Gaute Godager cofounded Funcom in 1993 with four others: Erik Gloersen, Andre Backen, Ian Neil, and Olav Mørkrid. Funcom was never the most successful publisher of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, but at 22 years old, Funcom is one of the oldest.

Funcom is now best known for MMOs, but the company once developed single-player games, such as: A Dinosaur’s Tale, based on the 1993 animation directed by Steven Spielberg; Disney’s Pocahontas, based on the 1995 box office hit; and The Longest Journey, the acclaimed 1999 point-and-click adventure.

The release of The Longest Journey commemorates the year that Funcom refocused almost exclusively on developing and publishing for the PC, after a tumultuous history with console games. In 2001, the company unveiled Anarchy Online, an early digitally distributed entrant in the MMO market, with Age of Conan following in 2008 and The Secret World in 2012.

After 15 years, Godager, the last Funcom founder standing, retired from the company and perhaps video games altogether. Currently, Godager works as a clinical psychologist, diagnosing and treating psychiatric illnesses at an inpatient clinic in Norway.

Ramsay: Today, you’re a psychologist. How did you get interested in psychology?

Godager: That was kind of weird. I was just shopping around trying to find what I was meant to be in the world. I studied computing, but I wasn’t too hot on the math. I studied law for two years, but that was insanely boring. And then I just landed on psychology. I read the introductory book, and I was hooked.

Ramsay: And video games?

Godager: Before I started university, I was developing a game by myself on the Amiga for several years. I thought the game was interesting and a really big challenge. I was arrogant, thinking I could make the game all by myself, which was possible back in the late 80s. When I completed my psychology studies, the Amiga as a platform died in front of me. I had spent several hundred hours for several years, making this game I thought was really cool. I went to my reseller and said, “You tricked me! You said the platform would last forever!” I was very naïve, of course. One tends to be at 20.

So, he said, “I’m sorry, but I know people who are actually making games; they might be interested in what you know.” That’s how I met the other four founders of Funcom: Erik Gloersen, Andre Backen, Ian Neil, and Olav Mørkrid. Of course, they were making games on Sega and Nintendo systems. They just used the Amiga as a development platform, but my skills were useful. We hooked up and started Funcom in 1993.

Ramsay: How exactly did you meet them?

Godager: The Commodore guy gave me Erik’s address and phone number. Erik became the driving force. He was the one who had a love of money and a love of making huge companies. He was the visionary. I tagged along, like an opportunist, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have his great faith in the others, but I tagged along, supported it, smiled, and said my speeches.

But we hit it off! I think we hit it off because Erik had such a great belief in the possibilities. He was older, knew the video game industry, and knew what it would take. Andre knew how to raise money and make a good presentation. Tyr was a comic artist, so he could do help with presentations and stuff. Olav was a brilliant programmer. And I could make tools.

Ramsay: What was Erik’s vision for Funcom?

Godager: Erik wanted to make great games, and to put it very bluntly, he wanted to get rich. In 1993, publishers threw money at developers. Everyone was growing, everyone was making money, and publishers were eager to fund small startups. To make our first game, our publisher gave us $85,000, which was nothing to them. It’s unbelievable that you could make a game with that kind of money, so Andre shelled out enough from his own savings for us to run a basement office in Oslo for four months.

We had four months to get going. We invited publishers over to wine and dine them, to show them we have a good setup. When the publishers arrived, we had our friends bring over their own computers and fill the offices. There were actually only five people working. Of course, we weren’t paid either, but at least we had shares in the company. We had enough people to make it seem like the company was running.

When the publishers came over, they could probably see through our hoax. There was a low probability of us making a successful title, and they probably knew it was a long shot. But having us work on something was still so cheap for them, like $10,000 to fund the first milestone. So, what we did was we made a quick contract with the first publisher to start us off, and then other publishers bought in.

Funcom grew quite quickly, from five people to almost 100 in two years. Of course, since we needed the first game to be a hallmark of our capabilities, the game cost us four times as much to make as we got paid. We really didn’t know what we were doing! The publishers knew that; they had similar arrangements with other developers all over the world. Some studios made it; some did not. They took a Darwinist approach to game development.

