DICE | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1989 some Swedish members of the demo group The Silents spent part of the summer at a summer house in the south of Sweden, and one of the group’s Danish members showed them pinball tables he had been drawing. Andreas Axelsson, who was Goofy in the group, later called it “the igniting spark”. Three years later the Amiga game those drawings led to, Pinball Dreams, was in the shops, and the five young men who made it had needed a company name to put on the box. They chose Digital Illusions. The company is now DICE, a studio of Electronic Arts in Stockholm, and its Battlefield 6 sold more than seven million copies in its first three days in October 2025.

Fast facts

Founded: 1992, in Sweden, by Andreas Axelsson (Goofy), Ulf Mandorff (SinCos), Markus Nyström (Chevron) and Olof Gustafsson (Blaizer) of The Silents, with Fredrik Liljegren.
Name: Digital Illusions, then Digital Illusions CE, known as DICE. The registered company is EA Digital Illusions CE AB.
Based: Gothenburg by 1994; Stockholm by 2006.
Owner: Electronic Arts, in full from October 2006.
Known for: Pinball Dreams (1992), Pinball Fantasies (1992), Pinball Illusions (1995), Motorhead (1998), Battlefield 1942 (2002) and the Battlefield series, Mirror’s Edge (2008).

A game before a company

Four of the five were members of The Silents: Axelsson, Ulf Mandorff, Markus Nyström and Olof Gustafsson. The fifth was Fredrik Liljegren. Axelsson told the interviewer Kim Wild that the company came second: “Digital Illusions was formed from the five guys making Pinball Dreams as it became apparent that we needed some kind of company name, both to put on the box, but also to manage the income and taxes. So the game was born first, the company was a practicality that came later.”

Everything depended on the ball. “We knew from the start that if we couldn’t get the ball right, there was no point in making the rest of the game,” Axelsson said, so Mandorff, “a self-taught computer freak with many ‘firsts’ in the C64 demo scene”, spent about six months of his spare time on the physics. Gustafsson was “the genuine pinball freak”. He sampled real machines, worked out the scoring, and sometimes rode about with his Amiga 500 strapped to the back of his bike. Nyström, the team’s third attempt at finding an artist, gave the tables their cartoon look. Axelsson designed most of the layouts, and the four tables took three years of tweaking.

Selling it was harder. At their first trade show, the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS), only the Bitmap Brothers and 21st Century Entertainment showed any interest. Axelsson was 17 at the time. The next year they came back with a nearly finished game, and 21st Century, the company Andrew Hewson had formed after Hewson Consultants closed, published it.

Pinball Dreams and Fantasies

Pinball Dreams had four tables, Ignition, Steel Wheel, Beat Box and Nightmare, each two screens high. Reviewing it in CU Amiga in April 1992, Tony Dillon dismissed 21st Century’s claim that it was the first Amiga pinball simulator but liked everything else, from the ball movement “with no quirks to the bouncing or jerky rebounds” to the sampled sounds: “Pinball Dreams may not have been the first, but it’s definitely the best so far. True Pinball fun without a coin slot.” Amiga Format gave it 84%.

Jimmy Maher writes that the move “inspired many sceners”, because The Silents designed and coded their own games instead of working for other developers. The scene still cracked the result. The group Fairlight spread a crack of Pinball Dreams, and Animal of Digital Illusions reflected that “considering the amount of people that played this game on copy parties, I guess I could have been retired by now!”

Pinball Fantasies followed at the end of 1992, with tables three screens high and a third flipper, and Amiga Format gave it 90%. The team spent several weeks in Los Angeles visiting amusement parks while making it, which Axelsson thought “probably influenced” the Partyland table. According to The Amiga Book, the two games sold more than 650,000 copies between them. Digital Illusions wrote only the Amiga versions. The many conversions, to the PC, Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, Jaguar and others, were made by 21st Century or its subsidiaries, apart from later PC versions by a group from Uppsala.

Pinball Illusions and the move to Gothenburg

Amiga Computing followed the third game from the start. After Fantasies the team began an adventure shoot ’em up called Malfunction, set it aside in April 1993 to spend four months converting Pinball Fantasies for the CD32, and by January 1994 had moved to Gothenburg to start a new pinball game from scratch. Each table took five to six weeks, and some were thrown away. The new game added the multi-ball that fans had asked for. Digital Illusions had told Amiga Computing in 1993 that it wanted multi-ball in the earlier games but that it slowed them down too much. Pinball Illusions came out in 1995 for the Amiga 1200 and the PC, with no version for the Amiga 500. Axelsson admitted it “lacks the love and passion we had when making the first two games”. Digital Illusions later rewrote it for the PlayStation and Saturn as True Pinball.

Racing games

The company also made Benefactor, which Edge described as a cross between Lemmings and Lode Runner, released on the Amiga in 1994. By the late 1990s, Edge reported, the team had decided that pinball alone would not take it further and changed direction. Its managing director, Fredrik Liljegren, told Edge in 1999 how it chose a new genre: “We picked racing games because it’s something we all enjoy playing… there were no pinball games so we made one, and we then felt we could do a racing game that was better than the others, so we did MotorHead.” It signed Motorhead to Gremlin in October 1997, after showing it at the ECTS, and followed it with Rally Masters. “We know technology because we’re from Sweden,” Liljegren told Edge. “It’s our forte.” The Amiga Book records that Digital Illusions was listed on the Swedish stock exchange in 1998.

