Video games in Switzerland


Video games in Switzerland have been released since the 1980s. In 2016, there were between 100 and 120 game companies, mostly small, corresponding to about 500 employees and a turnover of about 50 millions Swiss francs.
The Swiss Game Award was created in 2013, with some of the winners being Feist, Deru and FAR: Lone Sails.
Today, Swiss games are released for all the current platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, including Apple Arcade.
Fandom video-game-databank:Switz...

History

1960s

At 17, René Sommer created the earliest known electronic game in Switzerland, a variant of the Nim game. Sommer would later work as an engineer at Logitech.

1970s

At the end of the 1970s, students of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies created video games. They developed games and graphical demonstrations for the Smaky 6. The games were adaptations of board games and arcade games of that time.
In 1979, when asked by a journalist about the motivation behind creating games in a university laboratory, he answered, "The goal is indeed to learn how to program. The games provide both motivation to create challenging programs and present a number of truly difficult problems to solve."

1980s

During the 1980s, a few Swiss games were created for C64, Atari ST and Amiga computers. Alain Berset, ex-member of the Swiss Federal Council in charge of culture, developed video games in his youth and saved them on cassettes around this time.
On the Swiss computers Smaky, games like Bong, Ping, or Mur were released. In 1988,, the Smaky's mascot, appeared in a game for the first time, in Blupi at Home.

1990s

Many Swiss games were released during the 1990s. As micro-computers became affordable in Switzerland and programming had been taught for years in schools, more and more games were created. Some are still known today because of their open source licences, e.g. The Last Eichhof or GLTron, the latter being still regularly updated. Games appeared in various regions of Switzerland. At EPFL and then on external servers, a group of students created and maintained a multi-user dungeon game situated in the Middle Earth,. GATE, a game similar to The Legend of Zelda was released on Apple IIGS and Macintosh, in 1991. The same year, Supaplex, similar to Boulder Dash, was released for Amiga and DOS computers. Traps 'n' Treasures, a role-playing video game, was released in 1993 on Amiga.
Most of the games created by Daniel Roux for Epsitec, a Swiss company producing the Smaky computers, were released between 1988 and 2003. Eleven of them displayed the brand mascot, a yellow character named. Some of these games were educational, others were real-time simulation games or platform games. Games were created first for Smaky, but were later adapted for DOS and Windows, and sometimes translated. More than 100.000 copies of the Windows version of Speedy Eggbert were distributed in North America.
In 1997, a Tennis game was played remotely between EPFL and UNIGE with virtual reality devices and movement recognition, using telecommunications.

2000s

In 2001, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health released Catch the Sperm, a video game aimed at promoting prevention against HIV. The same year, Epsitec released an educational programming game offering to program a robot and solve tasks thanks to a lookalike C++ programming language.
In 2008, the Swiss game company released Farming Simulator. The original game would be followed by yearly by a series of sequels.
Between 2008 and 2009, Pro Helvetia, the Swiss national foundation aimed at subsiding culture, mapped the existing Swiss game industry and evaluated that there was a potential for development. They launched in 2010 a program called Game Culture in order to help the development of video games in Switzerland. The program lasted 3 years, with a budget of 1.5 million CHF.

2010s

The number of Swiss games released in the 2010s increased significantly thanks to mobile platforms, digital distribution service Steam for computers, and more accessible game engines available to create games. At the same time, state subventions kept growing. Many Swiss games are released every year.
After Farming Simulator, another studio launched a series of simulator games. Released in 2014 by Urban Games, Train Fever allowed to be in charge of building train networks. It would be followed by Transport Fever in 2016 and Transport Fever 2 in 2019, which both included new types of vehicles.
In a report published in 2018, the Swiss Federal Council explained that
In 2019, the Canton of Vaud launched funding to support game developers. It was the first Swiss Canton to do so.

2020s

The Swiss Game Hub in Oerlikon, Zurich was created to allow small studios to collaborate and learn from each other. Among the games produced by its studios is The Wandering Village.

Industry

Game designers

  • Michael Frei
  • Daniel Lutz
  • Sid Meier
  • Mario von Rickenbach
  • Christian Schnellmann
*

Companies

Associations/organisations

Events

Gamers Associations

  • Swiss E-Sport Federation
  • Gaming Federation

Schools/Academia

Education

Scientific research

Laboratories and departments

bavelierlab at UNIGE. Led by Daphné Bavelier, the goal of the laboratory is the study of brain plasticity, especially when video games are played.

Research projects

  • Confoederatio Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968-2000, a SNSF Sinergia project.
  • Horror-Game-Politics, a SNSF Ambizione project led by Eugen Pfister.
  • Pixelvetica, a project on the archiving of Swiss video games.

Museums/exhibitions

Exhibitions dedicated to games have happened in Switzerland.