A tale of two very empty game studios

Growing up, Molly Ericson loved two things — horses and video games. When studying game design at the university she became annoyed when she watched her boyfriend play FIFA. Why were there no sports games like that for equestrian sports? So she decided to fix that problem herself, and brought her fiancé along on the ride.

Making game studios more inclusive and increasing the gender balance are big challenges for the games industry. The good news? Vermila Studios in Madrid seems to have found a solution to the problem. The bad news? They don’t really know how they did it.

Do we really need more committees? Well, if the committee is committed to your well-being, the answer might be yes. At Deep Silver Dambuster Studios in Nottingham, Emma Green and the other members of the Well-Being Committee is busy making the work place better for everyone, with a special focus on mental health. As it turns out, it doesn’t need to be all that complicated.

Growing up under communism in East Germany wasn’t great for graphic novel buff Michael Hochhaus. The only good comics he could get his hands on were the few his relatives managed to smuggle in. But Michael beat the odds, and today he works for Koch Films and has an impressive collection of drawings from some the world’s best-known cartoonists and animators.

Aisha Kuipers was 30 years old and had achieved her dream of being a PR manager at the VR studio Vertigo Games. That’s when she discovered she had incurable cancer. How do you maintain a sense of purpose, joy and gratitude in the middle of dealing with all that? Well, Aisha has some answers.

David finds rare Nintendo special editions, a Mega CD collection with unopened games, a handheld games collection with some very special Pokemon games, and he also tells us all about his love for fat TVs.

In a vault somewhere close to Karlstad, Sweden, the ever-growing Embracer Games Archive is stored. It’s time to do some serious unboxing and find out what kind of gaming treasures are hidden in all those pallets and boxes. Join Games Archive’s new CO David Boström on one last visit to the vault.

Aaron Fernández had two dreams growing up, to become a rock star or a game developer. Both seemed out of reach as he worked in the family business, a metal workshop in Madrid. But then he hurt his shoulder, downloaded Unreal Engine for free and started practicing coding on his own. And all of a sudden, maybe that childhood dream wasn’t  that far off after all.

This fan favourite game has a lot of names! Game historian Martin Lindell has looked through another box in the growing Embracer Games Archive collections, and found the Konami silver boxes, and more specifically the game Probotector. If you don’t recognise the name, don’t worry. You might know it by one of its other names.

Video games are great, but for Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors, it all began with used comic books. Growing up in the countryside and in need of cash, he started his first business when he was in primary school and ran Sweden’s largest used comics business by the time he was 15. That’s when he took notice of some second-hand Nintendo games and that’s when everything changed.