Travelling to DreamHack last month was not only a milestone for Gamocracy, it was one for me personally as it was my first trip to Sweden.

Visiting a country for the first time is always a feat, but this time even more so because I’ve had a fascination with Sweden and Swedes for years. It all started because of electronic sports, Counter-Strike in particular, around 2000 or 2001. I had been running a gaming team for a couple months when I realized Swedes were something special: they won almost everything.

Nearly 10 years later, this hasn’t changed much:

I shot this video at DreamHack last month, it’s the final: 1,200 spectators are watching live. That’s pretty big, yet it’s far from the biggest esports attendance I’ve seen  (the Electronic Sports World Cup 2007 final had 5,000+ people in the audience).

No, what’s so special about this video is that it has to be the first time I’m witness to the home team, Meet Your Makers from Sweden, winning a major tournament… And I’ve attended tens of them. The reason why I never saw the home team win before is that I needed to go to Sweden for that (and it was my first time there, remember?)!

When the tournament is held in France or Germany or the US, one Swedish team – sometimes two – usually smashes the local champions, robbing the home crowd from the kind of joy only national pride can pump into a stadium.

Despite a total population of less than 10M people, Sweden is a far better competitive gaming nation than France (60M souls), Germany (82M) or the United States (300M). One could argue they’re actually better than the 3 combined. It’s also better than China and its gazillion online gamers. See, size doesn’t always matter. Relief.

You could tell from there that the Swedes have to have a special relationship to games and new tech. And you’d be right. Go to the main informant and ask about ‘Sweden test market’ or ’4G phone Sweden’ to get an idea that there truly is something about Swedes.

My last discovery about Sweden came very recently. Working at Gamocracy, I got interested in indie games for the PC and, surprise surprise, I got to learn that the Swedes aren’t bad at that either…

on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 7:05 PM - filed under On Tour (oh yeah). Both comments and pings are currently closed.