Ramsay: How were the shares split between the five of you?

Godager: You must understand that Olav and I were very naïve, in terms of how to make companies. The shares were very skewed. Olav and I got 5% each while Erik got ten times as much, and the investors got one third of the company. That shows you how some people go into a startup, prepared with an understanding of the mechanics, while others just want to make games and be part of something fun. I was on a waiting list at the university, so I just wanted something to do while I waited for my studies to continue.

Ramsay: There were no objections to the split?

Godager: No, and that shows you our lack of understanding. I was okay with the 5% though, so I stuck with the company for the longest time. I wasn’t there to make a lot of money. I was there to learn, and to do a good job. I was very interested in making games and I had a good set of skills, which ended up as the most valuable set of skills, of the founders, to the company.

I worked at Funcom for 15 years. The first founder was massaged out after only nine months. The second went after two years. It’s very common that some people are very good at starting companies while others are very good at running them. The ones who are really good at starting up are looking for their exits. When’s the exit going to happen? How much money are we going to make? But Funcom wasn’t making money. Funcom almost never makes money. The game industry is extremely hit-based, and we’ve never had a massive hit. We’ve had good sales though. We’ve survived.

But because Funcom almost never makes money, every time there’s a shift in leadership or ownership, the investors want to know where we can cut costs. And where do we cut costs? “Here we have this guy who owns a huge chunk of the company, and the company could really use that equity in other ways, so let’s find a way to get rid of him.” That’s normal. That’s what I’ve been seeing in the game industry. It’s a very harsh environment. You’re only as valuable as your latest hit. If you don’t have a hit, you’re nothing.

That’s why the other founders drifted off. The last one to leave stayed for seven years or more. I had chosen to leave because I was tired of that industry, and really tired of the long hours. 15 years was more than enough for me.

Ramsay: You had investors? Why would anyone invest in a company that never made money, that doesn’t have any hits?

Godager: I don’t know what the numbers are today, but back then, 1% of the games sold made 95% of the revenue. You had titles that everyone bought, and then there were people scrounging to barely survive. Everyone was waiting for the one hit that would put them in the major leagues where they’d make massive amounts of money. All investors are looking for that, too. They understand that if you make World of Warcraft, you will be insanely rich. Investors are looking for that potential when they invest.

But I think our first major investor wasn’t a venture capitalist. We got venture capital later in our investment cycle, but in the beginning, our investors in Norway had massive amounts of money stacked away from shipping and oil. They were spending money on new freight ships, so who cares about spending $5 million on a small business? That was just fun for them.

Ramsay: Did you invest?

Godager: Very, very little. I was a student. I invested my computer equipment I had at home, my time, and eventually, I invested in some rounds. Initially, I worked for free for almost a year. We were very young and very poor.

Ramsay: What was the video game industry like in Norway?

Godager: One thing that makes it very hard to succeed is it’s quite easy to find people who want to work in the game industry, but it’s very hard to find people with experience who want to work in the game industry. To be brutally honest, I don’t know of any game company in Norway founded in the last 15 to 20 years that hasn’t had a large proportion of ex-Funcom employees. Without Funcom, there wouldn’t have been a game industry in Norway.

Ramsay: There wasn’t a game industry then?

Godager: There was nothing. Nothing. Funcom pioneered the whole thing. Other Scandinavian countries were in similar situations. Games were made in Germany, the U.S., and England. Japan was massive in the 1990s. Korea wasn’t that big yet and quite different then. Sweden and Denmark are now quite good. We have a couple of large companies, but we’re small countries. Norway can fit easily into a Los Angeles suburb. The only thing going for us is we have tons of oil, so we literally grease the economy with oil money.

Ramsay: Without an industry, how did Funcom go about developing games?

