow, in which you play as the host of a TV tabloid talk show, with the goal of revealing various shameful secrets and other dirty laundry about your guests during each episode. I have now recorded a successful playthrough of one of the episodes in the game, and I’ve also made an English translation of the video, with subtitles for the dialogue and the various dialogue options you can choose from in the menus (though you’ll usually have to pause the video if you want to read the menu choices, since the strict time limit doesn’t allow me to linger on them for too long). The translated video can be viewed on YouTube, and can also be watched and downloaded from the Internet Archive (Swedish speakers can also watch the untranslated version on both sites). However, I should provide a content warning before you watch it: Like all the episodes available in the game, this one contains a lot of “edgy” humor, in this case mainly involving lethal violence against animals and people, and some rather explicit sexual dialogue towards the end.

Each episode of the game has a different group of guests and a different goal, and the way to reach that goal also varies somewhat, with slightly different gameplay dynamics despite using the same simple dialogue-based mechanic. In some episodes you’ll have to steer the conversation in some particular direction and convince or trick the guests into revealing their secrets, but in others, such as this one, the actual dialogue isn’t as important as the actions of the guests. In the translated episode, you’ll have to keep track of the different “weapons” the guest tends to use, such as a loaded crossbow, Bibles being thrown and studio robots running amok, and make sure that they’re used at the right moment against the right people.

As I noted in my previous post about the game, many of the voice actors are actually fairly famous in Sweden. Unfortunately, while the game credits do have a list of all the actors, it doesn’t actually say which actor played which character. I consulted with a friend of mine who’s fairly well versed in Swedish voice actors, and together we made some educated guesses about the characters in the translated episode (though some guesses are less certain than others):

• Froderick Bertleback: Henrik Hjelt
• The producer: Louise Raeder
• Marja Rouvakkala: Rachel Molin
• Pjürgen Kott: Henrik Norman
• Aunt Rotunda: Irene Lindh
• Anders: Claes Månsson

Another thing to note is that the episode is actually somewhat buggy, in that some of the dialogue (mainly the one involving Marja talking to the other characters) comes out of order, with one character responding to another before the thing being responded to is said. In my recording there’s fortunately only a few instances of this. There could have been more if I had decided to get deeper into the various dialogue sidetracks that are available, but despite there being some funny bits in those, it’s just not possible to hear them all in a single playthrough, mainly because of the previously mentioned time limit.

Getting into spoiler territory now, so only keep reading if you’ve watched the video: There are in fact a number of different endings to the episode aside from the “best” one that is show in the translated video. If you’re able to knock out all the characters except for aunt Rotunda and one of the others, the survivor will feel strangely compelled to admit various dark secrets to the old lady, even if they have nothing to do with the dead dog. Specifically, Pjürgen will admit that he has just faked his persona as a brave macho wildlife hunter, and Marja will reveal that she’s lesbian (which isn’t that shocking considering that it says so in her profile in the game manual), and more importantly, that she did in fact have a stamp collection hobby when she was a child. Both of these endings are still considered a success by the game, though the producer isn’t quite as, ahem, exuberant about them as she is when Anders reveals his secret.

I feel like it’s especially fitting to share a video playthrough of an episode of this particular game, since it does in fact have a built-in function that allowed you to share your completed episodes online with other players back when the game was released (though the website used for that function no longer works). Despite its many flaws, I think that The Talkshow has a fairly unique and interesting gameplay premise, and I’m glad that I can show an example of what it’s like to play to a wider audience.

Speaking of which, if you’re a Swedish speaker, you can also check out the recording I’ve made of a second episode of the game (also available on both YouTube and Internet Archive), with a different premise and a different group of guests. I have however decided to not translate this episode, since I realized that a lot of the plot is based on some outright hateful homophobic stereotypes. It might sound surprising, but the episode with the dead dog is probably one of the least offensive ones in the whole game.

Karl Hubert Hörnell has periodically been a fairly productive solo video game developer. He began his career as a teenager in the 1980s, programming for the Commodore 64, and according to the book Svensk videospelsutveckling, is the Swede with most games published for the C64. It’s very likely that I’ll be taking a look at some of these games in the future, but this blog post is about his next major game project: The website Java on the Brain.

Karl Hörnell had grown up with the Commodore 64, being essentially self-taught when it came to programming for it, and when more advanced machines became available, he wasn’t interested in switching to them. It wouldn’t be until the middle of the 1990s when he would return to game creation, due to discovering the programming language Java, which was becoming popular to use for creating games and other applications (known as “Java applets”) that could be run in web browsers, directly on websites. It was while he was doing his university studies that he got interested in Java, in large part because he could learn how to program it by reading about it online, and because it made it possible to create games similar to those he had made on the C64 back in the day.

Making games in Java proved to be a fun way to get away from his boring university studies, and in 1996 he started the website Java on the Brain, where he would put up his various creations over the coming years, all of them playable directly in the browser. The site apparently became very popular; Hörnell claims that for a while he was one of the most famous Java programmers in the world, and one year his site was nominated for the Webby Awards.

Some of the games on the site were made specifically for different companies and other clients, and he was even able to sell some of the games he had created just for fun. His really big break also came out of his Java programming: In 1999, he and some of his relatives created an online poker website (PokerRoom.com), which was fairly unique from most contemporary poker sites in that the game could be played via a Java applet directly in the web browser, instead of needing a separate client. This site also became popular, and in 2005 it was sold to another company for a huge sum of money.

Though the sale of PokerRoom basically made Hörnell independently wealthy, he has continued making some games in his spare time just for the fun of it, mostly for various smartphones, but also a few more for the Commodore 64. Aside from making games, he has also drawn various comics, including a humorous mashup of Dilbert and Savage Dragon called Savage Dragonbert (which actually got printed in the Savage Dragon magazine in the early 2000s). His artistic talents are definitely one of the most charming aspects of his games, that all have fun characters and other graphics drawn in his fairly distinctive cartoony style.

The Java on the Brain website (also called “J*va on the Brain”, because according to Hörnell, “Sun Microsystems, Inc. does not allow third-party sites to use the word ‘Java’ in the title”) is written entirely in English, and all the games on the site are in English as well. The site has a fairly simple, easy to navigate old-school design, looking pretty much the same now as it did in 1996. One notable aspect of the site design is that many of the games are framed by some rather cool-looking graphics that aren’t part of the Java applet itself, but rather the HTML website. This includes many of the phone-based games being framed by graphics resembling actual cellphones.

While the site and all the games are still up as of this writing, the one major problem when accessing it nowadays is the fact that most modern web browsers don’t seem to support classic Java applets, apparently because they’re considered a security risk. I was able to access the games by viewing the site in the “Internet Explorer mode” in Microsoft Edge, after configuring the version of Java I have installed to make a security exception for the website. It’s possible that there’s other ways to do it as well. I will say that I recommend playing the games on the site rather than in some separate Java emulator, since many of the applets are partially controlled by parts of the HTML site, or at least have the above-mentioned HTML framing graphics, that I think contribute somewhat to the experience.

Though the focus of the site are the games, there are also several other pages with interesting information, such as the “Goals” page where Hörnell describes his (not entirely positive) opinions about Java as a programming language and game platform, and the “Artwork” page where he shows off some of his artwork, both from his games and his comics (though most of the comics are in Swedish).

One of the most interesting aspects of Java on the Brain is the fact that each game has a number of sub-pages with information about it, including Hörnell describing when and how he got the idea for the game, how he developed it, initial sketches, and any interesting technical details. This is of course an invaluable resource from a game history perspective. Hörnell didn’t just create the site to share the games he’s made, it’s also partially intended as an educational resource, showing various tricks and ideas to other aspiring Java programmers, giving advice on how to create functional Java applets. In fact, for most of the games Hörnell provides all the graphics and source code to download. Many of the games (aside from those that he’s sold to other companies) are also available to download as freeware, and he has given permission that you can put them on your own website, as long as you credit him and link back to Java on the Brain. This was presumably one reason for why the site became so popular back in the day.

I won’t describe every single game in detail in this blog post, but I’ll highlight some that I think are particularly fun or interesting. In general, they’re all pretty simple to play, though I highly recommend reading the game instructions first, since many of them use some slightly unusual keyboard controls, with various letter keys instead of the arrow keys, which can take some getting used to.

Most of the earliest games (an some of the later ones as well) on the site are Java adaptations of various board games and puzzles, often with some interesting variation on the standard rules, such as in the rather hectic Multiplayer Speedoku. Some of these are also in 3D, including an interesting 3D variant on tic-tac-toe, and a Java version of Rubik’s Cube that was apparently one of the most popular and widely spread games from the site back in the day, including being used as an example in various books about Java programming. One of my personal favorites of the puzzle games is Autocrazy, where you have to slide around cars in a crowded parking lot (this game was later sold to Disney, and was reskinned as a tie-in to one of their Herbie movies).

After his earliest simple Java experiments, Hörnell went to make a number of games that were inspired by, or in some cases outright clones of, 80s arcade and computer games that he liked. One of the most notable of these is Iceblox, a simple but fun variation of the arcade game Pengo. He would go on to make several different versions of Iceblox, mainly for different types of mobile phones, including a more graphically advanced version called Iceblox Plus, and eventually even made a version for the Commodore 64. The player character in the game, a penguin named “Pixel Pete”, would also star in a few other games by on the site, such as 3D-Blox (which was specifically nominated for “The Scandinavian Interactive Media Awards” in 1997), and Cross Section.

Another similarly notable game is the scrolling shoot ‘em up Warp, mainly inspired by the computer game Xenon. It’s a pretty charming game, mainly because the imaginative and humorous environments and enemies on the later levels, once you get past the typical space theme on the first level. Warp later got a couple of sequels: The more advanced Warp 1.5, and the simplified Warp 0.5 for various mobile devices.

Other applets inspired by earlier games include the Dig Dug clone Don’s Dugout, and the cute Sokoban variant ChocoBan (slightly different from the original in that there’s different chocolate pralines that need to be pushed to specific places). Hörnell also made ports of the original Pac-Man and its sequel Ms. Pac-Man to various phones, titled MIDP-Man and Ms. MIDP-Man. Unlike most of the other games, these can’t be downloaded from the site, just played in the browser, because Namco contacted Hörnell and asked him to remove the downloadable versions.

