My name is Swen Vincke.

I’m the founder of Larian Studios, an independent game developer based in Gent, Belgium. Larian Studios has been around since 1997 and I’ve been running it ever since, so it’s fair to say that Larian is a large part of my life and that I take whatever happens to it quite personal.

Larian Studios is known for the Divinity RPG series which includes Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity II: Ego Draconis and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga. Currently we’re working on Divinity: Dragon Commander and another unannounced game in the Divinity series .

We also made online 3D worlds for broadcasters like the BBC (Adventure Rock), VRT (KetnetKick), NRK(Superia) en Lagardére(Gulliland). Probably the most a-typical series we made is Monkey Tales, an ambitious series of educational games.

I think almost all of our games at some point won awards, so we must be doing something right. My job on all games was either the creative director and/or the technical director.

The Lar & Larian names come from my favorite dog whose name was ‘Lar’. I also used it in the highscore lists of old arcade machines which only allowed you to enter three letters, so I guess it stuck.

The incentive for this blog was being called an idiot for the nth time by a certain Sergei Klimov, our newly appointed director of propaganda and publishing. His publishing outrage was focused at my habit of occasionally writing status updates on the Larian Studios forums. He said I might as well write my status updates on some wall in some desolate radioactive village and expect the same amount of readers. While I disagreed with that I succumbed to his pressure anyway.

My intention is to bring you regular updates not only about the life and tribulations of a game studio head, but also about how the games industry can be a vampire if you’re not careful.