Godager: When you work in the game industry, you understand that it’s all about making good games. That’s why Blizzard has succeeded time and time again with massive hits. They work on their games for so unbelievably much longer than anyone else can afford. They’ve probably been working on Diablo III since they launched Diablo II. That’s like ten years! Who else can do that? And that’s the only way to make sure you have a hit.

So, what you do is you develop good development methods. EA has these lines of engines they produce, so they can just pump out the next game with only a little bit more added to them. They have an NBA engine, an NFL engine, a FIFA engine, and then The Sims. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but when we started, we didn’t have any of that. All we wanted to do was make good games, and there was nobody in Norway who could tell us how.

Ramsay: What was the first game to come out of Funcom?

Godager: There were two that came out close to each other. The first one was A Dinosaur’s Tale in 1993 for the Sega Genesis, where you were playing a dinosaur. The second was Daze Before Christmas, which came out in 1994 on the Sega Mega Drive. I think that’s one of the few Santa Claus games. These were really, really small games where we developed incredible amounts of interesting technology. We had the first 3D flying game on the Sega Genesis. In A Dinosaur’s Tale, you could actually fly in 3D through the world.

The reason why you could do that was because, on that Amiga I told you about, we had worked for many years on the Motorola 68000 processor—the same one in the Sega Genesis. And, since 1986 in Norway, we had the demoscene. That was huge in Europe, where people could show off their programming skills. Hundreds of people would meet in huge factories and school gyms, and make small demos over the weekend. Those kids were who we recruited.

Half of them were delinquent hackers and half were just plain nerds, but they were really good programmers. With them, we were able to squeeze the last few cents out of the Motorola processor, and that’s how we showed we did better technology than anyone else. That’s how we got the ball rolling because people were like, “Oh, my God! That’s huge! And then we’d do this for $85,000, so we weren’t just good; we were cheap. We had no business sense though. We spent four times as much on making A Dinosaur’s Tale as we should have, and the same with Daze Before Christmas.

Ramsay: Why did you guys choose to develop A Dinosaur’s Tale and Daze Before Christmas first?

Godager: That was not the question. The question was: which game can we get some slightly stupid publisher to fund us to make? In the beginning, we were a developer for hire. The publisher came to us with the money, a one-line description of the target audience, the type of game they wanted, the core features that should be seen in the game, and the size of the game. We did development, and they controlled the merchandise.

Back then, you had to make cartridges that were amazingly expensive. The game sold for $39.99 or $49.99. The price was basically the same as today, but it was very, very expensive to sell cartridges, and the hardware manufacturers were the only ones that could make them. Platform companies like Nintendo and Sega made money off publishers who would preorder 100K cartridges at $15 a pop. They had to shell out $1.5 million, and if the game sold nothing, the publisher went down. We got paid upfront though.

The only people who always made money were the hardware manufacturers. To survive, the publisher squeezed the only people they could squeeze: the developers. Publishers would start up ten games, can half and write them off as bad investments, and then put the big money into the remaining five. That means that when the publishers had made their money, we would get a percentage of the sales, which was basically never. You could build a developer for hire, but you had to make sure that you made the game exactly to cost. That’s the only way you could grow the company. That was impossible for us because we had no experience, so we just floundered along. Fortunately, we had extremely patient investors.

Ramsay: Why were they so patient?

Godager: I’ll never know. Our very first investor was a friend of Erik’s and he was an old money guy, Tom Dahl. His father made a lot of money and his father’s father made a lot of money. He inherited everything and wanted to have some fun. Our second investor was the Yates family, who made their money in oil and natural gas. For them, investing in a game company was their idea of fun. They came on board three or four years into the cycle, in our second round of investments. The third round was venture capital, and then Funcom became the first Norwegian game company to list on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2005.

Ramsay: The way you tell the story, wealthy investors were perfectly happy to throw their money away. Was Funcom really such a bad investment?

Godager: In the 15 years I was there, we never made any money; we always lost money. We sold about one million copies of Age of Conan, but we didn’t make any money because the cost of making the game was $40–50 million. Making these massively multiplayer online games is insanely costly.

