Nordic Game Flashback: Life Below
Last week we sent you to Embark and ARC Raiders. This week, stay on the Nordic Game YouTube channel and go under the water.
The NG26 recordings are still working talks, not souvenirs. Design, audio, production, leadership, and the sessions that treat nature as more than a backdrop. Watch what you missed. Send one to a colleague who builds worlds for a living. If you only have time for one video this week, make it this one.
Watch: Nature Inspired This Coral Reef City Builder
youtu.be/KQQ-uvEkx28
Jørgen Tharaldsen, founder and CEO of Megapop Games, takes the main theatre through Life Below: A reef builder where you do not raise cities or armies. You grow coral. The session title in the NG26 program was Building With Nature: From Coral Reefs to Playable Worlds. The question he puts on stage is simple: What happens when nature is the design philosophy, not the scenery?
This is why it is worth the half hour.
It flips a genre you already know. City-builder logic is still there – systems, balance, expansion, but the “citizens” are a living reef. That single swap forces different design decisions. If you make management games, this is a clean case study in changing the fiction without throwing the grammar away.
It shipped in public. Tharaldsen is not talking about a mood board. Megapop is a 13-person boutique studio in Oslo. Life Below launched on Steam around the conference (26 May 2026). You hear a studio that just put the build in players’ hands, not a studio still selling the pitch.
Science is in the loop, not in the trailer. Marine biologists advised the systems. Heat, blooms, invasive species – the threats are designed as ecology. The narrative sits with Rhianna Pratchett. Hope for the ocean is the brief, not a slogan on slide one.
The work keeps travelling. Life Below took the Unity Awards 2025 Social Impact category. Megapop is now a Changemaker Award finalist at Playing for the Planet’s Green Games Summit 2026 — shortlisted with CD PROJEKT RED and Massive Entertainment. This week the game is playable at Tokyo Game Show 2026, on the Norwegian Games booth in Hall 8 (08-C14), with three stations.
It is the other half of the NG26 main-stage week. Embark showed how a huge live game iterates on data. Megapop shows how a small Nordic team builds a world from a living system. Same theatre. Different scale. Same reason we record the program.
Then keep going. On the same channel: the ARC Raiders conversation, Jesper Kyd, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Housemarque on SAROS, Planet of Lana, and the rest of NG26’s 179 speakers.
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NG27 is next! Nordic Game returns to Slagthuset, Malmö, 25–28 May 2027. Speaker announcements start soon – names you will want in the room, not only on a later upload. Book the week in May NOW.
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