My biggest personal favorite of the games on the site is Urbanoids, which is basically a remake of the classic Commodore 64 game Paradroid, but set in a current-day city environment instead of on a future spaceship. You play as a rather schlubby guy who has to defeat a bunch of berserk utility robots by either shooting them or hacking into them to take control of them, thus getting stronger weapons and being able to take on stronger enemies. It feels like the most impressive and ambitious of the Java on the Brain games, with a selection of different city maps of various sizes to choose between, decently complex gameplay thanks to the hacking minigame, and some very entertaining graphics, especially Hörnell’s illustrations of the different robots. The fact that it has a webpage that looks somewhat different from the other pages on the site also makes it stick out, giving the impression that it was intended to be something special.

There are also some interesting and fun creations among the games designed for specific clients, for example Tour de Applet, an arcadey bike game made for the official Tour de France website, and the pretty entertaining action game Adios, Amoeabas! (which is a great video game title, if nothing else). One particularly interesting game that started out as a project for a Conan the Barbarian website until the deal fell through is titled Dungeon Dregs, which Hörnell has left intentionally unfinished, with placeholder graphics and just a couple of finished rooms. His intent was for it to be a basic framework which other aspiring game creators could take and develop further, as yet another part of the educational aspect of Java on the Brain.

Some of the later additions to the site includes a number of card games and gambling games, intended as promotions for the previously mentioned PokerRoom website, again mainly targeted at various mobile phones. The actual poker applet that he created isn’t on the site, there’s just a page with a screenshot and some development notes. Finally, I should mention that there are a couple of applets that aren’t actually games, but simple music editors, named Blue Notes and Rainbow Notes.

The latest update of Java on the Brain was in 2012, which I think is understandable considering the above-mentioned phasing out of Java as a browser game creation tool. I’m mostly just impressed that such an old website is still up, with the games still available if you can get them running, and all the interesting documentation as well. It’s really a treat to still be able to access this piece of fairly early internet gaming history. I highly recommend doing so if you’re able, because many of the games on the site are still really enjoyable to play, which I think is a testament to Karl Hörnell’s talents as a programmer and game designer.

More English-language information about Karl Hörnell

• Wikipedia
• Interview on C64.com

On the night of February 28, 1986, the Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme was shot to death in central Stockholm, when he was walking home from a movie with his wife, Lisbeth. The news shocked Sweden; no Swedish politician had been murdered in the modern history of the country, and the murder has often been described as one of the things that shattered the illusion of “little safe Sweden”. The police investigation of the murder is considered one of the largest murder investigations in the world, involving a huge number of resources and personnel. But despite going on over many years, with many chief investigators coming and going, the case remains officially unsolved to this day.

One person was convicted for the crime during the 1980s, but was later acquitted, in part due to poor handling of the evidence against him. In 2020, the chief prosecutor who was then in charge of the investigation announced that there was one individual who was the most likely suspect, but since he was dead, the investigation was officially closed. As recently as December 2025, it was announced that the previously mentioned person was not considered the main suspect any longer, but that the investigation would remain closed, due to the unlikelihood of further investigation leading anywhere.

In the wake of the protracted and ultimately unsuccessful official police investigation of the murder, there sprung up various “private investigators”, who all had their own ideas about who the murderer was, and what their motive might have been. Over the years there have been a plethora of different theories about the murder of Olof Palme, some more plausible than others, to say the least. All kinds of people have been suggested to be the murderer, and all kinds of strange conspiracy theories have been spun about the murder.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the police investigation has been heavily criticized by many people, with many kinds of flaws in the investigation being pointed out, and the investigators being accused of incompetence in various ways. Some have even gone so far as to attribute the failure of the investigation to malice rather than stupidity, with many of the above-mentioned conspiracy theories involving the police and other government agencies in the murder, or at least suggesting that they’re intentionally covering up the truth.

In early 2025, after about a year in development, the game Lösningen (“The Solution”), created by Per Martinsson, was released. It was made to be played on the original Nintendo Game Boy (using the modern development tool GB Studio), and was released on actual game cartridges complete with box and manual. It’s also available to buy via itch.io as a downloadable ROM that can be played in an emulator, and there’s also an English version, titled A Solution (the English version also received a physical release recently).

The game begins at a crime scene in a city, where a prime minister has been murdered. It’s never outright stated that the prime minister is Olof Palme, or that the city is Stockholm, and none of the characters in the game are actually named. But it’s pretty obvious what the game is about, especially considering that there’s only ever been one Swedish prime minister that’s been murdered. Funnily enough, the game box and manual similarly never say what console the game is actually for, simply stating that it’s for “a handheld device that is almost as old as the riddle [the game] is inspired by.”

In any case, the player character is a policeman who is in charge of the murder investigation. However, the goal isn’t actually to solve the case. At the beginning of the game, a character called “Commissioner” tells you that the government doesn’t want the case to be solved, and instead gives you the mission to find pieces of evidence and destroy or hide them, to make sure that the murder remains unsolved. It’s interesting to note that the game never explains why the murder needs to be covered up. The player character just goes about his business dutifully without asking any questions, and the actual motive behind the murder or the conspiracy is never revealed.

Lösningen is described as being a “cover-up adventure”, a rather unusual twist on the typical detective adventure game. You steer the player character around the city, talking to other characters and trying to find different pieces of evidence, and also trying to figure out how to dispose of the evidence in various ways. For example, you have to give the bullets found in the body to a clumsy intern at the forensics lab to make sure that they’ll become unusable, de-magnetize a tape recording of suspicious phone calls, and make sure that a revealing letter becomes classified and hidden in the police archives. At one point you even have to deal with a fortune teller who claims to have discovered the identity of the murderer by looking at coffee grounds. That might sound silly, but it’s honestly not too far off from some of the more outlandish real-life investigations about the murder of Olof Palme.

At any time, you can look inside your briefcase, where you can see all the collected evidence and any hints you’ve discovered about what to do with them. As an adventure game, I think Lösningen is actually fairly easy, since you get plenty of clues about what to do and where to go next. If you get stuck, you can talk to your colleagues at the police station, get informative phone calls, get hints from people on the street, or talk to a journalist at the local newspaper who has all kinds of suggestions about what to do with the evidence. Part of the dark, satirical humor of the game is the fact that most of the characters in the game, from civilians to cops and criminals, are willing to help you, knowingly or unknowingly, to cover up the murder, without asking too many questions. Especially your fellow policemen seem to be pretty corrupt overall, and are willing to perform various suspect and unethical deeds for you.

The city map is fairly small and easy to traverse, and you also have the option to use the subway to quickly travel between different locations, for a small fee. This isn’t strictly necessary most of the time, but there is one location, a shady gambling club where various criminals gather, that can only be accessed by taking the subway. To reach the club you need to walk down a dark and dirty backstreet, and deal with one of the few action elements in the game: Dodging criminals who shoot bullets and throw bottles in pre-set patterns. If you’re hit you lose health, which can only be recovered by visiting a hospital and paying some money. You can also get injured if you’re hit by cars driving by in the streets, though ironically these only seem to appear if you try walking across a crosswalk.

The other major action sequence is at the end of the game, where you need to sneak around a passenger ferry and avoid the guards onboard seeing you as you try to dispose of the last piece of evidence by throwing it into the ocean. This is a fairly difficult segment, where you have to stand in a certain spot to make the guards go away, and then very quickly move to the exit to the next screen before they come back. You have to do it very precisely, with a small margin of error, though fortunately you can try it over and over again without any punishment until you get it right.

As noted, many things in the game cost money, including disposing certain pieces of evidence. While you start out with a decent initial capital, it won’t cover all of your costs, and you’ll have to make more money as you play. Some cash can be made by selling objects at a thrift store (which is how you get rid of some of the evidence), but your most important source of income is performing various tasks for people, such as cleaning a table at a café or helping someone find a lost object. At some points you’re basically required to “grind” these jobs, walking back and forth between different locations and repeating the tasks over and over to get enough money to finish the game, but I never thought it became too exhausting or distracting.

When you’ve dealt with the last piece of evidence, you get a brief victory screen, and are then allowed to keep walking around the city and do whatever you want. The game contains a number of small tasks that doesn’t affect the outcome of the main mission, but are more like amusing distractions. The most notable is the ability to place listening devices (“bugs”) in various hidden locations on almost every screen in the game. When you’ve placed a certain number of bugs, you get glowing letters of recommendation from the government. The other major side quest is finding cigarettes and smoking them. Both of these tasks are recorded in your briefcase, possibly motivating you to chase after a higher “score”. While the surveillance and smoking don’t seem to have any direct bearing on the cover-up mission, it does contribute to the general atmosphere of shadiness and conspiracy.

Other distractions include playing a slot machine in the gambling club, creating a facial composite of the murderer on a German computer, putting together a headline for the newspaper, and looking at some strange postcards at the post office. While there are no in-game “achievements”, the manual from the physical release does in fact have a list of things to do in the game that you can check off if you feel inclined to do a completionist run. But even if you try to discover everything, the game is overall fairly short, with the main mission taking maybe a few hours to complete. I think that is a good thing, since the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s a darkly humorous story with an interesting gameplay twist, not some serious long-form detective adventure.

I suspect that the game is even more funny depending on how much you know about the murder of Olof Palme and the many strange turns in the real-life police investigation (the trailer for the game states that it’s “based on real rumors”). As I was playing I noticed many more or less subtle reference to real events, with possibly the most notable being the whole gameplay element of placing listening devices and getting letters of recommendations. This might be a reference to the Ebbe Carlsson affair, where a private investigator of the murder did in fact receive official recommendations from members of the Swedish government, and possibly tried to conduct illegal surveillance. Another notable reference is when you visit a movie theatre, and the cinema screen shows a face that is very likely intended to be the suspect that was accused of the murder in 2020 (when that accusation was made, it led to a TV series about him being made shortly thereafter). Other references I picked up on include the fact that the police did in fact create a facial composite with German identikit technology, and the postcards in the post office having text on them that I presume are quotes related to the investigation. And of course, the various pieces of evidence in the game are based on real-life evidence that have been discussed and analyzed over the years.

