“Do You Want Me to Feel Sorry for You or Something?”
The same scenario greeted Ritva Persson each evening. She’d finished her nursing shift, gone home to the apartment, and walked in the door to the sound of Markus’s keyboard clattering in his room. High school was over, but her son showed no signs of moving out. He showed very few signs of anything at all, in fact. Often, when Ritva returned from a full day at work, Markus had been sitting at his computer the whole time. His hours spent in front of the screen were divided between playing simple, nerdy games and programming his own, just-as-simple, just-as-nerdy games. Even though his creations were nothing extraordinary, Markus liked watching them materialize before his eyes. When he was absorbed in his code, nothing else around him mattered. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Markus had a life plan, but if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he liked creating games. His dream was to make a career of it, and ideally, those games would be his own.
That Markus was shy was no news. Ever since his family had moved from the small town of Edsbyn to the city of Stockholm, he had preferred to keep to himself. Life in the small town had been different. His family moved there when Markus was a newborn, bought some land, and then built a house while Ritva was pregnant with Markus’s little sister, Anna. Markus’s father, Birger, got a job at the national railroad company, and Ritva commuted to the hospital in Bollnäs. Even then Markus loved building with LEGO pieces, but in Edsbyn he also played with the neighboring kids. He was kind of the tough guy in his little group, the one who came up with the pranks that the others went along with.
Markus remembers how he changed after the move to Stockholm. When he started at the Skogsängs School in Salem, he was put in a class with kids who had already had six months to get to know each other, and it took a while for Markus to fit in. He spent every day alone with his LEGO pieces, which he stored unsorted in an old school desk (the wooden kind, with a flip-up lid). Sometimes, he’d turn the pieces into spaceships and then dismantle them; other times he built a car—just to see if it would survive the trip down a small incline that Markus had chosen for exactly that purpose. If the car made it all the way down, it was branded a success and he would take it apart and use the pieces for something new. Every year as Christmas approached, more LEGO pieces were at the top of his list.
Markus’s interest was diverted only when his father came home one day from work carrying a large box in his arms. Proudly, Birger opened it in front of the family and lifted out a Commodore 128, the more advanced sibling of the iconic gaming computer, Commodore 64. The family set up the machine in the parents’ bedroom and it immediately became, as far as Markus was concerned, the focal point of the home. Some simple games came along with the new computer, but even more interesting to seven-year-old Markus was the programming instructions, which he read through with Birger guiding him. They sat together in front of the monitor every evening, and it was his dad whom Markus called over to come see the end results of his early exercises in programming.
The computer opened up a new world to Markus. Just as building with LEGO pieces was more fun than playing with ready-made cars and spaceships, there was something special about entering code in the machine and getting it to perform. Markus’s first original games were text adventures based on a cowboys-and-Indians theme. Perhaps the simplest form of game, a text adventure is more like an interactive novel where the player engages through text than what we’ve come to expect from computer games. For example, the player may be put in front of a house and must choose, by typing a command, between entering through the door, breaking the window, or turning around. Depending on which option he or she chooses, the story unfolds in different ways. The biggest flaw in Markus’s creation was that he didn’t know how to save the code, and so each time the computer was shut down, everything disappeared and the next day he would have to begin all over again. Maybe you need the tenacity of a seven-year-old to continue under such circumstances.
Whenever Markus wasn’t doing his own programming, he was playing games. The classic puzzle game Boulder Dash, in which the player’s mission is to dig around in caves, watch out for enemies, and collect valuable gemstones for points, was a favorite of his. He also played the action game Saboteur, and the role-playing game The Bard’s Tale (the first game he bought with his own money). As they all were in those days, the games were simplistic creations with pixely graphics and squeaky, hissing digital sounds for music. Markus could sit for hours in front of the computer with his trusty plastic joystick in his grip and his cassette player spinning in the background.
Markus had no trouble with any of his classes. In fact, school was so easy that he started trying to stay home. It wasn’t like he was cutting classes; Ritva remembers how he’d tell her he had a stomachache or some other vague symptom just serious enough for him to be able to stay home and slip into his parents’ bedroom and to the computer.
When Ritva’s days off from work coincided with Markus’s “sick” days, she became worried by how engrossed Markus was in the computer. It was the 1980s, the debates about video violence raged on, and something as new as computers—in homes, no less!—was depicted as dangerous for your eyes and your child’s development. He should get out more, she thought. Play soccer, be with the other kids. She wanted to see him come home with rosy cheeks, exhausted from an afternoon of fresh air, not sunk down in front of the computer like a sack of potatoes. She considered limiting his time at the computer, but soon realized it would be like trying to stop an avalanche with her bare hands.
Instead, she tried subterfuge. When Markus wasn’t at home, she snuck into his room and put up posters of soccer players—no one remembers which—that Markus immediately tore down with a caustic comment that no one else should try to decide what he would have on his walls. Ritva even dragged Markus to the local soccer club. After he had stumbled around the field, missed the balls, and avoided scoring, the coach took Ritva aside. “Nothing will probably come of this,” she remembers him saying. “He’s not going to be a soccer player.”
