Code Like It's 198x

Vogue

Magnus Högdahl: Crystal Dream, Fasttracker 2, Starbreeze and MachineGames

PeopleSource-checked

Vogue was the scene handle of Magnus Högdahl, a Swedish programmer who moved from the Amiga group Phenomena to the PC group Triton in the winter of 1991–92. He wrote code and ray-traced graphics for Crystal Dream, co-wrote the music program Fasttracker 2, founded Starbreeze Studios in 1998 and left it in 2009 with six colleagues to start MachineGames.

In July 1992 the text file that came with Triton’s first serious demo listed its members’ home addresses, and Vogue came first: Magnus Högdahl, of Timrå in northern Sweden. He had rendered the demo’s ray-traced pictures in a scene editor he wrote as his final project at upper secondary school. Eight years later the staff page of Starbreeze Studios, a nine-person games company in Härnösand, put him first again, as “President, Lead-programmer, Game design”. In between he co-wrote Fasttracker 2, a PC music program the Italian press was calling legendary by 1997, and spent two years on a game for an American publisher that stopped paying. He stayed at Starbreeze through The Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness, as its chief technology officer by 2008, then left in 2009 with six senior colleagues to start again as MachineGames.

Fast facts

  • Name: Magnus Högdahl; scene handle Vogue.
  • From: Timrå, northern Sweden.
  • Groups: Phenomena on the Amiga in 1991; Triton on the PC from the winter of 1991–92.
  • Known for: code, music and ray-traced graphics in Crystal Dream (1992) and Crystal Dream 2 (1993); Fasttracker 2 (1994), with Mr. H.
  • Companies: Triton Productions; founder of Starbreeze Studios (1998); co-founder of MachineGames (2009).

From the Amiga to Triton

Vogue started out on the Amiga. Triton’s README says he “is originally an Amiga programmer and was a member of Phenomena in 91”. That winter he began working with a small PC group, The Physical Crew. The partnership went well enough to become a demo, and the group took a new name for it, Triton, after a moon of Neptune. Its members in 1992 were Vogue, Mr. H (Fredrik Huss) and Loot (Anders Aldengård), the other two giving addresses in Söråker, near Timrå.

Crystal Dream came second to Future Crew’s Unreal in the PC demo competition at the first Assembly party in Finland in July 1992. Demozoo credits its code to Vogue and Mr. H and its music to Vogue. His own contribution to the README was an invitation: “If you’re into raytracing and other vectormatematicaly based graphic producing, you should contact Vogue.” The pictures had been rendered in Synthetic Image, “my own raytracingscene editor”. The sequel, Crystal Dream 2, won the PC demo competition at The Computer Crossroads in Gothenburg in May 1993.

Fasttracker 2

Mr. H’s music routines grew into Fasttracker, a PC tracker built to look and work like the Amiga’s ProTracker. Its successor, Fasttracker 2, credited to Mr. H and Vogue, followed in November 1994 according to Pouët and Demozoo, with its own XM module format. By February 1997 the Italian The Games Machine was calling it “the legendary FastTracker II”.

The program stopped with Starbreeze. On 23 May 1999 the Starbreeze website announced that it had been “put on hold indefinitely”: “it’s impossible to maintain the program while I run Starbreeze and Fredrik is working at Ericsson.” Högdahl, signing himself “/Magnus”, added that they were considering releasing the source code but had not decided “how, when or if”, and that “if this was an ideal world, where there was infinite time and no need to make a living, there would definitely be a multiplatform Fasttracker3.” The Triton entry tells the program’s story.

Into the Shadows

In 2002 Högdahl gave Edge his account of Triton’s first attempt at a commercial game. At the end of 1993 the American publisher Scavenger, impressed by one of Triton’s demos, contacted him with a proposal for him and Fredrik Huss. By the end of 1994 Triton Productions was a company and at work on Into the Shadows, a 3D action role-playing game for the PC, and at the start of 1995 the team moved to the United States. “We were all rookies and didn’t have a clue what a game development company should look like,” he said. He was the game’s only full-time programmer. It drew praise at E3 in 1995, but Scavenger stopped paying, and the team went home to Sweden. The Triton entry has the details.

Starbreeze

Triton became Starbreeze Studios, PC Gamer reported in 2002, and both PC Gamer and a 2008 Edge studio profile give 1998 as the year it was established. In August 2000 the company’s website described it as “a privately held game-development company located in the city of Härnösand”, with nine staff, and said: “Starbreeze is founded by Magnus Högdahl.” Two of the names on that staff list, the level designers Jens Matthies and Jerk Gustafsson, would leave with him nine years later.

Its first game, Sorcery, was a first-person fantasy role-playing game funded by Gremlin Interactive from late 1998. Infogrames bought Gremlin and terminated the contract in January 2000, but Starbreeze kept the rights to the engine. In the same year the Swedish developer O3 Games agreed to buy the company. Starbreeze’s first released game was Enclave on the Xbox in 2002, followed by The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004) and The Darkness (2007). In June 2008 Edge’s studio profile listed Högdahl as chief technology officer of an 85-person studio in Uppsala; the Starbreeze entry follows the company.

MachineGames

In 2009, a couple of weeks after Starbreeze shipped The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, seven of its most experienced developers, all directors, handed in their notice. Edge interviewed three of them in December 2009: Högdahl, now technology director of the new, self-financed MachineGames, with the creative director Jens Matthies and the game director Jerk Gustafsson. “We wanted to go back to the creative atmosphere of the garage days, but with all the experience we have now,” Matthies said. Högdahl, who had written engines since his demo days, planned to buy some of the technology this time: “We will be using more middleware with this project. It is, for example, not very wise to try to develop a physics engine when Havok has been making its one for decades.”

Two years later Edge described the departure as that of seven senior employees, “including Starbreeze founder Magnus Högdahl”. Bethesda Softworks bought MachineGames in November 2010, by which time it had taken on at least 15 more former Starbreeze staff. In 2013 Edge previewed its Wolfenstein reboot for Bethesda, made by a studio “full of Starbreeze veterans”.

Sources

See also

Checked. Verified against primary sources and signed off by a person.