Lösningen is, as far as I can tell, the first game created by Per Martinsson, who has said that he enjoyed the creative challenge of making a game for such an old and limited platform as the original Game Boy. He was apparently somewhat surprised by the amount of attention the game received, including it being reported on in mainstream Swedish newspapers and on TV, and being nominated in the category “Best Debut” in the 2025 Swedish Game Awards. The initial run of physical copies quickly sold out, and the same happened when more were produced (I was lucky enough to grab a copy, which I consider one of my most prized gaming possessions).

It should be noted that Martinsson himself doesn’t seem to believe in the various conspiracy theories about the murder, but he has said that while the game is intended to be a satire, his intent was also to shine a light on the many strange things that really has happened in the police investigation over the years. I think this is a fair motivation for making a game like this, and it certainly isn’t the first satirical piece of media about the Palme murder. The whole event, the investigation, the theories, the colorful personalities, the scandals, the media circus, it’s all become such a bizarre piece of Swedish history and the Swedish public consciousness, that lends itself well to all kinds of art, including satire and dark comedy. We may never know who murdered Olof Palme, but we will probably never stop speculating and theorizing about what the solution might be.

There had been a few attempts at publishing Japanese manga and anime in Sweden during the 1980s and 90s, with various degrees of success, but the publication of a Swedish translation of Dragon Ball, which started in 2000, is usually considered to be the start of the Swedish “manga boom” of the early 2000s, during which many more mangas were published, often in pocket books similar to the Japanese tankōbon format, or in comic magazines (including a Swedish version of the Japanese Shōnen Jump). There were of course also several books about how to draw manga, and the visual style became very popular in Sweden during these years, inspiring many Swedish comic artists as well. The big commercial boom ended somewhere around 2010 due to various factors, but there are still a few publishers that are putting out Swedish translations of Japanese manga, and some Swedish artists drawing manga as well. One of the most enthusiastic and successful Swedish manga artists is Natalia Batista.

Before I go on, I should perhaps note that there are different opinions regarding whether the term “manga”, which is usually defined as “comics from Japan”, can be used for comics by non-Japanese creators, or that originate from outside of Japan. I have seen various different terms used, such as “international manga”, “pseudomanga”, “manga-influenced comics”, or more country-specific terms like “original English-language manga”, “Amerimanga”, “la nouvelle manga”, and so on. Suffice to say, Batista’s comics are very obviously inspired by Japanese manga, including the visual style, the page layouts and to some extent the plot, and she refers to them as “manga” and herself as a “manga artist”, so for the sake of simplicity, that’s how I’ll be referring to her work as well in this post.

Natalia Batista has described herself as being “part of the Sailor Moon generation”, and started drawing manga when she was 14 years old. Aside from writing and drawing comics, she has made book illustrations and wall paintings of her characters, and she’s also been an active and enthusiastic participant and proponent of Swedish comic culture in general. She has been a teacher at Serieskolan (“The comics school”) in the city of Malmö, founded the annual convention Malmö Seriefest (“Malmö Comics Fest”), recorded the podcast Seriesystrar (“Comics Sisters”), been the manager of various comic anthologies, and has done numerous lectures and workshops about comics in Swedish schools and libraries. In 2006 she was one of the co-founders of the Swedish “manga artist collective” Nosebleed Studio, which later also became a publisher of manga, both Swedish-made and foreign. Nosebleed Studio is one of the few Swedish publishers of manga that has survived to this day.

One of Batista’s most notable manga is Sword Princess Amaltea (even the original Swedish version of it has the English title). She both wrote and drew it herself, though she got some help with the art from friends, colleagues at Nosebleed Studio, and even a few relatives (which she compares with how Japanese manga artists often have assistants). The first finished chapter of the manga was published as a fanzine in 2012 (with the title “A Sword Princess Tale”), and between 2013 and 2015 the whole story in three books was published in Sweden (by the publisher Kolik Förlag, though later a single large volume collecting all three books was published by Nosebleed Studio). Since then, the manga has been published in several different languages, including Italian, German, Czech and English. Batista made the English translation herself, and the translated chapters were originally released online via the webcomic platform Inkblazers starting in 2013, and when that site shut down, she created her own website where she continued putting up English chapters. In 2018, she got a publishing deal with Tokyopop, which published the complete English version of the manga in three books under their “International Women of Manga” imprint. Apparently the manga has been fairly successful, at least in Sweden where more than 10000 copies have been sold.

Sword Princess Amaltea is an action-adventure manga set in a medieval fantasy world. The big “twist” is that in this world, stereotypical gender roles and sexism are reversed (Batista was inspired by the Norwegian novel Egalia’s Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg, which has a similar premise). The setting known as “The Queendoms” is a matriarchy, and women are expected to be strong rulers, warriors and generally being the “dominant” gender with more rights and freedoms. Men are considered the weaker gender, and are expected to be demure and submissive, obeying the women. This is very much reflected visually, with the female characters having varying body types and clothing, often with short hair, while most of the men are thin, beardless, with long hair and wearing fancy skirts and dresses. It’s also reflected in the language, with expression such as “take it like a woman” or “you don’t have the boobs”. One particularly interesting linguistic detail in the Swedish version is unfortunately unavoidably lost in the English translation: The use of personal indefinite pronouns (in English for example “one gets lost without a map”). These are used fairly often when speaking in Swedish, and the most commonly used is “man”. But in the Queendoms, the characters instead say “kvin” (the Swedish word for “woman” is “kvinna”), really underlining that women are considered the “default” in this world. Batista has really put a lot of thought into trying to depict how gender roles, stereotypes and inequality permeate the setting, with the idea obviously not being to say that a matriarchy would be better than a patriarchy, but rather to make various examples of gender inequality more obvious to people who might not otherwise have thought about them.

Amaltea, the titular Sword Princess, is the youngest daughter of Queen Galatea. Amaltea’s older sister, Dorotea, is set to inherit her mother’s queendom, and according to tradition, Amaltea is at the age of 17 tasked with going out into the world to find a prince from another queendom, marry him and thus inherit part of his mother’s lands. The young Amaltea very reluctantly sets out on this journey, and soon finds a tower in the wilderness guarded by a dragon. After slaying the dragon, she enters the tower and finds Prince Ossian, but it turns out that he’s not interested in marrying Amaltea. The rest of the manga is about Amaltea and Ossian journeying towards Ossian’s mother’s queendom, getting into various adventures along the way. Though they initially bicker and argue a lot with each other, they do eventually begin to develop a certain fondness and friendship, finding common ground in that they’re both uncomfortable with the roles that the ancient rules and traditions of the Queendoms have dictated for them.

Amaltea is a strong-willed, hot-blooded young warrior, eager to prove herself, her fiery temper often getting her into trouble. Ossian is far more cool-headed, usually urging caution, worrying about Amaltea’s safety, both because he cares about her, but also since she’s the only one who can protect him on their dangerous journey. What I particularly like about the two main characters is that while they both want to rebel against norms and traditions, they are obviously shaped by the world they’ve grown up in, internalizing a lot of the expectations and norms of their respective genders. Amaltea does care about Ossian and wants to do right by him, but she’s been brought up to believe that men are inherently weaker than women, and this does often shine through, despite her best intentions. Not even an incident where their genders are temporarily swapped after a bath in a magic spring, and she gets to experience how men are mistreated first-hand, can entirely remove her prejudices. Ossian, meanwhile, often struggles to stand up for himself, usually yelling for Amaltea to rescue him (though there are a few instances where he comes to her rescue as well). Over the course of the story, he gets mistreated in one way or another by almost every woman he encounters, including many instances of sexual harassment, and he’s often treated as simply a pawn in the intrigues of the other royals.

After finishing the Sword Princess Amaltea manga, Natalia Batista thought about continuing to explore the setting and the story in other forms of media. This included a video game, which she began planning in 2017. In 2020, she launched a Kickstarter for the game, titled Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel. Most of the stretch goals were eventually fulfilled, and after a demo was made available on Itch.io, the complete game was released for PC via Steam in 2021. Batista is credited with “script and art” for the game, while game development was done by Senpai Media Group. I haven’t been able to find much information about this company. I did find one mention of them being a Swedish developer, but their website (currently only available via the Internet Archive) is in Japanese, and states that they’re based in Tokyo.

Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel is a direct sequel to the story in the manga, continuing the adventures of Amaltea and Ossian. The game does give a description of the setting and a summary of previous events in the beginning, so you technically don’t have to read the manga before playing the game, but I would still highly recommend doing so to get the fully story and understanding the backgrounds of the characters. I’ll try to avoid spoiling the whole plot of the manga, but I’ll have to mention how it ends in order to describe the plot of the game: Amaltea and Ossian runs away together from Ossian’s mother’s queendom, having decided that they’d prefer to continue adventuring and exploring the world over having to take up their royal duties. The game picks up some time later, and is about the princess and prince travelling between cities, taking odd jobs to support themselves while trying to keep a low profile and avoid being recognized, since Amaltea’s sister Dorotea is chasing after them.

As the title indicates, the game is in the adventure game subgenre known as “visual novel”. This subgenre has its origins in Japan, and games in it are very text-focused, usually consisting of reading text descriptions and dialog with accompanying still images of the characters, environments and events, occasionally choosing between different options that affect how the story progresses, leading to different endings. I think it’s a pretty appropriate choice of genre for a Sword Princess Amaltea game, especially since it’s usually associated with visuals in a manga style.

I will admit that I haven’t played many visual novels, but I get the impression that Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel fits most of the gameplay conventions of the genre. You read the text and dialog describing Amaltea’s and Ossian’s adventures and their interactions with other characters, and make many choices that affect the story in various ways. A single playthrough of the game is fairly short, but the idea is to play it many times and explore how different choices lead to different endings. There is actually a quite impressive number of different endings and variations of those endings in the game, with the “good” endings usually being some variant of Amaltea and Ossian riding away together towards future adventures, and the most common “bad” ending being Dorotea catching up with the two wayward royals and dragging them back to court to get married to each other against their will (a sort of parody of the typical fairytale “happily ever after” ending).

