The story of Tarsier’s beginnings could so easily have ended up a cautionary tale, a warning about learning to walk before you can run. Armed with an inspired concept, a group of nine students aimed high, without truly understanding the industry they were stepping into, or how to deliver on their promise. But while that first project never came to fruition, it would lead to a relationship that allowed the Swedish studio to make its name in secondparty development, until eventually it was ready to return to ideas of its own. Now, with a string of eclectic releases under its belt, Tarsier has no cause to curse that stumbling start.
One of the founding group of nine was who remains the company’s CEO. He began his career as a coder during the late-’90s web boom, but his head was turned by new university courses popping up around Sweden that focused on digital art and games. “I was tired of just doing webpages for banks and football teams,” he tells us. “So I jumped off that and started studying game development in Karlshamn.” It was here that he and the(Swedish for ‘ten’), and were awarded the prize of an incubator programme that provided resources to take the concept forward – albeit not financial ones. “There was no budget,” Johnsson recalls. “The only thing we got was office space.”