But when I said our investors were patient, I think that’s the best way of describing it. First, to them, they weren’t there to make a small profit; they were there to get the big bucks. They wanted something in their portfolio that was cool and fun. We made headlines not only in Norway but around the world. The New York Times wrote about us, and I remember being interviewed on CNN. Investing a game developer was cool! I don’t know how they feel about it right now, but that’s the way it was.

Second, they wanted to safeguard their investment. When you invest, let’s say, $30 million dollars, investing another $1 million to launch the next game is a relatively small price to pay.

The third reason was that the amount of money they were investing was just pocket change, at least to one of our investors. He’s still an investor, and we’re a listed company, but he hasn’t sold any shares. He could have sold a lot of shares many times, but he hasn’t; it doesn’t matter to him. He can spend ten times as much, and that’ll still only be third of an oil rig or whatever.

Funcom is also, in some ways, a national pride to Norwegian people. We sold one million copies of Age of Conan. Name one other entertainment property created in Norway that has ever sold that many copies. It doesn’t happen. It’s a cool thing, and it’s probably way overvalued, but again, it’s something that many nerds in Norway would like to have a piece of. Like, “I know I’m losing money buying Funcom shares because they keep going down, but it’s cool having those shares; I own a piece of magic!” But they are patient. Maybe they’re naïve like we were? Maybe they’re stupid? I’m very grateful. I always take the opportunity to thank them for their patience.

We were always very good at public relations and marketing at Funcom, too, or at least we used to be? I don’t know anymore. I haven’t worked there for years, but we used to be really good at being a company that people wrote about. We did different things, we did new things, and people were interested in what we were doing. We could still sell dreams of the next game. We could still offer people the possibility of not making money, or only making their money back, or becoming filthy rich down the line. Because we have that ability, people just kept giving us chances. So, we made some bad games, but we also made some good games.

We were among the very first, and we made industry changing games. I could sit down with you in World of Warcraft and just list the features they ripped off from Anarchy Online that we invented before them. I can say they did this, they stole that, they did this the way we did, but we were responding to what previous games did wrong and they were responding similarly.

The difference is that while they did what we did, they did what we did better, which is always what I say. They were more experienced. They were smarter than we were, but we were creative, and I think that’s why we’ve stuck around for years and years and years.

Our list of near successes is quite long. Funcom is one of the few developers and publishers that has not gone bankrupt while at the same time remaining independent. We don’t make enough money to be bought by EA, but we make enough money to be invested in again and again. We’re like a floater—with potential.

Ramsay: When a company develops MMOs, that company tends to publish their own games. Funcom had publishers prior to entering the MMO business. Why the switch?

Godager: By 1998, we were fed up with the developer for hire model. We were really fed up with making console games where we saw the hardware manufacturers make all of the money. We made excellent games, but they could screw us at a whim. I have so many tales of that.

I remember in 1997 when we worked in the Irish office on a really cool title, a comic book driving game. We had married some cool comic characters we’d made with Sega Rally-type driving. It was not only fun to look at, but it played really well. We thought that game had huge potential, so we made the game for the Sony PlayStation.

Sony was super interested in the game; they were asking for new copies all of the time. And they had said that for the approval process to be really fast, we had to submit games to them and we did. Suddenly, when had a really nice contract with them. Everything was fine, they were smiling, and we were hugging. But when the game was ready, they started finding bugs we couldn’t replicate. So, the game remained in limbo for several months. And one day, Sony’s in-house team releases a game that was a clear competitor. I can’t prove anything, of course, but isn’t that a weird coincidence?

In 1998, we decided to shift to developing and publishing PC games. PC development was the place to be because we could control everything. Retail still had to get their cut, but at least we could sustain lower sales numbers and make our money back. But we had less risk; we didn’t have no risk. And so we eventually moved more toward the subscription model, where sales weren’t dependent on normal distribution channels. We could sell games directly online.

It’s important for me to give credit where credit is due. Marius Kjeldahl, the vice president of technology, was the one who actually had the vision of moving the company into online games. I am not saying I was against it, but I wasn’t very happy about it. It was just a new place where I didn’t really understand the games. I wasn’t visionary enough. I hadn’t been online enough, basically.