While Amaltea and Ossian try to stick together during the story, there are two points in the game where they’re split up, and you have to choose which one of them you want to play as, seeing the game story from just one of their perspectives until they meet up again. Amusingly, at one point you can also choose to play as Amaltea’s horse Palifax (who is something of a comic relief character in the manga, constantly complaining in thought balloons about how hard he’s working carrying Amaltea and Ossian everywhere), and get a cute side-story of him going around in a stable and talking to various other horses, including a unicorn!

Overall, I thought the writing in the game was pretty enjoyable and often interesting, continuing to explore the setting in new ways through new environments and characters. In fact, aside from Ossian and Amaltea, there are very few characters from the manga that make appearances; almost all the characters in the game are new, as are the locations you visit. The new characters give interesting new perspectives to the world. I think the most intriguing to me are a group of mysterious men that Ossian can encounter, that he discovers are in fact a band of, if you’ll excuse the term, “men’s rights activists” looking to topple the matriarchy through some rather radical actions (keep in mind that the guys do have some legitimate grievances with how things work in this particular setting). There’s also at least one character that is implied to be a trans woman. This isn’t explored in any detail, but I must admit that I’m very curious about what being transgender is like in the Queendoms, not to mention other queer identities. Most importantly, you won’t meet every character in a single playthrough, which gives you some additional motivation to play through the game multiple times.

The dialogue between characters is also pretty well written, and I especially liked the interactions between the two protagonists. Amaltea’s and Ossian’s relationship is basically the same as in the manga, and even though they’ve grown a bit closer, they still tend to argue and bicker with each other from time to time (though this is to some extent dependent on the choices the player makes, which often involve what Amaltea’s attitude towards Ossian should be). Ossian often chides Amaltea and has to remind her that they need to keep their heads down, when her hot temper and adventurous spirit risks getting them into trouble.

When they’re split up, the respective storylines of Amaltea and Ossian also have somewhat different tones. Amaltea’s adventures often involve her taking risky actions and getting into fights, while Ossian has to focus more on going with the flow, talking to people and navigating the restrictions and expectations placed on men in the matriarchy. Just like in the manga, he’s often talked down to and even harassed, and since the player to some extent steps into his shoes and sees things from his perspective in the game, it might give them some even deeper insights into how exhausting such a life can be.

Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel is made in Ren’Py, a game engine that is very popular among creators of visual novels. Aside from the typical visual novel gameplay of reading text and making choices, there are a few additional gameplay elements you can encounter in the game. Amaltea and Ossian often worry about having enough money to survive on, and the first half of the game is focused on them finding jobs to make cash, with your choices influencing how well they do at their jobs and how much they get paid, indicated by a coin symbol showing up. There is at least one point where you can get different options to choose from depending on how much money you have, but other than that it doesn’t seem to have much effect on the game.

Another gameplay element shows up when Amaltea has to fight in a gladiatorial tournament. The fight plays out by you making a series of choices about what kind of attack Amaltea will do, and how she will counter her opponent’s attack, and depending on what you choose, Amaltea or the enemy loses hitpoints. It’s not a very complex fighting system, and once you’ve figured out which attack works against the enemy you can simply repeat it over and over to whittle her down, which honestly feels a little repetitive. You only have to play through one fight to win the whole tournament, with the remaining fights being described to you after that. It is possible to lose the fight, but it’s basically something you have to actively decide to do by repeatedly choosing the worst attack option. You might actually want to do this if you want to see all the game endings, since depending on your previous choices, Amaltea losing can have some interesting results.

I really like the game visuals, especially the character art and backgrounds, all drawn by Natalia Batista. As previously mentioned, the game contains many new characters, and they all have interesting designs and clothing, with various poses and expressions depending on the dialogue. Interestingly, many of the background characters, and even a few of those with speaking roles, are based on various Kickstarter backers of the game, since that was one of the backer bonuses offered. Speaking of clothes, I also like that Amaltea and Ossian go through several different outfits during the game (something they also did during the manga), including everything from fancy dresses to dirty rags. But no matter how dire the situation gets, Amaltea is always able to retain her distinctive checkered bow!

It might not sound that important, but it’s also fun that the whole game is in color, since the manga was all in black and white, with only a few color illustrations of the characters on the covers. Getting to see the world and characters old and new in color really is a treat, and even better is the brief animated intro, where we get to see Amaltea swing her sword and Ossian use magic (there were plans to have an additional animated sequence in the game, but unfortunately the Kickstarter didn’t reach that level). There are a few simpler animations inside the game as well, such as leaves falling in forest environments, and some parallax scrolling in the backgrounds of certain scenes.

Most of the music in the game wasn’t made for the game itself, but are from an archive of freely usable songs made by Kevin MacLeod. The one exception is the title song, which was composed for the game Hideyuiki Shima, who has made music for various games and anime before. The most important aspect of the game audio, however, are the voices. All the dialogue Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel is fully voiced, and it adds an important layer to the setting, and the differences between the female and male characters in it. The female characters have a variety of different voices, many of them strong, loud, deep, forceful, confident and commanding. In contrast, the majority of the male voices are soft, light, slightly high pitched and gentle, matching the physical appearance of the men. It once again underlines that this is a world where women are in charge, and where men are not expected to raise their voices or speak forcefully. The acting is generally decent, with some of the actors apparently being veterans in anime and video game voice acting. I especially liked the voices for Amaltea (voiced by Kathy Pfautsch) and Ossian (voiced by Kodiak Spence), who both sounds very much how I imagined they might while reading the manga.

All the voice acting is in English, and that’s also the default language of the game. The text is also available in some other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Swedish. I tried playing through the game in Swedish a few times, but while the translation was decent enough, and it was fun to see the above-mentioned use of “kvin” again, I noticed that there were quite a few spelling errors in the text. As I understand it, the game was originally written by Natalia Batista in English, and then translated to Swedish (this translation was one of the Kickstarter stretch goals), as opposed to the manga. The recurring spelling errors was one reason for why I eventually went back to playing the game with English text, but the bigger reason was because it matched up with the voice acting. I would have loved to have Swedish voices available as well, but I understand that might be beyond the scope of the budget.

As a game playable via the Steam platform, Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel has a set of achievements to unlock. They all have to do with reaching some particular scene in the game, or with getting some specific ending. It does give the game something like a puzzle challenge if you want it, trying to figure out which combinations of choices leads to which event. I have managed to get almost all of the available achievements, but there are at least two that still elude me, and they are both tied to the same thing: It is apparently possible to get a scene where Amaltea and Ossian realize that they are in fact in love with each other, and an ending where they “ride off into the sunrise” (unlike most endings where they ride off in the night instead). However, despite playing through the game many times by now, and discovering all kinds of scenes and alternate endings, I still haven’t been able to find this apparently very rare event. What’s particularly frustrating is that this to some extent seems to have to do with the story structure being slightly buggy: There are some instances where the events of one scene lead to an unrelated scene, or where the game references an event that hasn’t happened in the current “timeline” based on my choices. This includes one time where I did in fact get a scene where both Amaltea and Ossian do admit their love to each other… But then the game goes on as if they hadn’t done that, and I didn’t get the “love” ending.

I even went so far as to send an e-mail to Natalia Batista where I politely asked about how to get the romantic ending to the game, and to my delight she actually did reply to it, being very helpful and forwarding my question to the game programmer, who explained the general idea on how you’re supposed to play the game to get the two protagonists to fall in love. But even with this advice I still wasn’t able to figure out how exactly to get the desired ending, and I didn’t feel like bugging the programmer with a request for a detailed walkthrough. I suppose I could simply brute-force it by playing through every single combination of player choices until I get there, but I honestly don’t have much interest in doing that. One unavoidable problem with a visual novel is that even though you can save the game wherever you want and continue with different choices, it still means you have to skip through a lot of text that you’ve already read multiple times each time you try a different route through the game. And as I understand it, the “love” ending is still fairly similar to most of the other endings: Amaltea and Ossian rides away on Palifax together on future adventures.

Despite the bugs, I still enjoyed the game very much, mainly because of the characters and the unusual and fascinating setting, a setting that I would love to see explored even more. While Natalia Batista has mentioned that she doesn’t intend to continue the manga, she has also said that she’s had plans for other games, including a card game of some kind. There’s also a “film pitch” available on her website. And in fact, before Sword Princess Amaltea – The Visual Novel had been released, she had already published a tabletop roleplaying game set in the Queendoms, titled simply Sword Princess (currently only available in Swedish, though she has mentioned that she wishes it would be translated to English some day too). I hope that I’ll be able to play this game as well sometime in the future and write a separate post about it. While I am in fact fairly satisfied with Amaltea’s and Ossian’s story ending with “and their adventures continued…”, I still want to see more of the fantastical and strange world they inhabit, which is both very different from our world, and yet in some ways worryingly familiar.

Hans Emil Villius (1923-2012) was an extremely famous and beloved Swedish historian. He wrote dissertations and books about many historical events, but became known to a wider audience between the 1960s and 90s, when he worked for Swedish radio and television, making several historical documentaries (together with long-time colleague Olle Häger), and even having a few movie roles. Villius was usually the narrator for the documentaries, and that is how he’s mainly remembered; for his distinctive voice, with a slight accent from his home city of Kalmar. When most Swedes of a certain generation think “historical documentary”, they think of the voice of Hans Villius. He’s won several awards (usually together with Olle Häger) for his work teaching history to the Swedish public, including a medal from the king of Sweden. The English Wikipedia article about him is actually fairly well-written, if you’re interested to read more about his work and impact.

Aside from everything else he’s done, Villius has lent his voice to video games a few times as well. Specifically, his voice can be heard in the Swedish localizations of the historical PC strategy games Caesar III and Pharaoh (and also in the expansion to the latter game, Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile), as the narrator in the cinema sequences, and also giving mission instructions in Pharaoh. This of course feels very fitting because of the historical themes of these games, with Villius basically doing the same job he did in his documentaries. However, he has also been involved with a video game that certainly doesn’t fit in with his usual work. And that was probably intentional.

