GRIN

» see grin.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ulf Andersson applied to Massive Entertainment in the mid-1990s and did not get the job. They hired somebody cheaper. So he and his brother Bo started their own studio in Stockholm in 1997 and recruited the first programmers off IRC, in those years a reasonable place to find somebody who could write a renderer.

The studio was called GRIN and its first game, Ballistics, came out in 2001 as a technology showcase built alongside Nvidia for the GeForce 3. That set the pattern. GRIN was always a little better at engines than at shipping its own ideas, and what it mostly did instead was take in other people's games. Ubisoft handed over the Windows versions of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and its sequel. Capcom came next with Bionic Commando Rearmed and then the full-price Bionic Commando, and Wanted: Weapons of Fate arrived from Warner Bros.

By August 2008 it had about 250 people in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Barcelona and a quality-assurance office in Jakarta. Counting a development partnership with Streamline Studios the number was closer to 350, and that is the figure behind MCV calling it the second-largest independent developer in Europe after Jagex. A year later there was nothing left. Three games shipped in 2009 and all three sold below expectation, the layoffs started in May, and every office outside Stockholm had closed by June.

On 12 August 2009 grin.se stopped being a studio site. In its place sat a page headed "Grin Gone", dated Stockholm, signed by both brothers with their titles still attached, and it said what had happened in one sentence: too many publishers had been delaying their payments, causing an unbearable cashflow situation. Then it thanked Nvidia, Intel, the Ubisoft team, the bank, and Adam Boyes at Capcom US for being honest, "a rare gift." It ended with "brb... /afk" and the names of two founders who did not have a company any more.

~ the dossier ~

~ the diesel years ~

Diesel was the engine, written for Ballistics and rebuilt twice. It is the part of GRIN that is still running. Overkill Software, founded in 2009 by the same two brothers with composer Simon Viklund, shipped Payday: The Heist on a modified Diesel, then Payday 2 and Raid: World War II on Diesel 2.0. Starbreeze bought Overkill in 2012 and the engine went with it. A piece of a bankrupt Swedish studio has been underneath one of the most-played co-op shooters on Steam for fifteen years.

The rest of the staff split into new companies within months. Roughly twenty-five people in Gothenburg formed Outbreak Studios the same week. The Bionic Commando Rearmed team became Might and Delight in April 2010. Two of the lead engineers started an engine company called Bitsquid, which Autodesk later bought and which is now the thing Vermintide and Darktide run on. For a studio that failed, GRIN seeded an unusual amount of the Swedish industry.

~ the unreleased masterpiece ~

The farewell letter mentions "our unreleased masterpiece that we weren't allowed to finish" and names nobody. What it meant came out afterward through ex-employee portfolios: a project codenamed Fortress, an action role-playing game that Square Enix had taken on and reframed as a Final Fantasy spin-off, in preproduction from the second half of 2008.

The detailed version of that story is the founders' version and it arrived almost two years later, in an Aftonbladet interview on 28 May 2011. Milestone payments stopped for roughly six months, Square Enix called in early August 2009 to say none were coming, and the art direction notes never made sense because they were passing through an English office to a Japanese one that had never stated what it wanted. Square Enix has never publicly answered any of it, and the figures in the retelling disagree: the contract is reported as both 16.5 and 20 million dollars depending on which outlet relayed the interview.

Ulf Andersson softened it himself in 2023, saying Fortress had played a large part without being the only reason, and pointing at the three games that had already reviewed badly that year. That is probably the fairest reading. The 2009 letter blamed publishers in the plural, and a studio that had gone from 190 people to 250 in eight months was carrying a payroll it had no way to bridge when the money arrived late.

~ what the box did not say ~

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is the GRIN game most likely to have been played in Turkey, because GRIN built the Windows version and Windows is what Turkey had. Consoles stayed a specialty purchase here right across the 2000s; the default gaming machine was a PC, often somebody else's PC in an internet cafe, and the PC build of GRAW was a measurably different game from the Xbox 360 one that most of the sales figures describe.

None of which was visible at the time. Ubisoft was on the box and Ubisoft was on the loading screen, and the name of the Swedish company that wrote the thing appeared in a splash you clicked past. That is the normal condition of work-for-hire development, and it is why a studio can employ 250 people and build an engine other studios still use, then vanish without most of its players noticing it had been there.

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