Greve Graphics

Greve Graphics ("GG") was founded a rainy day in 1983 by Lars Hård, later joined by his brother Nils Hård and Bengt Caroli. It was turbulent times in Scandinavian games development scene at that time since no other real games development company existed. In 1984 the GG team started to work in a more structured setting by renting their first office in Helsingborg. In 1985 they expanded heavily with new premises and opened one "office" (a very small room) on the Canarian island Tenerife.

GG's corporate mission was to have fun, at least what they said to the press, but focus was on volume production of mid to high quality games from 8-bit and 16-bit systems. They developed 5 titles in-house during 1985-1986:

• Captured - a famous plattform games
  
• Supercan (only releasen in Asia and Australia) - strong plattform game
  
• Soldier One - a shooting games with multiple scenes
• 1943 - One Year After - Capcom later stole their name and released their own 1943, but it was almost 8 months after GG's version hit the market
• Blood & Guts - a violent multi-activity game in true Scandinavian Viking tradition. Ale drinking, tower jump, axe throwing, etc.
  

GG also produced music for ten to twenty more games, among them Three Musketeers and Doixin. Their development toolkit "The Basic Revenge" was used by over 5000 developers to speed development time

Facts & Trivia

• At the peak of GG they had over 10 emplyees (five fulltime, the rest on project basis) so it was no small operation
• GG sold over 180000 copies of Soldier One, their first release, worldwide. In all, it has been estimated that worldwide sales of GG's titles must have reached a million sold.
  
• All their revenue went into hardware, "inspirational travel" and huge parties. One of ther "vernisages" probably had over 500 guests (they invited less, but people came from all over the world to Helsingborg in Southern Sweden to have fun)
• GG developed for multi-systems using their cross-platform engine RBX. It transformed assembly language code automatically to for many different processors. Their primary platform was 8-bit C-64, but all games were developed on Amiga systems with their own proprietary software. Rumour tells us that one lage UK publisher offered to buy RBX, but the GG people gladly rejected the offer with a postcard from Tenerife
• GG spent a lot of money and time on the game "Goreemium - The Rise of Nothingness". It was never released, but several playable demos has been around on trade shows with many people stating "looking extremely innovative" (it was among the first games in the world were user directed a team with different skills to solve complex tasks)
• The GG people had a lot of press coverage all over the world, but they were most visible in Northern Europe. They were almost "cult classified" since they got many people in Sweden interested in games development, demo scene, etc.
• Today Lars run an Artificial Intelligence company, but has been involved in both multimedia and games development activities during the last 20 years. Bengt is a programmer developing invoice systems. Nils is running an e-business.