Battlefield

In 2000 Digital Illusions took over Refraction Games, the developer of Codename Eagle, an action game published in the United States by TalonSoft that year, with large maps on which players could drive tanks and fly aircraft. When Computer Gaming World previewed Refraction’s next game in February 2001, it gave the developer as “Digital Illusions CE (formerly Refraction Games)”. That game was Battlefield 1942. Edge described it in November 2001 as a Second World War game for up to 64 players, in which a group could crew a bomber together, “one acting as the pilot; one the bombardier; one the tail gunner”. EA published it in September 2002. Computer Gaming World counted 35 vehicles, from submarines to aircraft carriers, and 16 maps, and concluded: “Multiplayer games that require this much coordination between gamers are rare; ones that are as fun as Battlefield: 1942 are even rarer.” Battlefield 2 followed in 2005, and Digital Illusions also made the Xbox racing game RalliSport Challenge in 2002.

Electronic Arts

EA published Battlefield, and it bought into the company that made it. The Amiga Book records that EA owned 62% of Digital Illusions by March 2005, and in March 2006 it agreed to buy the rest for 67.50 kronor a share, after negotiations with shareholders that had begun in 2004. Edge remarked that EA “may finally have both of its hands on DICE”. The purchase was completed on 2 October 2006. DICE’s chief executive, Patrick Söderlund, became an EA studio general manager, and said: “We’ve been working very closely with EA for the past five years and this is a very natural step for us.” The Amiga Book notes that Axelsson has since left the company.

Frostbite and Mirror’s Edge

As part of EA, DICE built its own engine, Frostbite. Edge previewed Battlefield: Bad Company in July 2007 with its “accomplished Frostbite engine” and buildings that could be blown “to their constituent parts”. The next month it had a first look at Mirror’s Edge, a first-person game built around running and climbing rather than shooting, which it said was “taking some audacious steps” to overhaul a predictable genre. Mirror’s Edge came out in 2008. Frostbite went on to run Battlefield 3 (2011) and later games across EA, and DICE made Star Wars Battlefront in 2015 and its sequel in 2017.

Battlefield Studios

DICE opened a Los Angeles studio in 2013, and in 2021 it became a separate EA studio, Ripple Effect. Battlefield 2042 followed in 2021. In 2024 EA grouped the studios working on the series, DICE, Criterion, Motive and Ripple Effect, as Battlefield Studios. Their Battlefield 6 was released on 10 October 2025, and EA reported that it sold more than seven million copies in its first three days, the biggest launch in the series’ history. In March 2026 EA made layoffs across all four studios, saying that “Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities”.

Sources

Kim Wild, “Pinball Dreams”, interview with Andreas Axelsson, in The Amiga Book, revised edition (Imagine Publishing, 2015), pp. 116–119: the summer house in 1989, the founders, the naming of Digital Illusions, the ECTS, 21st Century, the physics and table design, Los Angeles, sales of 650,000, the conversions, Pinball Illusions and True Pinball, the 1998 stock-market listing, EA’s 62% stake in March 2005, and Axelsson’s departure.
Tony Dillon, review of Pinball Dreams, CU Amiga, April 1992, p. 47.
Amiga Format issue 33, April 1992, p. 81: Pinball Dreams, 84%. Amiga Format issue 41, December 1992: Pinball Fantasies, 90%.
Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 200–201: The Silents and Digital Illusions; Fairlight’s crack of Pinball Dreams and Animal’s comment.
Amiga Computing issue 62, July 1993: news of a third pinball game and multi-ball. Amiga Computing issue 80, December 1994: preview of Pinball Illusions, with Malfunction, the CD32 conversion, the move to Gothenburg, table design and multi-ball.
Edge issue 70, April 1999, p. 36: Rally Masters preview, with Fredrik Liljegren (printed “Liliegren”) on the move to racing games, Motorhead, Gremlin and Benefactor. Edge issue 73, July 1999: Rally Masters, publisher Gremlin.
Computer Gaming World issue 193, August 2000: review of Codename Eagle, publisher TalonSoft, developer Refraction Games.
Computer Gaming World issue 199, February 2001: Battlefield 1942, “Digital Illusions CE (formerly Refraction Games)”.
Edge issue 103, November 2001: Battlefield 1942 preview.
Jason Brown, preview of Battlefield: 1942, Computer Gaming World issue 219, October 2002, pp. 76–77.
Edge issue 162, May 2006: EA and DICE.
David Jenkins, “Electronic Arts Completes DICE Purchase”, Gamasutra, 17 March 2006 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/electronic-arts-completes-dice-purchase
Electronic Arts, “EA Acquires Digital Illusions”, press release, 2 October 2006. https://s204.q4cdn.com/701424631/files/doc_news/2006/10/1/314270.pdf
Edge issue 177, July 2007: Battlefield: Bad Company preview and the Frostbite engine.
Edge issue 178, August 2007, p. 54: first look at Mirror’s Edge.
Electronic Arts, “Battlefield 6 Shatters Records Becoming the Biggest Launch in Franchise History”, 24 October 2025. https://www.ea.com/news/battlefield-6-shatters-records
Chris Kerr, “EA has laid off an undisclosed number of Battlefield developers”, Game Developer, 9 March 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/battlefield-developers-laid-off-by-ea-months-after-battlefield-6-shatters-records-
Wikipedia, “DICE (company)” and “Ripple Effect Studios” (web, secondary): founding in May 1992, the takeover of Refraction Games in 2000, Mirror’s Edge, Star Wars Battlefront, DICE LA and Ripple Effect, Battlefield 2042 and Battlefield Studios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_(company)