In 2011, a Swedish trailer for the upcoming action game Gears of War 3 for the Xbox 360 was released, and to the surprise of pretty much everyone, the narrator was Hans Villius. According to one news article, a Swedish PR firm working for Microsoft had hired him to do the narration, with him recording the script in a studio in Stockholm. The video was titled “Gears of War – Sista Striden” (“Gears of War – The Last Battle”), and the video description justifies Villius’ voice by stating that it’s “a piece of gaming history”.

I’ve read some claims that there were English subtitles available for the video at some point, but I haven’t been able to find them, so instead I’ve decided to make subtitles myself. As usual, you can watch my translation on YouTube, or on the Internet Archive.

Of course, the true reason for hiring Villius was most likely that it would get attention for being such a weird choice. As you can see in the video, the narration is actually pretty humorous, especially considering that it’s this famous, respectable, distinguished historian talking earnestly, with his distinctive voice and accent, at times using funny Swedish expressions (I had some difficulty deciding how to translate “grobian”, and I was sorely tempted to translate “dumsnut!” as “you silly goose!”, instead of just “you dummy!”), to describe the events of a brutally violent, extremely macho and fairly juvenile sci-fi action video game, all set to dramatic and bombastic music. If nothing else, any pretense of it being intended to be taken seriously goes out the window when you hear Villius talk about teabagging.

However, I must admit that I’m a little disappointed with the scrip that Villius is reading. It would, in my opinion, have been even funnier if he had been narrating the video as if it was a real historical documentary, rather than saying somewhat generic lines about how cool and violent and heroic the game protagonist is, in a tone that’s actually somewhat different from how he usually sounded in his documentaries. I do believe that some of the lines are intended to fit with Villius’ usual work. Specifically, the introductory “The men in the picture are soldiers…” might be a reference to his classic TV program Svart på Vitt (“Black on White”), in which he would describe a still picture of some historical event in great detail in each episode. It would have been amazing if the trailer had been just that: A still screenshot from the game in black and white, with Villius describing the soldiers and their history. But instead, we get a video that mostly works because of the above-mentioned bizarre juxtaposition of a serious man describing unserious things.

Still, the people from Microsoft and the PR firm probably didn’t think about it as deeply as I did, they presumably thought that the weirdness would be enough to give the game some extra attention. If so, it appears that they were right, because the video did get plenty of attention in the Swedish gaming press, and even in some of the mainstream newspapers. This was in fact quite possibly one of the last narrations that Villius did before he passed away the following year, which might feel a little undignified for such a distinguished and beloved historian. But according to a few brief interviews he did about it, he apparently did at least think it was pretty fun to record, and to learn what “teabagging” means.

The game Journalist, released in 2000 on CD-ROM for PC and Mac, is set in the fictional Swedish town Midköping. The player character (you can choose their gender and name at the beginning of the game) is a journalist that has started working at a local newspaper, Midköpings Kuriren (“The Midköping Courier”), and your goal is to rise up the ranks of the paper by researching and writing stories about events in the town.

The game manual is actually fairly sparse, only containing a brief text about the history of freedom of the press in Sweden and installation instructions for the game, but there is an in-game overview available of how the game works. Journalist takes place over several days, with a new story to write every day. Each day begins with the editor of the newspaper giving you a mission, to write about a particular story, and then you’re at your desk in the office. The game is controlled almost entirely with the mouse (except for when you need to write in names or numbers in certain places with the keyboard). You can click on things in the office, such as your notebook to read your notes, the phone to call people, the clock to make time move forward, or the map on the wall to choose a location in Midköping to travel to.

The goal of each day is to gather enough information for your story. This is mainly done by interviewing people, either by calling them on the phone in the office, or by going to different places in the town and talking to people there. You must also find information in various public government databases, about people, companies and other organizations. Like many countries, Sweden has laws about the freedom of information, and the rights of citizens (including journalists) to access official records. Journalist is to a large degree about making use of these rights, to use the public records to find useful information.

If you suspect someone of having shady business dealings, you can check their tax records to see if they have any debts, for example. Sometimes it’s a chain of one piece of information leading to another. For example, an interviewee might mention the name of another interesting person, but that person’s phone number isn’t in the phonebook you have at the office. So you’ll have to do a search in one database to find their personal identity number, which can then be used to search for their passport information in another database, which includes their phone number (I don’t know if this is actually possible in real life, perhaps the game simplifies the process somewhat for the sake of gameplay flow). Similarly, you can find information about companies at Intellectual Property Office, criminal records from the courthouse, private organizations from the library, and so on. In this way, the game is very educational, teaching you about how the Swedish government works, which government agency is responsible for what and has which information available.

Most of the record information searching is done by visiting the relevant government building, writing the name or personal number of the person you want to investigate, and then wait to receive the information. It’s all depicted in a somewhat old-fashioned way. There are no computer terminals for quick information retrieval, instead you fill in paper forms and hand them over, and get the information on file cards.

Aside from government buildings, you can visit locations in the town such as the hospital, school, town square, hotel, museum, industrial park, pub, and so on, in order to find people to interview. The pub even has a shady backroom where various criminal types hang out, who you can ask questions about dealings in the criminal underworld. As previously noted, you also have a phonebook at the office which contains the numbers to many different people, companies and other organizations. As I played through the game, I did however notice that there were some locations that you actually don’t have to visit at all, and some people you don’t have to interview, in order to complete the game. Maybe some locations are just intended to be “red herrings”, and some names in the phonebook are just there to fill it out.

Interviews are done via dialogue options, but before you can ask a person questions, you have to “earn their trust” by answering a multiple-choice trivia question from them. If you fail, the person won’t talk to you, any you’ll have to wait a while before trying again. Different characters ask questions in different subjects, and they can be things like “what is the capital of this country?”, “which year did this historical event happen?”, “what movie did this actor play in”, or “what kind of animal has this name?” I personally think that these questions are a little silly and break the flow of the game, where you just want to get them over with so you can get on with your investigation. Luckily, I was playing this game in 2025, so I could find most of the answers with a quick internet search (though some of the questions are a little dated, for example asking about statistics that have changed since then, or countries that have changed their names). Alternatively, if you get a trivia question wrong, you can then ask another interviewee the same question to get the correct answer from them, for future use.

When you’ve answered the trivia question correctly, you can ask your own questions, and most of the time the interviewee will happily answer them, telling you everything they know. Sometimes they might become hesitant, and you have to choose the right dialogue option to get them to talk. One recurring theme is the importance of keeping your sources secret if they ask for it, promising them that their names won’t be printed in the paper. Other times, people might only give out information if you promise them a monetary reward, or if you tell them how important the information will be for the public. Different characters can be persuaded in different ways. Again, this feels somewhat educational, teaching you the methods that real journalists use when interviewing people.

Another important source of information is the archive at the newspaper office. It’s run by a jovial old man named Åke, an old veteran whom you can ask for both old newspaper clippings regarding the subject your researching, or just for general advice if you’re stuck and don’t know what to do next. He’s kind of like a built-in tip function in the game, though he won’t always give you all the necessary advice, leaving you to figure some things out on your own. Any newspaper clippings he finds will be put on your desk, where you might also receive other mail on occasion, from people you’ve interviewed and asked for information they didn’t have on hand immediately, but promised to send to you. Finally, there will occasionally come news broadcasts on the radio in the office, that might contain interesting tidbits as well (though it might also just be a “thought for the day”, some famous quote regarding the subject you’re currently writing about).

All in all, the work of a journalist is portrayed as consisting of a lot of detective work. You have to figure out how different events, people and organizations are connected, who can tell you what, where to go next, in order to gather all information that might possibly be available, and usually unravelling some kind of mystery. At one point, one of the interviewees even asks you if you’re a journalist or a police officer.

Since the goal of the game is to gather information, the most important tool at your disposal is your notebook. At basically any time when there’s text on the screen, you drag and drop that text into the notebook in the upper right corner, to create page with that same text on it. Answers to interview questions, information from databases, trivia questions, radio broadcasts, letters, everything can be instantly copied into the notebook, and you can look at your notes at any time, when doing new information searches, when asking questions, and so on. It’s certainly a great relief that this tool is provided in-game, so you don’t have to write everything down in a real-life notebook (though it can still be handy to have one of those available while playing as well, to keep track of various details, or save some useful information for future missions, since the digital notebook is erased when you start a new story).

When you think you’ve gathered all the available information, your final task each day is to visit the editor at the newspaper. He will ask you a series of questions about the story, and you have to answer all of them correctly to “win” the mission and get your story published. Of course, you can have your notebook open while he asks the questions, and hopefully the answers can be found there. If you answer a question wrong, the editor will yell at you angrily and send you back to the office to continue searching for more information (sometimes his reply when you answer a question wrong contains a hint on where the correct answer might be found). The early missions are pretty simple, with the editor only asking one or two questions, but later stories require more answers, with the hardest ones having more than ten questions that must all be answered correctly.

Most of the time, I found the editor’s questions to be pretty fair and relevant to the story, making sure that I’ve found out everything that might be important, and that I’ve made the right connections. However, there were some points where I couldn’t figure out where to find the answer to a particular question he asked. It’s possible that I simply missed some important detail, but there were a few instances where I could swear that the information was impossible to discover, that there’s some bug in the game that makes it so certain important interview questions or interviewee answers didn’t appear, or where there was no way to find a phone number to a person that needed to be interviewed. But, again, it’s possible that I just missed it. Whatever the case might be, since the editor’s questions are all multiple choice, there were times where I got by simply by guessing the right answer, perhaps going through the questioning a few times and getting it right through process of elimination (luckily, the questions are the same each time).

However, there is one important aspect that makes it so that you can’t get through the whole game simply by trial and error: Time. You have to complete your research for a story during a single day, and time always moves forward when you travel to a new place or when you interview someone. When you make an information request to a government agency, it also takes time until they have an answer for you, and you can either click on the clock to move time forward to get the result, or go and do something else in the meantime. An important detail is that certain locations have different opening hours. Later in the day, many government agencies close their doors, making it impossible to get information from them (and if you want to visit the pub, you have to wait until they open in the afternoon). If you spend the whole day failing to find the information needed to answer the editor’s questions, the player character gives up and goes home, and you’ve failed the mission.

