Alex's Story

By Alexander Presthus, Co-Founder at Lumi Game AS.

1987 was a fairly ordinary year in terms of world events, Margareth Thatcher was elected for the third time into office in the UK, Ronald Reagan was the US president and Johnny Logan won the Eurovision song contest with the ballad ”Hold me now” (Yes, I know, terribly exciting). Star Trek TNG also made its debut on TV. On the computer and technology front however the world was making progress, this was the year when MS DOS 3.3 and Windows 2.0 was released to the public. The future of computers looked bright as both IBM and Apple were pushing the personal computer as the next big thing to revolutionize the world. It is perhaps not strange then that my childhood would center around this new and wondrous technology.

Ever since I was little I loved to tinker with technical things and figure out how they worked. We got our first computer when I was around 4 years old, and I became instantly hypnotized and drawn to the blinking cursor on the screen, which would display the letters I pressed on the keyboard, it was truly magical!

Much to my mother's chagrin my room filled up over the years with more and more computer and tech related stuff, I started building my own computers, and fixing up the computers of others at the time. Come to think of it, it’s a minor miracle that I didn’t start a serious fire at some point, as the fuse would often blow after one too many serial connected power cables. When I was around 7 or 8 I started to explore the world of computer programming and it was like a whole other world of magic opened up, I could actually tell the computer what to do! I never took it too seriously, however, and it was limited to my random ideas of some software I wanted to create (often far too complex for my skillset at the time).

In the Norwegian equivalent of high school I was reunited with programming when I studied Media and Communication. Being older and possibly wiser, I had an easier time of it and managed to create a few fairly usable programs and games, although nothing too terribly exciting. Then after those 3 years the journey went to a place where Vikings once ruled and settled, the city of Tønsberg. There I studied 3D Design, mostly to follow my desire to work in the games industry as that had always been with me since the day I played my first computer game (which I think was either Pac Man or Paperboy). Most importantly I also met my future co-founder and friend Erik there. After finishing my 3D Design degree, I was not quite sure what to do, as a career as a 3D Artist didn’t really appeal to me, but the imminent need to pay the rent caused me to get a job as computer technician for my home municipality. I spent the next 4 years of my life fixing computers, servers and networks, but eventually decided enough was enough, and that I wanted to try something completely new. So I applied to go to University in the UK to study Criminology and Forensic science (you know, CSI type stuff, although far more boring and time consuming than on television). Before I went off to Uni that year I had gotten in touch with Erik again and we decided to meet up to watch his local team play, as they had been newly promoted a division. The beer probably had some influence in it, but that day we decided to attempt to make a game for iOS, without having a clue how to actually achieve it. But later that night we had a fully playable prototype! We decided shortly after to found Lumi Games, the idea was to develop games on the side while I was off at Uni and Erik worked at the kindergarten.   

After a while in the British Isles however, it became more and more apparent to me that the entrepreneur in me was pushing harder and harder to focus on building Lumi Games full time. While studying blood, murder and chaos had its appeal, I realized it was not my passion, not in the same way games and computers are. So after about a year in England, I dropped out and returned to Norway to see what we could do with Lumi Games. During this time we had started ParticleBOOM, which I am sure we thought was close to finished at least 3 times already, but it somehow just kept growing and evolving as we put more time and effort into it. And today it is really a very different (and better) game than what we originally thought of.   

So now that we have had 1 game released (PAX! HD) and two close to completion (ParticleBOOM and TETRA) the future is looking bright and interesting for Lumi Games, and we can´t wait to really start to push both the game design and technology forward and contribute in our own way to the games industry. We have a few prototypes (for multiple platforms not just mobile), which we work on during late nights or days off (yes, I have heard, that is actually a thing.) which will do just that, and hopefully showcase entirely new ideas and concepts. Be excited… be VERY excited. ;)

Day 13 | Lumi Games