Ramsay: Was Funcom technically prepared for online games?

Godager: The development infrastructure we had was ready, more or less, on the client side. We everything we needed to make PC games. On the server side, it was a much bigger struggle. What type of server do we need? What do we need to know? We didn’t know, so we hired people who understood servers and server programming.

And although Marius was a visionary, he didn’t really get the backend, so we launched Anarchy Online without any methods of receiving payment. That was a disaster! The game had been in development for three or four years. It wasn’t that hard to make, but so many things needed to be coordinated and weren’t.

We also had no crowd control system. Let me explain it to you very briefly. Let’s say that you want to make an online version of the summer Olympics in London. There is a set number of people that can be gathered in one place. We could carry the load when they were evenly distributed throughout that world, but real people don’t have that way. The second everyone hears that Usain Bolt is running the 100-meter dash finale somewhere, everyone rushes there. In our MMO, our system broke down. We didn’t understand why.

So, basically, we had a leaky ship—a ship that when we poured water on it in the dry dock, it seemed to hold up, but as soon as we dumped the ship into the ocean and filled it with passengers, the ship started to leak everywhere and sink. It was just something that was almost impossible for us to predict. We failed quite miserably at launch and lost a lot of customers. And we were notorious.

We were the first to fail in such an epic way, but other games had come after us and done the same. If you go to MMORPG.com and read about launches, you will see that eight out of ten launches fail in some way. There are so many ways for a world to fall apart.

Ramsay: What did you learn?

Godager: Launch day was a remarkably happy event. We were sitting around in our offices—taking pictures, popping a bottle of champagne, and saluting each other for doing a good job. Of course, we didn’t have the tools to understand how badly the launch was actually going. It took some time for us to understand how much crashing we had. We were in the dark about almost everything. There were so many broken pieces of technology glued together with hope and fear. Some pieces were just missing.

Our many patient and nice investors actually had a critical role in the failure of Anarchy Online: they pushed so hard for an unfinished game to come out because they felt like we had spent enough time and money. They were right, but they tossed their investment out the window by pushing so hard. Before launch, I remember we, the non-management people, were saying, “The game isn’t finished! The game isn’t ready! We need to wait. We need to do more.” But we had spent so much money, and we had been saying the same thing for so much time, that we didn’t have any credibility anymore.

We didn’t know when we started how little we knew, which is always a problem. We were breaking in a new technology, a new platform, and, for the first time, we were the publisher and we didn’t have another publisher’s quality assurance organization. We had to do everything ourselves and make massive leaps everywhere.

Everything fell apart over the weekend after launch. It was really bad. There were many bugs, and players were demanding we fix them. So, we were working around the clock on a huge patch, and when that patch went out, we actually broke everything. We had gone from crappy to completely disastrous.

The worst thing we saw that we had to fix was cheating. It was bad enough that we had to implement a crowd control system. Players were using speed hacks to move ten times as fast, so our coders worked really, really hard to implement fail safes to ensure that a player’s character was always positioned correctly. The fail safes worked really well in our office on our servicers, but the crowd control system, and the anti-spoofing and anti-cheating systems, kicked in constantly for players around the world. People would log in and start moving but then they were suddenly yanked back. The client would display a message saying “take it easy.”

It was like spitting in the face of our customers. Players grew really frustrated, and we lost a lot of customers that first weekend. And, of course, all the coders were so tired that they had gone on vacation. They took some time off because they just delivered this big patch.

The launch of Anarchy Online was a really stressful and terrible experience. We learned a lot, and there’s a lot of code in The Secret World that is probably many hundreds of iteration better than what was in Anarchy Online. Going forward, we built on what we had done, fixed it, and made it better, so The Secret World had a flawless launch with almost no crashes or bugs.

Ramsay: Who were your competitors?

