Anyone who follows Gala Games knows we are growing rapidly and scaling as quickly as we can. To help the community get to know the team better, we are going to be releasing profiles on each team member we bring on board. We have a lot of these coming, but the first we would like to introduce to the community is Erik Sundberg, who is joining us as a Full Stack Engineer!
Erik is awesome, and he has everything that we would want in a developer. Like many of us here at Gala Games, his work is bigger than just games and goes deeply into finding positive ways to influence the world.
In his own words…
“I started programming when I was 10, making shockwave games for the web back when that was the cool thing to do. From there I’ve mainly worked in education technology, developing games and interactive experiences for K-12 students. At my last position I was the lead senior software engineer and spearheaded an initiative to gamify our content offerings for students. In 2019 I had the amazing opportunity to work in South Africa as an instructor teaching elementary and middle school students basic tech skills and programming. This may sound totally selfless, but I also chose to teach in South Africa because I got to surf every day after school.”
When asked about why he has dedicated his life to building games, he had this to say:
Gaming has always been a big part of my life. I have three brothers, so we gamed all the time growing up and eventually I got interested in making them as well. I love the psychology behind gaming, in that a creator manifests a world of rewards and obstacles that encourages a player to discover, play, and explore.
Like all of us, his favorite game is something personal and which has a history attached to it!
My favorite game growing up was definitely Super Smash Brothers for the N64. The amount of time I’ve put into that game has to be 5000+ hours. My twin brother and I came in 1st and 2nd in a Smash Bros competition back in 2007 at Michigan State University (I got 2nd…).
Erik’s interest in gaming is deeper than just video games and exhibits the deep gaming roots that we love to cultivate at Gala Games.
I have a podcast called “The Brotherverse” where my three brothers and I joke around while playing D&D. I’m the Dungeon Master and create artwork for each episode release. I first started playing D&D 5e about 5 years ago and have been obsessed ever since. We’ve been going now for 2 years and recently released our 50th episode.
Gala Games is happy to welcome Erik to the family! We have so much to accomplish, and we know that he will be a big help!