This is probably the biggest challenge of Journalist: Managing your time. Especially in later missions, you have to plan out how to spend your day, sending information requests to agencies and doing other things while waiting, making sure that you find all the relevant information before the places where you can find it become unavailable, knowing how to spend your time while waiting for the pub to open, and hopefully giving yourself enough time so that if you fail to answer a question from the editor, you still have time left to find the necessary information and try again (the editor isn’t available at all times during the day either, so you only get a limited number of attempts to get it right). Most of the time you can’t just wait around and push the clock forward for something important to happen, you must move around and make sure that you’ve covered every angle of the story. It can feel a little stressful at times, and I often felt a little bit of dread as I entered the editor’s office, praying that I had managed to find out everything that was necessary, and feeling a great deal of satisfaction when it turned out that I had.

At the end of the day, whether you’ve succeeded with the story or not, there is a sequence where the player character returns to their home, and there’s a series of screens tallying up the results. First, it checks how long you’ve worked during the day, and how it affects your relationship with your partner (who funnily enough is the character of the opposite gender that you didn’t choose at the beginning of the game). Get home early and your partner is happy, work too much overtime and they’re angry with you. Then there’s statistics on how well you’ve done with the trivia questions, a list of all the stories you’ve finished so far, and a comparison of how well Midköpings Kuriren is selling against the competing newspaper (which is literally named “Konkurrenten”, meaning “The Competition”). As far as I can tell, none of these stats actually affect the gameplay during future days, it seems to just affect your score. Your partner might yell at you for coming home late every night, but they’ll never break up with you, and the editor never mentions the sales numbers of the newspaper. It doesn’t seem possible to actually get a “Game Over” in Journalist, no matter how badly you’re doing.

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, the player character moves upwards through a series of titles as they complete more and more stories. They begin as a “Trainee”, then become a “Writer”, then a “Journalist”, and finally receive the hallowed title of “Murvel” (a Swedish slang word, often used somewhat jokingly or even derogatorily, for journalists). At first you’re given each mission directly by the editor, but after finishing a few of them, you’re allowed to pick between several different stories from a corkboard, and is allowed to finish them in any order you want, though you must complete all the stories in each set before moving up in rank and receiving a new set of stories to work your way through. The missions of course increase in complexity with your rank, and in the third and fourth ranks the stories actually stretch over several days, with revelations from one day leading to new things to research the next. In the “Journalist” rank stories can go over two or three days, while at “Murvel” they all stretch out over four days.

In the first two ranks, if you fail to complete a story, the result can either be that it’s not published at all, or that “The Competition” publishes it instead. This element seems to disappear completely in the later ranks; here you must finish each step of the multiple-day stories to continue. If you fail, you’re instead given a much simpler story as a sort of “punishment”, and after completing that you get a new attempt at the mission you failed (though luckily you don’t have to start over with the first day of a story if you’ve already progressed into later days of it). So, technically you could complete these later missions entirely by answering the editor’s questions through trial and error, but I think it’s definitely easier to try to do it the “honest” way. As a sidenote, while I haven’t played through all of the optional “punishment” stories, I did notice that they sometimes involve visiting the locations and talking to the people who are otherwise irrelevant to the “main” stories. So maybe I was wrong in my earlier assessment that these were just extraneous red herrings.

When you start up the game, there’s a disclaimer text stating that any similarities to real people or events are entirely unintentional. I can see why this might be necessary, since the different news stories you research in the game do feel fairly realistic, similar to news regularly seen in real-life newspapers. As noted, the early missions are relatively simple, and the stories are equally so. It can be things like getting an interview with an up-and-coming athlete by discovering their phone number (using the method described above), or investigating the working conditions of a certain profession in the town. Later stories can be far more complex. They often start out seeming to be fairly simple on the surface, but as you start digging, you discover more and more twists and turns, usually involving dirty secrets, scandals, shady dealings, criminal activities or political corruption. Some examples are:

• A politician espousing the importance of caring for the homeless, but at the same time secretly campaigning against a hostel for them being built near her home.
• The usually expensive spice saffron suddenly being sold very cheaply, which turns out to be because a shipment was stolen from the harbor.
• A politician using tax money to pay for expensive hotel visits for her and her husband.
• A clearly incompetent teacher being hired by a school instead of one that is far more competent, because the latter is an immigrant, and the employer is racist.
• A soccer team being able to afford an expensive new player by secretly using a foreign tax haven.
• A nursing home tricking senile patients into giving them all their money.
• A particular company getting lucrative contracts by the town government, because the owner is friends with an influential politician.

Once you’ve completed all the missions at the “Murvel” rank, you’re offered one final story, which I must admit felt a little different from the rest: Discovering a conspiracy involving an occult secret society that has recruited many influential people in Midköping. I think it feels a little “out there” compared to the more mundane scandals of previous missions, but I suppose that it could be seen as fitting final mission of your career, a “dream scoop” for any journalist. In any case, when you’ve finished this final story, the game ends with your character receiving The Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism, and getting a new job on television, promising to stay true to their journalistic integrity and continue their work in service to the public.

Journalist has a very distinctive graphical style. All the locations and characters are illustrated with cartoony, humorous art, reminiscent of European comics. Despite the often very serious subjects of the different stories in the game, the art still lends it a somewhat lighthearted tone. Most of the graphics are still images, with only a few animations when the player character walks into the offices in the morning, walks home in the evening, and stamps in frustration if visiting a location that is closed. There are also small humorous animations of the character doing various actions, such as running, getting an idea, or falling asleep at their desk, that appear at random throughout the day, and the loading screen at the beginning of the game has different humorous comic panels, all of which also contributes to the lighthearted feeling of the game. The actual frontpage newspaper articles that are shown when you successfully complete a mission are all accompanied with what are possibly old public domain photos, slightly blurred and in black and white, often quite weird and only vaguely related to the actual story, again giving it a slightly humorous edge.

The sound effects are generally pretty standard and fitting, but one notable aspect are the voices. Aside from an explanation of the game in Swedish when you click the “help” button, the voice clips heard when doing interviews are all in a sort of mumbling, high-pitched nonsense language, with different “male” and “female” voices, and different clips in different tones if the interviewee become amused, or angry, or hesitant, for example. I can only speculate that this might have been done to create the illusion of Journalist being “fully voiced”, while saving space by reusing a few all-purpose voice clips for the large amount dialogue in the game. In any case, this too contributes to the humorous tone of the game.

Aside from an upbeat poppy synth melody in the intro and ending credits, most of the game music has a jazzy tone. There is only background music in the office (where you can click on the desk radio to change between a few different tunes), and during the statistic screens at the end of the day, with other locations simply having various appropriate ambient background noises.

Of course, in a game with so much dialogue and other text, the writing is very important. I think the game is fairly well written overall, with different characters having different ways of speaking, and their dialogue delivering the relevant information without sounding too much like exposition. In fact, I think part of the challenge is deciding which pieces of dialogue might be relevant to put into your notebook, and which are just extraneous. An amusing detail is that many of the characters and street names in Midköping are apparently named after the people developing the game.

Journalist was developed by the company Aniware. This company was originally named Mixedia, and was one of the developers of the wildly successful (in Sweden, at least) game BackPacker. It’s interesting to compare Journalist and BackPacker, with both being games with a slightly unusual premise for its time. The gameplay in BackPacker is almost entirely focused on answering trivia questions, and many other Aniware games also have some kind of quiz theme, which might explain the presence of such elements in Journalist, despite it not quite fitting in, in my opinion. The game was published by IQ Media Nordic, one of the biggest game publishers in Sweden at the time (among many other things, they published my old favorite Kosmopolska).

The game credits the gameplay idea and writing to the two real-life journalists Thomas Arnroth and Anna Lefvert. Both of them are fairly famous and renowned in Sweden. Arnroth has, aside from newspaper journalism, also worked as an author, comic artist, and perhaps most notably as a video game reviewer and games journalist. Lefvert has also worked as a newspaper journalist, but nowadays focuses more on photography and writing about interior design, gardening and handicraft. Presumably many of the stories and incidents in the game are based on their own career experiences, and their background certainly lends a feeling of authenticity to the game.

The distinctive game graphics were created by artist Eckhardt Milz. I haven’t been able to find much information on him, but he has apparently worked on a few different animated movies through the years (including being an animator on An American Tail: Fievel Goes West), and also on some more games, including at least one other by Aniware. The music was done by Peo Thyrén and Francois Cormery. Thyrén is a well-known Swedish musician with a long and successful career, both as part of his own band, and in collaboration with many other big Swedish music artists. I couldn’t find a lot of information about Cormery, aside from him having worked on at least one other Swedish game.

The game had its own website back when it was published, and most parts of it has been preserved on the Internet Archive. Aside from some general information about the game, the site has a page with various downloads such as a demo version. Very intriguingly, one of the download links is for a version of the intro song of the game that apparently had lyrics written by Peo Thyrén. Unfortunately, that particular link no longer works, so I can only imagine what the lyrics might have been about. Another interesting page has a glossary of various slang terms used by journalists and other people in the newspaper business.

There is also a page on the website with different positive review quotes. Apparently, Journalist was fairly well received at the time, and the reviews I’ve read praise the realistic depiction of newspaper journalism in the game. I have to wonder if the reviews might unavoidably be somewhat biased though, considering that they were written by people who works at newspapers themselves! Still, I do generally agree with the positive reception. I think that Journalist is an interesting, well-made and entertaining game, challenging but with a good learning curve, and very educational about the work and challenges of journalism. After having played through it, I feel like I’ve gained a newfound respect for the journalistic profession, and I actually look at news I read in a different light now, reflecting on the hard work that goes into them.

I also think that Journalist was fairly groundbreaking as a game with this particular subject matter. There have been many other games since where you play as a journalist investigating important stories or solving mysteries, or as a newspaper editor (including the Swedish-made game The Westport Independent), usually with some additional political angle about the importance of journalism in the fight against corruption and fascism, or how those dark forces can make use of journalism for their own goals. As noted, Journalist is somewhat more lighthearted, though I do think it explores the themes of freedom of information, and how to use this freedom in a responsible way to benefit the public.

