What happened in 2016

It’s 2017, the holidays are definitely over and it’s back to full-speed-ahead here at the studios. 2016 was a very busy year for us, so here’s a recap on the things that happened.

With all the growing in the past couple of years, Arrowhead has expanded to the point of bursting out of our current offices. After a lot of searching central Stockholm, we finally finalised a contract for new offices, a stone’s throw away from our old ones but in a lovely position right next to the water. The new office will be significantly upgraded from our last, almost three times as big with plenty of windows and large balconies.  We are even trying to squeeze in a sauna on the roof (can’t wait for the place to be finished!).

We had a number of new employees join us last year – artists Oscar, Staffan and Tore, as well as Björn, our World Designer. We also started a long term collaboration on our next project with our old friends at Pixeldiet, a small Swedish team of talented programmers. Pixeldiet used to work with us on The Showdown Effect.

Cheerful new artists and designers

We also celebrated a number of anniversaries in 2016:

• Magicka turned 5 years old on January 25^th.
• Helldivers had it’s first anniversary of release on both PlayStation (Mar 3^rd) and PC (Dec 7^th). We also celebrated our second Liberty Day in October (26^th).
• Gauntlet turned two years old on Sep 23^rd and celebrated its first anniversary of the PlayStation release (Aug 11^th).

We also officially started our next project. It’s being kept tightly under wraps so far, but we can say it’s the biggest and most ambitious project which we’ve taken on to date. It’s also very, very cool and we are not biased whatsoever.

Arrowhead went to a number of places for talks and conventions. We visited several schools and universities to give talks on the games industry and how to get the job you want. It was our second year at Comic Con and boy did we hand out a lot of balloons and speak to a lot of people!

Arrowhead received recognition in 2016 for Helldivers. We were nominated twice in the DICE Awards for “Best Handheld” and “Best Action”, winning the category for “Best Handheld”. Later that year we were also nominated twice in the Nordic Game Awards for “Best Art” and “Small Screen”.