Team

Bendik Stang

Founder, CTO and Chairman

Bendik is an extremely creative person who loves to invent and design things. In addition to his many responsibilities at Snow Castle, Bendik serves as coordinator for the Norwegian chapter of the International Game Developers Association. As an example of his wide range of interests, Bendik has been invited by the European Space Agency to present his ideas on how to survive extreme gravitational forces at an international conference of scientists from space agencies such as ESA and NASA. In 2003, he founded gameXplore with a friend. Bendik is an avid gamer and loves MMORPGs and strategy games both as a player and developer. He holds a number of patents and has a Masters degree in Science with a specialization in 3D animation and game design from Denmark Technical University and New York State University, Buffalo.

Erik Hoftun

Co-founder, CEO

Prior to gameXplore and Snow Castle, Erik was senior partner at Geelmuyden.Kiese, a leading Scandinavian communication agency. Erik has consulted for major corporations ranging from Rolls Royce and Volvo to Telenor, TV Norge, Statkraft, DnB NOR and Sony. His specialty is strategic communication. As former head of an advertising and design agency, Erik has advised and worked on numerous interactive online solutions and knows a few things about what works and what doesn’t. He has varied international experience both from Asia and the US. A former Naval Officer trained at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, he also holds degrees in Political Science and Business from University of Oslo and the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.

Morten Nordvold

Co-founder, Board Member and Head of Business Development

With a number of impressive business ventures behind him, Morten has broad experience in international business, ranging from leadership positions in large multinational corporations, building his own successful telecommunication startup in Australia to taking a traditional Norwegian company to successful partnership with an international industry leader. Morten is an investor in, as well as an active advisor to Snow Castle and plays an important role in new business development. Morten holds a degree from Oslo Business School and a MBA from Arizona State University.

Alf Marius Foss Olsen

Lead Programmer

The only true hippie on the team—he looks like a hippie, walks like a hippie, and talks like one, too—Alf is also a great systems developer and by far the most structured on the team. A computer science engineer, Alf Marius does scripting and design work on our database and is responsible for quality assurance of game data. As lead programmer, he is the problem solver and go-to-guy on any challenge, both in game development and our own systems.

 

Mattis Henning Bødtker

Lead Game Designer

A true game enthusiast, he has done a lot of work within the video game industry over the years, creating a vast network of contacts and working on side projects. Mattis has a Bachelors Degree in Information Technology and Game Design from the Norwegian School of Information Technology. He was nominated for IT Student of the Year (2010) by Universum and also made it to the Semi-Finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in the Game Design category. He loves to work with Game Design, Level Design and has a tendency to do GUI Design for the titles he works on.

Eivind Fjellvang Ljønes

Programmer

 

Fridtjof L. Olsen

Lead Artist

An award winning illustrator, digital artist and animator, Fridtjof worked at the Oscar winning animation company Storm Studios before he joined Snow Castle. He has won the prestigious Macmillan Prize for his picture book The Day Light Owl. Fridtjof has a BA (Hons) from University of the West of England (UWE) and a diploma in Game Art & Design from Art Institute of Vancouver, BC, Canada.

View his portfolio

 

Fredrik Dahl Tyskerud

Concept artist 

Coming from a traditional art education at Nordic Institute of Stage and Studio (NISS), Fredrik started as a concept artist and illustrator in 2005. He has done work on computer games, motion pictures, covers and illustrations for tabletop games as well as concept art for commercial photography and the advertising industry.

 

Sarah Cameron 

Editor and Writer

Studying for a Master's degree in Norwegian linguistics at the University of Oslo, Sarah has an excellent knowledge of the Norwegian language, and a great interest for languages in general. She also enjoys writing, both professionally and for fun, and has practiced writing since the age of ten. Ranging from short stories and poems to informative texts and academic papers, she has writing experience in a wide variety of styles, and the combination of her language awareness and her love for the written word makes her texts grammatically correct as well as interesting to read.

 

 

Benjamin Johansson

Programmer

 

Malene Jaeger

Production Assistant

Malene does all the very important tasks that make Snow Castle tick. Without Malene, things deteriorate fast. Bendik, who usually sleeps like a baby, suddenly experiences sleepless nights of worry. This soon develops into irrational outbursts of anger during daytime, putting Snow Castle on edge. The creatives cease to create, the programmers protest protractedly and everything grinds to a screeching halt. When Malene is not doing all the things that needs to be done at Snow Castle, she is finishing a degree in political science at Oslo University. We have no idea how she finds the time.

 

Dag Isaksson

3D Designer

Born and raised in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, Dag decided to pursue a career in the digital arts and left home for the 3D-graphics school of SOFE in Karlshamn and then at The Game Assembly in Malmö where he continued developing his skills in modeling, animation, rigging and scripting. We are delighted that Dag accepted our invitation to work for Snow Castle and continue to be amazed by the stunning visuals this cool Swede magically wrings out of his computer.

Hans Kristian Andersen

3D Artist

Hans Kristian Andersen is a 3D artist specializing in character and creature creation. He has studied 3D Design and 3D Animation at the Idéfag School. Hans Kristian spends most of his time in ZBrush doing digital sculptures, but he also rigs, animates and paints texture maps. His 3D wizardry and amazing attention to detail is what brings those strange Snow Castle creatures to life. 

 

Saira Kamali

Content Manager (gameBase)

Saira is responsible for keeping gameBase© updated. gameBase© is our vast numeric database covering all current video games and powers products such as gameLink©. As soon as a new game becomes available, Saira and her staff make sure gameBase is updated with data and screenshots so our customers are kept up to date and happy. For Saira this is the perfect job because she loves everything about video games and plays anything she can get her hands on from action and adventure to platform games.