The game was only ever released in Swedish, and I suspect that it would be difficult to translate it into other languages, since many of the government agencies and other concepts in the games are distinctly Swedish. Still, if you are a Swedish speaker, I can highly recommend checking the game out (it seems to run without problems on my Windows 10 computer). I did also manage to find a video that shows off some of the gameplay, so even if you don’t know Swedish, you can at least see the graphic style, hear the music, and listen to the funny voices:

Growing up in Sweden during the 1980s and 90s, my memories of arcade games are usually seeing one or two cabinets in cafés, bowling alleys, movie theatres and similar establishments. Dedicated arcades, with large numbers of games, seems to have always been a rarity, though not completely absent, in Sweden, even during the height of worldwide popularity for arcade games. The book Insert Coin, written by Ludde Nordenskjöld, is quite possibly the most exhaustive exploration of the history of arcade games in Sweden, and explains the reasons for why they never managed to get quite the same foothold here as they did in other countries (I should note that despite the English title, the book is entirely in Swedish, and it’s probably unlikely that it will receive and English translation).

I haven’t been able to find much information about the author, except that this was apparently his first published book. He wrote another one in 2024, with the title Aldrig Game Over (“Never Game Over”), which is apparently an autobiographical exploration of being a young video gamer during the 80s and 90s, but I haven’t read that one. Insert Coin was published by Dokument Press, a book publisher focusing on books about art, photography and design, and creativity in general (apparently with a certain focus on graffiti art).

The book is divided into chapters of various lengths, and is mainly based on interviews that the author has done with different people involved in the Swedish arcade business. There are chapters about the different companies that imported arcade machines and distributed them across Sweden, and about the few actual arcades that have existed in the country over the years. The book isn’t solely about electronic arcade games, it unavoidably explores the history of jukeboxes, pinball machines and gambling-based slot machines in Sweden as well, since the arcade distributors were involved in those businesses as well, and the rise and fall in popularity of those types of machines affected the popularity of arcade machines too. Aside from interviews with the owners of arcades and arcade distributors, the author has also interviewed Swedish game collectors, or just people who visited the arcades and played the games back in the day. There are also some chapters about the history of arcade and video games in general to give some context for the rest of the book (including a rather interesting one about the government campaign against pinball machines in the USA during the 1940s).

I really like the visual appearance of the book. The different chapters have slightly different layouts, looking somewhat like magazine articles. There is a large number of images on the pages, photos of arcade machines and Swedish arcades, of the people involved, scans of flyers, advertisements, distributor contracts and other documents, and sharp reproductions of the logos of the different Swedish companies. It definitely feels very professional and well made. The text is also well written, with the author often describing the process of getting in touch with the interviewees, making phone calls and visiting the old, often retired owners of the companies to drink coffee and chat about the old days.

So, what was it that happened to the Swedish arcades? One of the most important events that affected their existence was a moral panic during the 1970s and 80s, mainly centered around a specific arcade in Stockholm, called Alexander Lucas (“Alexander Lukas” is the Swedish name for the Donald Duck character Gladstone Gander). Newspapers had articles describing how arcades in general, and Alexander Lucas especially, were shady and unhealthy dens where children went to waste all their savings on addictive arcade and pinball machines, and where illegal drugs were sold. It was even suggested that the children engaged in various criminal activities to get more money for their arcade addictions, including theft and sex work. Some of the people interviewed in Insert Coin claims that some of these reports were exaggerated or completely untrue.

Whatever the case might be, things came to a head in 1981, when a group of Swedish politicians together with news reporters did a tour of various arcades in Stockholm. They didn’t run into any trouble at Alexander Lucas specifically, but when they went to another smaller pool hall they were threatened and physically attacked by the owners. After this incident, one of the politicians, a minister named Karl Boo, drafted a new law that went into effect in 1982, named Automatspelslagen (“the machine game law”). The law states that you need to apply for special permission, and pay a fee, if you want to have an arcade or pinball machine in your establishment. You can only have a limited number of machines in the same locale, you can’t have any criminal activity in your past, the locale can’t be a certain distance from schools or other locations where children gather, and players must be at least 16 years old. While the specific details of the law were a little vague at first, it did have the effect of basically killing off large-scale arcades in Sweden (with a few exceptions), which also seems to have been the intent. Later on it was even ruled that things like LAN cafés, and simply having playable video game consoles in a public establishment, also fell within the purview of this law.

Aside from describing the effects of this particular law, Insert Coin also describes the evolution of Swedish laws regarding slot machines and other types of gambling, and the various clever attempts to get around these laws, since as previously mentioned, these had an effect on the pinball and arcade machines as well. Sometimes they were in direct competition, but since many companies distributed both arcade and slot machines, they usually made most of their money on the latter, which financed the former. Today the majority of Swedish electronic slot machines are the Vegas machines (formerly known as “Jack Vegas”), that are distributed by the state-owned gambling company Svenska Spel. Some of the former arcade distributors interviewed in the book suggest that there’s been an active attempt by the government to replace arcade machines with the much more lucrative gambling-oriented Vegas machines.

During the 1990s, there was an active attempt to create an arcade in Stockholm despite the legal restrictions. The owners of the arcade, called The Plays wanted to challenge and test the limits of the laws, and were actually quite successful, inspiring some other people to open similar establishments as well (including in my home city of Helsingborg, though sadly I’m too young to have any memories of it). The book notes that one reason for their popularity during this decade was that Sweden was in an economic recession, which caused the state to do a currency devaluation, which in turn made imported goods, such as home video games, more expensive. Therefore, people who couldn’t afford home consoles went to the arcades instead. Most of the arcades from this time didn’t survive into the 2000s, however, both because Sweden’s economy improved, and because home video games began catching up with arcade games when it came to graphics and other technological aspects. The latter was one of the major reasons for why arcade games in general became less popular, not just in Sweden, but worldwide. Nowadays, I’m only aware of a few Swedish arcades that are still open, such as at the Liseberg amusement park in Gothenburg, Pixel Arcade in Malmö, and HEY STHLM in Stockholm (taking its name from the Japanese arcade “Hey” in Tokyo).

But despite the ups and downs in the popularity of arcade games in Sweden, there were in fact several different companies that distributed and serviced the machines across the country. As mentioned, Insert Coin contains interviews with several of the former owners of these distributors, who relates their stories about what the business was like, their relationships with the foreign arcade manufacturers such as Bally and Atari (including some amusing stories about Nolan Bushnell of Atari pretending that the company was bigger and more successful than it actually was when meeting with the Swedes during the 1970s). In fact, one of the Swedish distributors was allowed to call themselves “Bally Scandinavia”, and it was they who ran Alexander Lucas.

One interesting aspect of the Swedish arcade distributors were the modifications they did of the imported games. Many of the more colorful cabinets were overhauled with more neutral-looking wood paneling, in order to make them fit in more “adult” locations such as restaurants. Swedish distributors were apparently also pioneers during the 1970s and 80s when it came to the concept of reusable “universal cabinets”, where you could simply replace the circuitry board instead of having to buy a completely new machine. There were the “JG Classics”, made specifically to fit inside a Swedish Volvo car for transportation, and the modular “JK Cabinets” that could be fit in alongside vending machines. Other experiments included a variant that could be put in a storefront window, with the coin mechanism and controls in a box on the outside of the window, so the game could be played even when the store was closed.

The legislation created to combat arcades in Sweden survived into the 2010s. When Insert Coin was published in 2017, the law was still in effect. The final chapter of the book is an interview with two women at the Swedish Gambling Authority, the government organization that is responsible for enforcing the law. They are both in agreement that the law is old and outdated, and the organization has sent proposals to the Swedish government about updating the law and removing most of its restrictions. The book ends with an epilogue stating that a proposal for a reevaluation and change in the law is currently being processed by government bodies. This processing would in fact take several more years, but finally, in 2022, an overhaul of the law was voted through in the Swedish parliament, and went into effect in 2023. This change included removing the need for special permissions and fees for arcade machines. However, the new law included a requirement for receipts from the machines, which caused some protests from the remaining Swedish arcade operators. One of the owners of HEY STHLM was interviewed by Swedish TV news, and stated that the arcade machines aren’t built to print out receipts, hoping that the requirement could be limited to buying game tokens for the machines instead. I haven’t been able to find any more news reports after 2023 about what happened or how the law has been applied, but as of this writing the above-mentioned arcades are still up and running, so presumably things have worked out for them.

In summary, the history of arcade games in Sweden is strange, fascinating and somewhat complex, and I’m glad that a book like Insert Coin exists to chronicle it. I consider it to be on par with Svensk videospelsutveckling among Swedish books on video game history, both regarding the importance of the subject matter and the quality of the writing, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Swedish gaming history and gaming culture.

Today is the three-year anniversary of The Swedish Games, and just like the previous anniversaries, I wanted to do something involving the game Kosmopolska, since that was the game that originally inspired me to want to write about Swedish video games (as a sidenote, I have kept working on and updated the website I created for that particular game last year, so check it out for more interesting information and media related to the game). This year, I decided to make English subtitles for a short TV interview with one of the people involved in the creation of the game, Henrik Georgsson.

The interview was a part of a one-episode TV program on Swedish public TV, titled Dataspel för vuxna (“Computer games for grownups”). I’ve only translated the part that is about Kosmopolska, but the whole untranslated episode is available from the invaluable YouTube channel Rosa Mannen. The first half of the episode is about a similar artistic and adult multimedia PC game, the Danish game Blackout (which did receive a Swedish translation, so I might write about it in the future).

The interview in the Kosmopolska segment is done in black and white, in an actual old prison cell in Stockholm, reflecting the black and white prison cell parts of the game. The credits don’t say who is conducting the interview, but it might possibly be the person credited as “producer”, Kristin Olson. The interviewee, Henrik Georgsson, is credited for having written and directed the live action film sequences for the prison cell segments in Kosmopolska (but he wasn’t involved in the colorful CG film sequences in the “imagination” part of the game). He has worked as a director and scriptwriter since the 1970s, mainly on Swedish film and TV series, and has received international awards for some of them. Interestingly enough, he has also been involved in at least one other game, another thing I might write about in the future.

