The Tekes Skene Roadshow visited Jyväskylä just one day before our monthly meeting. It ended up being a very personal visit, with Kari Korhonen talking about how the Skene program works and answering questions from game developers from Jyväskylä.

We were happy to arrange our May Gathering with our good friends, Jyväskylä Entrepreneurship society. The Gathering was at the Jyväskylä Train Depot, a great space all kinds of cultural events at Jyväskylä.

We had two great guests, with Kati Heljakka and Samuli Syvähuoko, who also visited us this time last year.

Kati Heljakka is a toy and games researcher, with a PhD from the university of Turku. She is also a creative director at the Finnish board game company, Tactic. Tactic was a very exciting example of a Finnish games company, since it does something most of us are not that familiar: board games. It also manages to be international and still make the games in Pori, Finland, when most board game companies have outsourced the production into Asia. Very inspirational to hear someone with both the theoretical training and practical experience about making physical games.

Samuli Syvähuoko is veteran of the Finnish game studies, having been involved with starting such game companies as Remedy. He’s been touring Finland, talking about the Game Brewery, a project for “refining the Finnish games industry.” On top of that, they managed to make actual beer for the games industry! He also argued at length that Finland is the best place to be making games. The numbers he showed us of Finnish games industry’s growth seemed pretty convincing.

The evening came to a great end at the Bar Paja, with the games industry’s own beer. This was also the last gathering this spring, with the next one waiting us in September.

Thank you JES, Kati and Samuli and see you all in September!