We spoke with one of the founders of DICE about their first game.
These days, Swedish studio Digital Illusions, more popularly known as DICE, is one of the world’s largest game developers. The EA-owned studio is best known for the Battlefield series and for its game engine Frostbite, which powers everything from Dragon Age: The Veilguard to EA Sports FC.
Roots on the Amiga
But Digital Illusions has a long and rich history, dating back to the demo scene on the Amiga. The studio was founded in the early nineties by four veterans from the Swedish demo group The Silents, namely Olof Gustafsson, Markus Nyström, Andreas Axelsson, and Fredrik Liljegren. Already with their very first game, they had an international hit on their hands.
The game was called Pinball Dreams, and Digital Illusions themselves promoted it as the first true pinball simulator. Not only did it feature the most realistic ball physics system of its time, but it also had large playfields that extended vertically across multiple screens. This allowed the game to have proportionally accurate pinball tables without having to shrink them in size.
Add to that great graphics, a powerful soundtrack, and a rich array of authentic sound effects, and we’re talking about a true classic. Pinball Dreams sold over 650,000 copies in its first year on the market, received two official sequels, and was at least partly responsible for making virtual pinball games one of the gaming industry’s big genres for a brief time in the ’90s.
Interview with Fredrik Liljegren
We’d like to take a proper deep dive into Pinball Dreams and its sequels at a later date. But in the meantime, we’ve reached out to former Digital Illusions spokesperson Fredrik Liljegren to hear a bit about the development of the game and the early history of Digital Illusions.
Were there specific existing pinball games that served as inspiration, or did you perceive a gap in the market and aim to fill it with your own unique approach?
The initial idea to make a Pinball game actually came from some of our other members of our Demo Group the Silents, one of the Artists had drawn a pinball playing area that was larger then the screen, we thought as avid pinball players ourselves that this was an interesting way to depict the game as all previous pinball games we had seen all was on a single screen and hence could not have the same layout as a real machine in dimensions.
As I stated we all enjoyed playing pinball as well, so we thought why not as our first game make something we already enjoy playing. It also «seemed» like an easy concept to execute at the time and with the scrolling screen being able to depict a real pinball layout we thought we had something unique to bring to it as well.
How did you go about to translate this physical game into an on screen game, this must have been a challenge for you.
Given we were all quite young at the time, we enlisted an older programmer we knew that had more of the math skills needed to write the ball physics for us while we worked on the other aspects of the game. It took him quite some time as he was doing this in his spare time to get the accurate physical attributes of the ball behavior and also to make it fast enough to be in real time. For the first game we also keept the playing area to a single plane and a single ball which simplified things as well.
A group of friends and a demo group to entering the commercial gaming industry, what were the major differences in this transition, and what were some of the most significant challenges you encountered along the way?
The major challenge was mostly that we could not dedicate ourselves full time due to either school or work. So the development time for the first game was done in spare time so it took more than four years to complete the first game, Pinball Dreams.
Could you also shed some light on the process of securing a publisher for your games? Additionally, I am interested in hearing about your experiences as an independent developer in Sweden collaborating with a publisher based in the UK.
Being from the demo scene we had friends all over Europe including in the UK, so when we had a playable demo of the game after three years we decided to go over to a Trade Show in London to showcase the game to potential publishers. We stayed with some of our demo group friends just outside of London and not all of us were old enough to get into the ECTS but somehow we managed to all get in. Once there we simply walked up to the publishers we had identified beforehand as interesting based on the games we enjoyed playing to show off the game.
We got quite a bit of interest and even had one publisher offer us a contract on the spot, but when they were unwilling for us to take the contract with us and for us to speak to a lawyer about it we knew it was a bad offer.
After the show we keep in touch with the publishers that had shown interest and ahead of the next year’s show we sent them a more finished product before the show. Three of them sent us contract offers prior to the show, based on these we decided to go with 21st Century Entertainment as the publisher as they offered us the best deal and seemed the most enthusiastic about the game itself.
Also, the ethical considerations Digital Illusions faced when your games were cracked by Fairlight, also from the demo scene. How did your team navigate these challenges, and what strategies did you employ to address them?
We knew that the game was going to be cracked, given that we ourselves did some cracking and distributing of cracked copies. So was not really a big thing, but we did put in some crack detections that altered some of the scoring and ball physics in later games, that was never fixed by the crackers so they played worse than if you owned the original game.
On a lighter note, do you have any favorite pinball tables, both within the Pinball series and in real life?
My real life favorite game of all time has to be Adams Family, during the development of Pinball Dreams my favorite was Terminator 2.
Are you still playing real pinball tables? As part of a club, perhaps? There are competitions and international leagues now, have you participated in any of this?
I play real pinball tables at a friend’s house occasionally, I have not participated in any leagues. I know Olof Gustafsson, who did the music for our pinball games, is a competitive Pinball gamer on real tables.
You mention Addams Family and Terminator 2, great classics indeed. New, real pinball machines are still being made. Any modern favorites?
Guardians of the Galaxy is a very good modern table.
21st Century Entertainment kept releasing updates and variants of your pinball games, and even new games such as Slam Tilt. Were you involved in any of this?
No, we were not involved in any development outside of the Amiga versions of Pinball Dream, Pinball Fantasies or Pinball Illusion.
Several other developers started making pinball games, particularly in the ’90s, likely inspired by your success. Examples are the Epic Pinball series and Pro Pinball Series. Did you play any of these, or others? What did you think of them?
I did not play any other Pinball games outside of our own. But happy to see that we did inspire other developers.
What about more modern pinball games, like Pinball Arcade or Zen Pinball?
No, I only play real pinball tables these days.
Have you considered going back to creating pinball games again?
No, I am no longer interested in Game Development, it was something I did when i was younger but now have no interest in.
After having made a name for yourselves with pinball games, you went in an entirely different direction and made Benefactor, a 2D puzzle-platforming game. How did that come about?
With the success of the Pinball games and making a names for ourselves, this lead to other small team reaching out to us and wanting to work with us on their titles, Benefactor was two guys from the north of sweden that we engaged with and they later became a part of DICE, they where already developing benefactor so that how it became released under the DICE names.
Did Benefactor really have to be that difficult?
Yes, it needed to offer a HARD challenge. LOL!
You mentioned your old demogroup The Silents. References and shoutouts to that group and the abbreviation TSL kept popping up in Digital Illusions and DICE games, and to some of us they are fun to see and find. Did you put these in every game, and are you still doing this?
I am sure that there are still hidden references but maybe now much harder to find. Most of the Silents members are no longer at DICE, so maybe they are less prevalent.
The demoscene is still going strong by the way, are you keeping up with current releases? Keeping in touch with any old friends and contacts still in the scene? Have you ever wanted to go back and create a demoscene production again?
Not keeping up with it or much contact with anyone that is a part of it. And I’ve no interest in developing anything in that space.
We’d like to thank Fredrik Liljegren for taking the time to answer our questions!
If you’d like to read more interviews like this, as well as other features in English, please have a look here!