Godager: The two biggest MMOs at that time, at least in the West, were Ultima Online (UO) and EverQuest (EQ). UO was extremely focused on online player vs. player combat, and there were no levels. You came into the game as a new player. I remember that I had two gold pieces and very little equipment. It was hard for me to make money because the game was styled around the hardcore player. I wandered around for hours, trying to find some way to make money, and, gradually, I spent all of my money on food.

Being extremely weak, I stumbled out into the world where these player killers were just waiting for me and several hundred other hopeful newbies. They slayed us over and over and over, and we’d respawn where we died, so we were just killed over and over and over. We had to log out, wait several hours, and then log in again. UO wasn’t flawed from a technology perspective; the game was just super hardcore. UO was made for the winner, for the player killer. That was the philosophy of the people who made UO.

And the same goes for EQ. That was a game balanced around high-level gameplay—a game that you had to spend hours and hours and hours playing. I played a spell caster. Every time I cast a spell, I spent mana points, but there were absolutely no mana potions in the game. There was nothing you could buy to replenish your mana. The only way to regain mana was to sit down and read your spell book, which took up to five minutes to regain your full mana. You could kill one beast, but then you had to sit down and read your spell book. The spell book was a full screen page, so you saw nothing for five minutes except your spell icons while you waited for your mana to replenish. It was really hardcore and balanced around playing in a group because you were really poor and puny by yourself.

These were our competitors and they were successful. The only reason UO and EQ were successful, in my opinion, was that they were first and people just accepted what they were given. It wasn’t until World of Warcraft where Blizzard plied their “games for everyone” knowhow. They made an extremely solo-friendly MMO. The other games were really hard to play by yourself. That’s why they had 12 million subscribers instead of 500,000.

With Anarchy Online, we remedied many of the problems with UO and EQ. We tried to create the first MMO, and we tried to create the first player-friendly MMO. Unfortunately, really broken server technology didn’t really help our case.

Ramsay: What did you take away from Anarchy Online that you used in the making of your later games?

Godager: One of our Anarchy Online expansion packs, Shadowlands, was the biggest expansion pack that Funcom had ever made. It was set completely in another world, a new game in its own right with a portal to the Shadowlands from the main world. That was our test bed for our ability to execute a successful launch and make a really huge world. I think we learned more from that.

Shadowlands was a massive expansion. In terms of real estate, we almost doubled the size of Anarchy Online. In terms of complexity, we added a lot of new systems. In terms of graphics, Shadowlands wasn’t 2.0; it was more like 4.0. We didn’t have that many customers, but Shadowlands was still successful and we made money. That was where we wanted to be as a company.

We saw with Shadowlands that we can execute a huge game, that we can make a good, huge world, and that we can make something really visually appealing. At the time, my boss and I worked really well together; he put a lot of faith in me and saw that the team that I built with Shadowlands could go on to make another title. We were shopping around and wondering what we were supposed to be doing, so we picked up the rights to Conan. I wanted to do something with that. It was a happy coincidence that the IP had just been bought by some Swedish people. Norway is like Canada to Sweden. We speak the same language and we have the same mentality, so it was easy to get in touch with them.

They really saw that we understood how to take care of someone else’s intellectual property through our work with Disney on Pocahontas. We were able to convince them we could make their IP worth more if they let us build a huge MMO. They thought that was a fantastic thing, of course. There aren’t many MMOs coming out, maybe one or two every other year. There are fewer and fewer coming out because breaking into that market is really hard. So, we took what we learned from Anarchy Online and made Shadowlands, and then we took what we learned from Shadowlands and made Age of Conan. We started making Age of Conan in 2003 and continued until the launch in 2008—five years in production!

Ramsay: Before we talk about why you left that year, since you were the creative director, did you spend any time on developing creative talent? I ask especially because Ragnar Tørnquist is effectively Norway’s Sid Meier. Did you play any role in building that kind of creative leadership within the company?

