GAME DESIGNERS from Sweden

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Swedish Game Designers of all time. This list of famous Swedish Game Designers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Markus Persson (1979 - )

With an HPI of 59.49, Markus Persson is the most famous Swedish Game Designer.  His biography has been translated into 45 different languages on wikipedia.

Markus Alexej Persson ( , Swedish: [ˈmǎrkɵs ˈpæ̌ːʂɔn] ; born 1 June 1979), also known as "Notch", is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is best known for creating the sandbox video game Minecraft, which has since become the best-selling video game in history; and for founding the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009. Persson is currently working on new games under the banner of Bitshift Entertainment. Persson began developing video games at an early age, making games both professionally and for pleasure for much of his life. He achieved critical success upon the publishing of an early version of Minecraft in 2009. Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over ten million copies. After this point, Persson stood down as lead designer and transferred creative authority to Jens Bergensten. In September 2014, Persson announced on his personal website that he had concluded he "[didn't have the connection to his fans he thought he had]", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation. Persson left Mojang in November of that year, selling his company to Microsoft for a reported US$2.5 billion. As the majority shareholder, the acquisition made Persson a billionaire. Since 2016, public criticism of several of Persson's Twitter posts in which he wrote of his beliefs that transgender women are not women, that the QAnon conspiracy theory is "legit", and that those critical of a heterosexual pride day "deserve to be shot", has arisen. In 2019, Persson's tweets were censured by Microsoft, who subsequently removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration. In 2015, he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain, which was publicly relaunched in 2024 as Bitshift Entertainment.

2. Jens Bergensten (1979 - )

With an HPI of 39.12, Jens Bergensten is the 2nd most famous Swedish Game Designer.  His biography has been translated into 24 different languages.

Jens Peder Bergensten (born 18 May 1979), also known as Jeb or Jeb_, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is best known as the lead designer of Minecraft, and is the Chief Creative Officer of Mojang Studios. In 2013, he, along with Minecraft creator Markus Persson, was named as one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world. As an employee of Mojang Studios, he had been co-developing Minecraft with Persson since 2010, became the lead designer in 2011, and assumed full control in 2014, when Persson left the company after its acquisition.

3. Johan Andersson (1974 - )

With an HPI of 29.83, Johan Andersson is the 3rd most famous Swedish Game Designer.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Johan Andersson is a Swedish video game designer and studio manager for Paradox Tinto, a Barcelona-based division of Paradox Interactive.