Taking a trip to Malmö to make interviews with three of the studios here a sunny spring day. One of these studios was Tarsier, where I met Ola Holmdahl and Andreas Johnsson.

Tarsier has an extremely nice office at Ängelholmsgatan in central Malmö. We had a long talk over lunch and discussed the history of the studio and the development path taken. One of the first games they worked on was Ragdoll Kung Fu, leading to a long relationship with Sony. On the same general theme, their most well known game is probably the PlayStation game Little Big Planet, in which they have been involved in several versions. We also talked about a very beautiful and appealing upcoming game, Hunger. Conceptual work begun in 2014 and they received support for the project from both the Creative Europe Program and Nordic Game Program.

Tarsier is in an interesting phase of post-launch and moving into a (hopefully long and strong growth) phase. With growth, however, comes an increasing need of role definitions and several interesting management challenges. Firms in all industries struggle with finding a way to grow with a balance of appropriate management mechanism and maintaining a pleasant work environment and nice culture. Several good ideas about this was discussed. (If interested, there is research on the subject.)