I have uploaded my translation to YouTube and the Internet Archive. As previously noted, it’s a very short interview, but I still think it’s interesting to hear Georgsson talk about his involvement in Kosmopolska, and his thoughts on video games as a serious artistic medium in general. Any piece of media, however small, that is about one of my favorite games is an exciting discovery to me.

I have previously written a post on this blog where I tried to compile a list of every game, electronic or otherwise, based on the Moomin characters (and, as I noted in that post, I consider most of those games to more or less fall under the purview of this blog, because of the mixed Swedish/Finnish nationality of the characters’ creator). The first game based on the Moomin books was a boardgame released in 1957, with both the Finnish name Muumipeli and the Swedish name Muminspelet on the box, both translating to “The Moomin Game”. One of the most notable things about this particular Moomin game is that it’s the only one that was actually designed by the creator of the Moomin characters herself, the brilliant artist and author Tove Jansson, alongside her brother Lars “Lasse” Jansson.

Tove Jansson, the daughter of Swedish graphic artist Signe “Ham” Hammarsten-Jansson and Finnish sculptor Viktor “Faffan” Jansson, was born in 1914 in Finland, and began her career as an artist at an early age. While small creatures resembling the Moomins had appeared in her art earlier, the first book with the characters was published in 1945. The Moomins began to become really popular during the 1950s, leading to many companies asking Tove for permission to produce all kinds of merchandising products based on the characters. Tove was very involved in the production of the merchandise, often giving detailed instructions on how the Moomin characters could be depicted, and drawing many images herself specifically intended for products such as calendars, cards, wallpapers, towels, and so on. Her brother Lars, also an artist and author, also became deeply involved in the business, eventually founding the company Moomin Characters specifically to keep track of the growing Moomin brand and its many licensees. Among other things, Lars took over drawing and writing the Moomin newspaper comic strip for many years when Tove found it too stressful to work on.

I haven’t been able to find much specific information about the genesis and development of Muminspelet, other than statements that both Tove and Lars were involved in its creation. The game was originally manufactured by the Finnish company Kuvataide Bildkonst, and was first sold by the Finnish department store retailer Stockmann. When it was released in 1957, there was a “demonstration with living game pieces” at the Stockmann store in Helsinki, with children being instructed by Moominmamma to find her missing key, while being chased by the Groke and a palm tree throwing coconuts (all of which are parts of the actual boardgame). Since then, it has been published in various different editions by different companies, such as the Swedish Alga, until the present day. Nowadays the publishing rights for the game are owned by the Finnish company Martinex (under their game label Peliko, which was previously a separate game company before being bought by Martinex), which also sells all kinds of official Moomin toys and other merchandise.

The game instructions begin with a short story written by Tove Jansson, describing “how it came about”. The story explains that a large group of guests had come to visit the Moomins, and Moominmamma decided to show the around all across the Moominvalley. After the guests have left, Moominmamma discovers that she has dropped several important objects during her tour of the valley, including the key to the jam storage cellar, a pair of seashells (Tove was fond of collecting seashells herself), and several “beautiful stones”. Therefore she gives the other members of the Moomin family the mission to find her missing items, and just to make it more fun (“in the Moominvalley even boring things are done in a fun way”), she decides to make a game of it. The game instructions end with the Moomintroll stating “And for justice to be done, the winner will get a jam sandwich”.

The game is played on a board depicting the Moominvalley (with the image being pretty accurate to other maps of the valley that Tove had drawn previously), with various paths with steps to move along. The gameplay consists of the fairly typical mechanic of rolling a six-sided dice and moving your game piece the number of steps the dice shows. The rules specifically states that you can choose to move along any path, but you can’t turn around and go back the way you came. One notable section of the game is the “sailing routes” that goes across the sea to the island of the Hattifatteners. You can only choose one of these routes when going in one direction, having to “tack and sail” because of “the wind being in the northwest” (Tove had a lot of experience with sailing herself, and had a great love for the sea in general).

Before the game begins, the key, the seashells and the stones are placed at spots indicated on the gameboard, and the goal of the game is to visit these spots and collect the key, and either one of the seashells or two of the stones, before travelling all the way back to the starting point at the Moominhouse. However, if you have collected the key and then pass by one of the other players, or they pass by you, you have to give the key to that player. So there will eventually come a time during the game session where the different players are moving to intercept each other, with the key often changing hands many times.

Aside from this, there are also several spots on the board where if you land, you have to draw a “surprise card” with various effects, some beneficial (such as receiving an extra stone or being able to roll the dice multiple times), some inconvenient (such as losing stones, having to stand still for multiple rounds, or being transported to some particular spot on the board). There are also specific spots on the board where different “dangers” happen if you land on them, according to the game instructions, without drawing a random card. These include a palm tree where you’ll get knocked out for two rounds by a coconut, and a spot where the Groke freezes you.

I have only had one opportunity to actually play the copy of Muminspelet I bought a while ago (playing a video game by yourself is much easier than gathering enough people to play a board game with), with two other (adult) players. In general, we found the rules easy to understand and keep track of, though there was some trouble with the rule of only being allowed to move your game piece in one direction. Eventually we decided that you couldn’t move in different directions during the same turn, but that it was okay to turn back the way you came during future movements, mostly just so that we didn’t have to keep track of which direction we had moved the previous turn. The game went a little slowly in the beginning, since you could never be sure how far you would be able to move. There was also the concern that it might be difficult to pick up the required objects, since you have to end your movement on the spots where they are, but this was never a big problem when we played. Maybe we were just lucky with our rolls, or maybe the gameboard is well enough designed so that there’s enough opportunities to pick up stuff. There’s also the theoretical risk that someone might pick up all the stones before anyone else can get them, but this wasn’t a problem when we played either. Some of the cards actually force you to give stones to another player, possibly to avoid this problem, which had the effect of motivating us to actually pick up more stones than needed, just in case. Also, it was very rare than any of us ended up on the “danger spots” on the board.

Once one of the players had managed to pick up the key, the game got a little more exciting, with players chasing each other and the key changing ownership back and forth multiple times. Eventually, the player that currently held the key happened to pick up a card that forced them to immediately move to the Moominhouse. This would in general be an inconvenience, but in this case it of course meant that they immediately won the game. All in all, it was a pretty fun game session, though I suspect it might be even more interesting with more players (the game has six player pieces in total).

The best thing about Muminspelet, however, is the presentation. The big gameboard is especially beautiful, drawn in Tove Jansson’s distinctive Moomin style, colorful, with clear paths and lots of fun characters and fascinating details all across the map. Each of the cards also has a cute illustration by Tove, often with a small black snouted creature as a stand-in for the player. The rules are also clearly written, and the story at the beginning of the game instructions is a delight to read, being just as clever, humorous and charming as any of the Moomin books. I especially like that Moominmamma feels like the central character of the game: It’s her items that you are collecting, it’s she who decides the rules of the game, and she’s the central figure on the game cover. The cards are also charming, which each has a fun description of some event and how it affects the player, usually involving one of the many characters inhabiting the Moominvalley. One interesting aspect of the game is the languages. In the original version there were rules written in both Swedish and Finnish, and each card has a text in both languages. In the later edition that I own, there are also rules in English in addition to Swedish and Finnish, and an alternative set of cards with English text.

As a sidenote, I have to say that I’m happy that the Moominvalley alter egos of both of Tove’s two greatest lesbian loves are present in the game: Thingumy and Bob (aka Tofslan and Vifslan, representing Tove herself and her first girlfriend Vivica Bandler) appear on one of the cards, and Too-Ticky (representing Tove’s later life partner Tuulikki Pietilä) can be seen in the lower right corner of the game board. Tove had to keep these relationships more or less secret for many years due to the social mores of the time, but she still decided to hint at them in her Moomin stories.

As noted previously, Muminspelet has had several different releases over the years. The rules have remained the same, but there are some differences in the appearances of the different versions. The most notable difference is that when the game was intended to be re-publishes in the 1970s, it was discovered that Tove Jansson’s original drawing of the gameboard had been lost, so Lars Jansson drew a new one, which has been used in newer versions ever since. I have seen some photos of the gameboard in the earlier versions, and it seems that Lars did an impressive job reproducing the structure of it, imitating Tove’s style and keeping all the little details (though he also adds some more). One important difference is that the later gameboard has a number of signs with names (in both Swedish and Finnish) for the different areas of the map. There are also some differences in some of the spots on the path: In the original version, the “danger spots” have red flags with numbers on them, while in the newer versions they are just black spots. The spots where you draw a card actually had pictures of cards on the originally, but are now small stars. Also, the blue spots with the stones were originally larger, with a star twinkle on them. I did also come across a third version of the gameboard, apparently from one of the newer editions, where it is completely redrawn by an unknown artist, with a noticeably different style, and different characters in many spots. It still looks decent, but nowhere near as good as the other two versions of the board.

Other differences between the different versions of the game includes the game pieces. In the early version, the player pieces were generic boardgame pawns in different colors, while in the version I own, they are plastic figures of various Moomin characters (Moomintroll, Moominmamma, Moominpappa, Snork Maiden, Snufkin and Sniff). These miniatures are fairly well made, though while playing the game we noticed that they had a tendency to fall over, sometimes making it difficult to know which spot on the board they had been standing on. The pieces representing the key, the stones and the seashells also differ between versions: Originally they were paper tokens with images on them (also drawn by Tove?), but in more recent edition they are plastic pieces as well.

There are also different covers for different releases of the game. Most have the same cover image, presumably drawn by Tove Jansson, but there’s at least one later edition with a different cover, with the same general layout, but with different characters drawn in a somewhat different style. Some smaller differences include different images on the backs of the cards in the different versions, and some versions of the game instructions having illustrations in them.

I really do like Muminspelet, both playing it and simply admiring it as a work of art. It’s especially fun to play a game created by Tove Jansson herself, and I might even go so far as to say that it could be considered an additional piece of Moomin fiction by her, a part of the Moomin “canon”, as it were. As noted, the game is still being sold, and recent editions come with rules in English as well, so if you are a Moomin fan, I can highly recommend buying a copy.