Ritva was successful, however, in getting both Markus and Anna to go to church. Though Markus seldom talks about growing up in a religious, evangelical family, his parents had actually met each other through the Pentecostal movement. Virtually every Sunday, the family took the commuter train into the city, got off at the T-Centralen subway station, and walked to the City Church in the center of the city. Markus mostly remembers the services as boring. But he did believe in God.
Eventually, Markus found a small group of friends at school who also had particular interests. One showed a great musical talent; another was, like Markus, more interested in technology and logical constructions. Everyone in his small circle got good grades and each had a single passion in life. They were, if we may use a tired expression, nerds. At some point in middle school, they added tabletop role-playing games to their list of activities, which got Markus to reveal a new side of his personality. In every other context he preferred to take the backseat, but when it came to creating fantasy worlds, with dragons and elves, he suddenly wanted a central role, to be the game master, the one who made up the stories with monsters and set the challenges for the other players. The boy who usually sat by himself now wanted to join in and have a say, but only about a world that existed in his and the other players’ imaginations.
When Markus and his sister were around twelve and eleven, their parents divorced and their father moved out. The house became too big and expensive, so Ritva and the kids moved into an apartment. Contact with their father grew increasingly rare. The divorce was a blow to the entire family, but it really hit Markus’s sister hard.
It began as innocent teenage rebellion. Anna found new friends. She began to comb her hair into a huge Mohawk. Then, one by one, she added the classic punk attributes to her look: the studded black leather jacket, the piercings, the black eye makeup. Some days, she painted sharp arrows out toward her temples. She showed up less and less often at school and at home, the fights were getting violent. Both Markus and his sister remember the time she kicked in a door at the apartment. One time Anna, who knew her brother’s sensitive spot, screamed something at him about being a computer nerd, and Markus retaliated by calling her a “punk whore.”
“I tried to intervene. I thought, If I get through this with a sound mind, I’ll be lucky,” says Ritva today.
One day, Markus found evidence that Anna’s rebellion had taken a more serious turn. He had snuck into her room, which was something of another world for him. There lay the leather jacket, green hair spray, and records with music and lyrics no parent could understand. On one of the walls, a British flag hung askew. An old teddy bear dangled from the ceiling, a noose around its neck. And in the unmade bed, there lay a badly hidden can with a small spout and a label that said “Butane.” Meant for refilling cigarette lighters, butane was known among teenagers as an easy-to-get and quick-acting intoxicant, if inhaled.
Markus was floored. Not so much because the can was proof that his sister used drugs (he was a teenager, after all, so drugs weren’t a complete mystery to him) but rather by her choice of intoxicant. At school the talk was of weekend binges, but nothing he’d heard about huffing lighter fluid made it sound very enticing. Apparently the effect was about the same as you’d get from holding your breath for a very long time, but much more damaging. It just didn’t sound like very much fun. Using this particular drug was, in his opinion, stupid and pointless, and he tried to make that clear to her.
It didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped. Anna screamed, defended herself, and accused Markus of going through her stuff. She stiffly denied the butane was hers, or at least that she huffed it. Of course, Anna had been out of control for a while by then. Ritva had disapproved of the black, studded clothes and the punk rock. And then her daughter’s interest in piercing had developed into a fascination with scarification, a form of tattoo where patterns are cut rather than inked into one’s skin. But the butane was different. Ritva then knew she was losing her grip on the situation, and so she turned to social services for professional intervention.
Markus handled the chaos in his usual manner: he isolated himself. People who were close to the family can’t really remember a time when Markus was seen doing anything other than sitting in front of the computer. Even today, he speaks of the computer, of code and the world of programming, as a sanctuary, a quiet place where he can be alone with his thoughts.
In order to better understand Anna’s behavior, we need to tell her father’s story. Birger was an addict. The drugs—mostly amphetamines—had been a part of Birger’s life before the kids were born, but he stayed clean during their childhood. After Birger and Ritva’s separation, however, it wasn’t long before Birger went back to his old habits. Shortly after that, he left Stockholm and went to live in a small cabin out in the country, a long train trip away from his children.
Birger became increasingly isolated from the rest of the family. Ritva did her best to avoid all contact with him. One day, the family received news that he’d been arrested. He’d been involved in some kind of break-in, they were informed. Birger was sent to prison.
Today, no one in the family really remembers a trial or any specific charges; they had cut all ties with Birger. Even Markus “shut it out,” as he puts it. Much later, after the prison sentence, Markus received a telephone call. He heard his dad through the receiver telling him that he was free.
“Well,” Markus answered, “do you want me to feel sorry for you or something?”
Services at the City Church were beginning to feel less relevant to a teenage Markus. It was no longer so obvious to him that there was a god watching over him. The revelation didn’t come through introspection or soul-searching, but through the rationale of a programmer who contemplates what is reasonable to believe in. Markus didn’t lose his faith; he replaced it with logic.
