SOLID CLOUDS

The Icelandic studio putting itself on the map with a genre bending MMORTS

- Jen SimpkinS

These days, the world ‘cloud’ conjures up a certain image: of servers humming away in basements, of high-powered tech evangelists building castles in the sky. Indeed, back in 2013 when Stefán Gunnarsson founded and named Solid Clouds, he found it hard to get out from under that assumption. “During that time, anything that was cloud-based was supposed to be the magic solution or whatever,” he laughs. But he hadn’t named his new studio in reference to remote mass-computing power. Rather, he’d named it for the personal journey he was about to undertake. “I was brainstorming, and I imagined just when you’re daydreaming and looking at the sky, and you see something, and it kind of becomes solid and real.”

In a previous life, Gunnarsson was a mechanic by trade – but he also had a passion for videogames, playing Ultima Online professionally for several years. He ran a play-by-mail game, in which he had 16 people fighting a Napoleonic war, and was drawn to browser-based MMO strategy games such as Tribal Wars and Travian. “From 2007 to 2010, they were a big thing,” he says. “I thought they were fascinating. But what irked me so much was the game map kind of disappeared – it wasn’t that important. Even in modern mobile games, it’s still not that important. Most people who love strategy games have played Civilization, so I wanted to combine the MMO element with a proper game map.”