Godager: I don’t think I can take credit for building Ragnar. Ragnar and I were the two big stars depending on which game was coming out. Ragnar did The Longest Journey, and I did Anarchy Online, and then he did Dreamfall, and I did Age of Conan. Now, he’s doing The Secret World. We were on different teams. I don’t remember if I hired them, but I remember when he started working with us in 1994. I thought he was a brilliant, brilliant guy. When everyone asks me about the talent, I would always say that Ragnar is probably the most talented person we had in our company.

I’m much more of an organizational development guy. I build organizations, I build companies, and I build relationships. I had a very, very conscious role in building talent. I always thought my role was to help build an organization that could run itself, especially if I were to leave, or if I was hit by the tram or the subway.

I was always trying to find talent and spend a lot of time with them, giving them responsibilities and letting them run with the ball. I’d check in occasionally and review what they were doing, but I was never in complete control. Sometimes you need more control than I had, but sometimes it’s also very costly to have too much control. When I left Funcom, I was very proud of the organization I left behind. I was very happy about that.

Ramsay: What were the events leading up to your departure?

Godager: To be very honest, I was depressed. I had done everything I could, and exhausted everything I knew, when I made Age of Conan. I had tried so hard to make something that could be my legacy. I had wanted to leave Funcom in 2003 after Shadowlands. I was tired of the game industry and I was tired of making games, but I was dissatisfied because I didn’t have a hit.

Age of Conan sold like a hit, but we lost customers because it didn’t have enough content. It was too empty. People consumed the content too quickly and the end game was not. Age of Conan was substandard compared to World of Warcraft, or any other game out there for some time. So, we didn’t really make it.

When I left in 2008, I saw that too many players were leaving, and I was depressed by that. I had really put all my soul into it. My boss was very sad that I left. He felt we had done everything right, and he felt I was a good game developer, a good game designer, and a good creative director, and that the company lost a lot of knowledge when I left. I know this because he doesn’t lie about stuff like that.

I wasn’t asked to leave, but I wanted to leave because I was so sick and tired of failing. I was sick and tired of the game industry. I just wanted to do something completely different with my life. I realized later that I left too quickly. I should have stayed on, helping the company learn more from our past mistakes, but I had to put myself and my own feelings first. For the first time in 15 years, I did that, and that felt really good.

Ramsay: In 2008, what was the trigger that motivated you to go through with leaving Funcom?

Godager: Before then, every day, I was receiving an e-mail message, automatically generated from Funcom, about the number of subscribers; I was watching the number of subscribers just dwindle. When I went to Portugal with my wife and kids, my life without Funcom felt so good. That’s when I realized I can no longer stay on, so I wrote my letter of resignation on the way home. I just needed some time away to really understand how stressed, tired, and fed up with the game industry I had become.

Ramsay: On the way home? Was your decision to leave that easy?

Godager: It was very hard, but not in the sense of having doubts. It was very hard because I felt like I was killing a large part of my identity. I was Funcom. I was the only founder left. My life had been Funcom every day, every morning, for 15 years. I chose Funcom because it was mine. After I left, I chose psychology because it was good for me to help people after all that time.

Ramsay: What do you think makes an entrepreneur successful? What do you think makes him, or her, fail?

Godager: When you’re starting your own company, I think you need to be able to disregard naysayers who say “ah, I think that’s been done before” or “this is really hard; you shouldn’t do it.” Fill in where you don’t have knowledge with hope and aspiration, and then surround yourself with people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear, so that you can prepare yourself for your own mistakes. You can’t give them power over you, or your company, but you need critics and you need to be able to disregard them.

I also think that one of the biggest flaws I’ve seen in founders is that they become hooked on investor thinking. Instead of thinking about how to make a good product, something interesting, or something you can love to make, they ask, “When is my exit? When is the next round of financing? What’s the price of my shares today?” The people who lasted the shortest of the Funcom founders were the people who were most interested in becoming rich or powerful.

You can become powerful and rich, but that’s not why you should become a founder. You must believe you can do something that’s cooler, different, better, nicer, faster, or cheaper. I’ve seen many startups fail, and nine out of ten times, they failed because the founders were more interested in riches than products. I’m not saying you should want to be poor though. I’m not saying that.