Just before beginning high school, Markus, like all Swedish students, went to see the school’s guidance counselor. Inside the office, he said he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life: program computer games. Few of his teenage classmates had such a clear ambition; hardly anyone else got their dreams so effectively crushed, either. Make games? Like, as a job? The guidance counselor took it as a joke and recommended the media program because, he told Markus, it had a branch that, unlike computer games, offered a bright future: print media. Dejected, Markus accepted the offer and left. Media at Tumba High School was what he got.
The school did have one major upside. Even though the courses smelled more of printing ink and thick sheets of paper than the digital world Markus loved, there was an elective in programming. Markus went to a total of two classes. During the first one, he ignored the teacher’s instructions and instead programmed his own version of Pong. The teacher took one look over Markus’s shoulder and made a quick decision.
“Just come back to the last class and take the test,” he said.
Markus got an A.
During the summer between his first and second years at high school, the fights at home got so bad that Anna moved out. His sister describes her following years as a complete chaos of drugs and self-destructive behavior. From the huffing she’d moved on to heavy drinking. Then she tried amphetamines, the same drug her father was hooked on. Anna became the sole member of the family to maintain any contact with papa Birger during the years he was using. She tells us today how they began to take drugs together and how she became more of a dope buddy than a daughter to him. Markus stayed in touch with his sister throughout this period, but could only look on as she fell deeper into dependency.
Markus and Ritva were now alone in the apartment. Markus had graduated from high school in Stockholm in the late 1990s, when the dot-com bubble was at its greatest and pretty much any teenager with basic computer skills could get a job at a hyped-up web agency with fancy offices. Markus’s problem was not that he didn’t understand his opportunities, but that he was all too aware of them. He tried working at a web agency for a short time, but thought the programming tasks were boring, so he quit. There were always other jobs out there, he figured. And there were, until the first signs that the expected giant profits from the new generation of IT companies would never materialize, and the bubble burst.
Suddenly, being a gifted, slightly introverted teenager with mounds of programming knowledge but no formal education wasn’t such a promising position to be in. But then, Markus had never wanted to be a run-of-the-mill programmer at a run-of-the-mill company. He wanted to make games.
“I’m going to get rich,” his sister remembers him saying once. “And then I’ll take you on a helicopter ride.”
But he had no plan to make it happen.
An unemployed Markus started to feel quite comfortable living at home with his mom. With both his dad and sister gone, there was plenty of room, and the place was quiet enough for him to sit undisturbed at his computer.
Ritva remembers him saying once, “Mom, I’m going to live with you my whole life.” She could see how the years would pass without Markus getting either a job or an apartment. Oh, my God, what a nightmare, she thought. But she just smiled, and her son shuffled back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.
Ritva didn’t try to throw Markus out, but she did try to at least get him out of the house during the day. Every day, she opened the free newspaper, Metro, and carefully read through the ads for courses. When she saw one that was for programming, she signed him up without asking him if he was interested. After a few failed attempts, she finally got Markus to go to a short course on the programming language C++.
Markus also continued working on his own games, and he’d come a long way since his first attempts with text adventures. He had become a skilled amateur coder, experimenting with small, simple games that tested new, original ideas. Markus started competing in game-development contests, where the goal was to develop a game in a short time using the least amount of code possible. It forced him to think economically—just the kind of fast-paced programming he liked so much. The aim was not to make money, and he didn’t. It was more about getting attention and recognition from other amateur developers.
Luckily enough, the IT industry soon began to rise from the ruins of the crash. Markus took an opportunity to work at the fringes of the gaming industry, at a company called Gamefederation. It was not a game-developing company—Gamefederation worked with systems for game distribution. But now and then, Markus would get the chance to create small game prototypes in order to test a system’s functions. These creations haven’t been saved for posterity, but for the first time Markus was getting paid for something that at least resembled game programming, and that, he liked.
When Markus was hired at Gamefederation, another developer, Rolf Jansson, had already started working there. Rolf quickly became Markus’s closest colleague, despite their drastically different backgrounds. Unlike Markus, Rolf already had substantial work experience. Before ending up at Gamefederation with Markus, he had been a consultant at IBM—a dream job for many. The pay had been great and, being a successful employee of one of the world’s largest IT companies, his future would have been secure. Nevertheless, Rolf, just like Markus, dreamed of working with games.
Rolf remembers Markus as being shy and quiet, but a nice guy. It was when the two of them began talking about games that Markus lit up, and they had a lot to talk about. Markus got Rolf to play Counter-Strike, and Rolf showed Markus his favorite games. Soon, the two of them began staying late after work, playing multiplayer games on the company’s network. Sometimes they sacrificed a lunch and went over to The Science Fiction Bookstore, in Stockholm’s Gamla stan (the Old Town), where they bought cards for Magic: The Gathering. Between game sessions, they would talk at length about what was missing from the games available on the market, and together they could envision the perfect game and figure out what it was that the next hit game needed.
Markus stayed at Gamefederation for four years. He then got the chance to enter the game industry for real when he interviewed for a then-unknown company, Midasplayer. The little he’d heard about it was promising. At Midasplayer, each developer was responsible for his or her own games. On top of that, Markus liked that the company focused on making small games to be played online. It sounded like what he’d been doing on his own for years without earning a cent. Everything seemed to be falling into place; they just needed to hire him.