We’ve spoken with Badger Punch Games about their award-winning Amiga-game Roguecraft.
The Amiga game Roguecraft from Norwegian indie developers Badger Punch Games has enjoyed great success since it launched last year, and this weekend saw it win an award for best retro game at the Debug Indie Game Awards in Brighton. We caught up with Henning and Ricki from Badger Punch Games to hear more about them and their game.
Who are Badger Punch, and how did you come about?
Badger Punch Games AS consists of Ricki Sickenger and Henning Ludvigsen. We got to know each other back in the early 1990s in the demoscene, and later we were part of a relatively untold chapter of Norwegian gaming history when we moved to Greece (along with several others) to create an MMORPG called Darkfall Online. The plan was to stay there for a year, but it ended up being almost ten years.
Ricki returned to Norway a couple of years before Henning, but we chatted daily and started making small games together online just for fun. The first game was Ubergridder for Xbox Live Indie, where the name Badger Punch Games also originated. This was about 15 years ago, and even though it has only been a hobby for both of us, we had to register an AS (limited company) at the end of 2024 when our Amiga game, Roguecraft, did quite well.
First came Rogue64, then Roguecraft. Will there be another game in the same series?
It started with Rogue4K, a game Ricki made for a competition where the game had to be under 4000 bytes. It ended up being a great starting point to work from, so we decided to create Rogue64 with graphics, music, some extra gameplay elements, and release it both physically and digitally.
Roguecraft became a natural evolution as we moved to the Amiga 16-bit generation with more features, more monsters, three classes, isometric perspective, and animated graphics.
We have many exciting plans for the coming years with this series.
We will soon release an updated version of Roguecraft, and we are flirting with the idea of porting Roguecraft to the Sega Megadrive, as well as a mix of Rogue64 and Roguecraft to the NES. We are also working on something very exciting but currently «secret» that we unfortunately can’t talk about yet. Additionally, we have started on a further evolution of Roguecraft for modern platforms like Steam and Nintendo Switch, where the game will feel like an «upscaled» Amiga game. And, a couple of plans for the Commodore 64. Time is clearly a challenge, but we have mapped out plans for the next few years, roughly.
Roguecraft is your first Amiga game. Did you get tired of making Commodore 64 games?
Roguecraft is our first game for the Amiga, yes, but we are far from tired of making Commodore 64 games. We have a couple of plans we want to execute on the Commodore 64 when it fits our schedule. We also follow a style where we only work on things that we both find fun to do, and the Commodore 64 is definitely a platform we both have tons of nostalgia for and enjoy making games for. The reason we started on the Amiga was that after Rogue64, we felt we had a game we could expand upon, and it felt natural to think we could create a better version of the game on the Amiga.
How do you feel the reception of the game has been in the retro community?
The reception of Roguecraft took us, the publisher, and the distributor by surprise. There has been overwhelmingly positive feedback and incredible coverage of the game in both retro communities and the press, as well as in mainstream gaming press. Countless videos have been uploaded to YouTube, and people are streaming the game live. It’s incredibly motivating to create such games for retro systems when you receive such feedback and see people actually playing our games and enjoying what we create. Now we’re trying to ride that wave a bit and make more.
What is your motivation for making retro games?
Ricki: I’ve always wanted to make games for the first computers I had, but I didn’t have the knowledge to do so back in the 80s and 90s. It’s incredibly fun to go back to those old machines and explore their possibilities and potential with modern tools and the experience of a modern game developer. There’s also a special joy in creating physical copies of our games and having them on the shelf at home. It makes me proud and happy.
Henning: My motivation is nostalgia, and how cool it is to see people play the games we’ve made and enjoy them. There’s also something about releasing physical copies in addition to digital sales, which you don’t see often with modern games. I’m old-school and love physical boxes. The fact that there are publishers today who produce and release physical games for retro systems is incredibly fun!
I also hit a wall a few years ago when I was working full-time on modern video games and burned out, so I left the industry to work full-time on board games. But making smaller video games as a hobby, where it’s just the two of us working very well together, focusing on simplicity and having fun, is very rewarding and gives me a lot of motivation.
If you could do this full-time, would you, or is it best to keep it as a hobby?
(Retro) game development is something we do because we think it’s fun and because it’s a break from regular work. If we could do it without the stress of having to earn enough to survive, we would gladly do it full-time. We feel we have a good thing going now, where we can spend the time we want on projects and work on the platforms and games that come to mind without thinking too much about the market or expectations.
How did you find a publisher? And what is included in the physical box when you order?
We have been involved with several publishers for previous games on the Commodore 64 and Mega 65. We had some contact with Thalamus Digital, but no concrete agreements, plus we didn’t think we had much of a chance with a legendary publisher like them. When we were at the after-party at Kickstart 2022 in Nottingham, we had a few beers with some Amiga developers who thought we were definitely «Thalamus material,» which led to us contacting them and securing a deal almost immediately. They did an amazing job, and the game has done incredibly well!
We had 3 versions of the box for pre-sale:
Standard Edition
- Box
- Manual
- CD with CD32 version
- Floppy disc label
- Sticker
- Postcard (Thalamus + Badger Punch)
- A3 poster
Deluxe Edition
- Box
- Manual
- CD with CD32 version
- Sticker
- Postcard (Thalamus + Badger Punch)
- A3 poster
- Bookmark
- Sticker with characters from Roguecraft
- Floppy disk
Zero Clucks Edition
- Box
- Manual
- CD with CD32 version
- Sticker
- Postcard (Thalamus + Badger Punch)
- A3 poster
- Bookmark
- Sticker with characters from Roguecraft
- Floppy disk
- Badge
- T-shirt
- Plastic chicken
We are now preparing to produce a new batch of physical boxes for those who missed out on the first round!
How did you decide what to include in the box?
We had some discussions with Thalamus about what should be included and what players would enjoy, and we ended up with what we believe is a good combination of the two.
Can we also get some background on the chicken in the game? 😄
The chicken came about by coincidence, really. Henning has a Photoshop file where he occasionally plays around with ideas for monsters and characters. Suddenly, a chicken appeared, and we thought it could be fun to combine it with Lovecraft-inspired monsters. This later evolved into a mutated version of the chicken to make it more interesting and to surprise players on later levels in the game.
We like to include a bit of humor in what we do, so including the chicken on the cover and poster of the game, along with the tentacle monster in the background, creates a slightly amusing contrast where you’re not quite sure if it’s an actual chicken or something more sinister when you discover the skeletons lying next to it.
When you buy the most exclusive «Zero Clucks Edition» of the physical box, you also get a small plastic chicken in the box, which we thought was fitting.
How did it feel to win the Debug Indie Game Awards in the retro category?
It was fantastic to win with an Amiga game in 2025. We are incredibly proud of the project and super grateful for the help we’ve received along the way, from both the publisher and everyone else involved. We didn’t think we would win when we were nominated alongside other incredibly good games like Goodboy Galaxy and Flea2.
Thanks for your time!
Roguecraft is available on Itch.io.
Interested in reading more about Rogue? We interviewed one of the original creators of Rogue last year. Read on for the story of Rogue.
While Spillhistorie.no is a Norwegian site, we have a number of articles in English. These include features on classic games and interviews with various people from gaming.