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EP110 · Tools · first published 2021-12-04

Game Communities and Computer Graphics | Jani Penttinen | Neuvottelija 110

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Jani Penttinen started at Bloodhouse sleeping in a sleeping bag on the office floor, made Supreme Snowboarding at Housemarque — one of the first games to use 3D cards and, as he recalls it, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies — and ended up at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas when his uncertain "let me think about it" was read as a negotiating tactic and a signing bonus of about four thousand dollars rose to about eight thousand. At Westwood he worked on Command & Conquer: Renegade, Generals and Earth & Beyond until Electronic Arts closed the Vegas studio and split its staff into three auditoriums. The second half is about communities: user-generated content will not last if the players make the content and the studio makes the money; for Penttinen an NFT is a technology for provenance and resale commission, not an investment; Sami Miettinen tells how his own Clash of Clans suggestion went into Supercell's production; and the generation raised on Roblox plays block graphics because realistic graphics are ordinary to them. Penttinen closes on why he would rather make console games than mobile ones and why Slush deals are done outside the halls. Published 4 December 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: Tools and Implementations

Game Communities and Computer Graphics | Jani Penttinen

Summary: In episode 110 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Jani Penttinen, who was there in the early days of the Finnish games industry, worked on graphics for Westwood Studios games in Las Vegas in the early 2000s and still lives there. The episode has two halves. First comes the history of the games industry and computer graphics as seen from inside: a sleeping bag on Bloodhouse’s floor, Supreme Snowboarding and the first 3D cards, a salary negotiation that succeeded by accident, and the way Electronic Arts closes a studio. Then the conversation turns to what is changing in games — and there the central observation concerns community, not graphics. The episode also shows footage of Penttinen’s own Xbox game, which he made practically alone. Published 4 December 2021.

Renegade, Utopos and the first 3D cards

Penttinen’s first game of his own was Utopos, a multiplayer game for the Atari, which Miettinen calls a pretty clone of a multiplayer Asteroids. “Is that too harsh?” — “No, that’s fine.”

The real breakthrough was Housemarque’s Supreme Snowboarding. According to Penttinen the previous generation of games was still rendered in software, because there were no 3D cards yet:

Supreme Snowboarding was one of the very first games that used 3D cards.

As he recalls, the machines had something like a Voodoo 2 card, which is why the game looked so good next to everything else. He thinks it was “the first Finnish game ever that sold, was it over a million copies”, and the best-selling one at the time. The figure is Penttinen’s own recollection.

Why California lost and Vegas won

Penttinen lived for years in Silicon Valley, and his verdict is blunt: “if you don’t have to live there for business, nobody lives there.” The traffic is congested, for half the year you breathe wildfire smoke, and housing is “absolutely unbelievably expensive”. The family saved for years for a house, but every year prices had risen faster than their savings.

On a weekend trip to Las Vegas they realised that the same money would buy “any house at all” there. The decision was quick, the house was built to their own spec, and about three years later, Penttinen says, the price of similar houses had nearly doubled. Remote work during the pandemic made location matter even less.

Bloodhouse, a sleeping bag and Stardust

His career began at a company that, in his words, has vanished from the history books:

The very first was Bloodhouse. It has vanished from the history books, but Bloodhouse was Housemarque’s predecessor.

No salaries were paid, and Penttinen slept in a sleeping bag on the office floor. Even so, the company made Stardust, one of the first Finnish games. After Bloodhouse he spent time at Remedy and then moved to Housemarque. After Supreme Snowboarding he had been through every Finnish games studio and lacked the means to found his own. What was left was to leave.

The negotiation nobody conducted

The episode’s best single story starts with Penttinen not being able to afford flights to job interviews in Britain. He arranged a gig with the Finnish company Hybrid Graphics, which sent him to its client Westwood Studios in Las Vegas to help with 3D coding — with a stopover in London, where he spent a week and went to all his interviews.

The British offers were good, but after a couple of days in Vegas Westwood asked him to come and work there and offered a signing bonus of about four thousand dollars, “which for me was an unbelievable amount of money” in the days of the markka. He had not thought of moving at all:

I was just like, let me think about it. Of course they thought it was my negotiating tactic, so then they put about eight grand on the table.

Finnish embarrassment did the rest: he felt he had to accept, because he did not know how else to get out of the situation. Westwood promised to handle the paperwork.

Westwood Studios and three auditoriums

Westwood was then, Penttinen says, “perhaps the toughest game studio in the world”, with ten years of hit after hit — Command & Conquer and Red Alert. He was hired to code the studio’s first 3D game, Command & Conquer: Renegade, and was the lead graphics programmer on C&C Generals and the massively multiplayer Earth & Beyond as well.

Electronic Arts already owned the studio but left it independent for about three years. Towards the end came “all kinds of workshops” on how the studio was to be aligned. The plan was to grow the 250-person Vegas studio into a megastudio, but at the last moment EA decided to concentrate the work in Los Angeles and close Vegas.

The announcement is the episode’s most precisely remembered scene. Everyone was called into an auditorium for a speech “that you couldn’t really make sense of”, and afterwards people were divided between three rooms. Penttinen’s group was offered a move to Los Angeles, the second one to San Francisco, “and the third one was given a pink slip”.

Graphics processors, crypto mining and 4K

Miettinen mentions that the investor guest Ernst “Pavel” Grönblom had a few months earlier picked out Nvidia in his portfolio. Penttinen admits he did not see the rise coming: he felt graphics had reached a level where only speed was being tweaked. Many of today’s AI developers, he says, come from the graphics scene, which twenty years ago was “the hottest thing”.

Cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with graphics, but graphics processors are optimised to do very simple calculations in parallel, and that happens to suit mining far better than Intel’s general-purpose processors. “If you had bought Nvidia really cheap ten years ago” — and bitcoin, they agree.

Miettinen notes that a company producing sports broadcasts still uses HD, because 4K produces gigabytes of data. Penttinen agrees there are limits, but his latest game, Guntech 2, runs at 4K on the Xbox Series X. It is built on the Unity engine, and the cutscenes run on the same engine: the camera simply moves through the game’s own scene.

A game you can play with your own children

Penttinen made the game practically alone, and he calls it Utopos “the way it was meant to be done”. A killer virus threatens the solar system — he came up with the idea a year earlier and wondered whether the pandemic would be forgotten by the time it came out. The guiding design principle is playing together:

A game you can play together with your own children.

Four players can play at once. Children fly small sidekick ships, each with a different weapon and simple controls; the larger ships differ in weaponry and carrying capacity. In a contest of reflexes, Penttinen says, he is no match for the kids.

User-generated content

Miettinen recalls that Penttinen spoke at Slush in 2011 on behalf of Transfluent about crowdsourcing. Penttinen says he has long been an advocate of crowdsourcing, and in games it is now called user-generated content: instead of a pre-packaged experience, players get to make content themselves. Mods, skins and level editors have always existed, but few games have been built to be modded — and those few have lived long.

He attaches a clear condition to that future:

When everyone takes part, there has to be a marketplace, because it won’t fly very far if you exploit your players so that the players make the content and you make the money.

The arc, as he sees it, has gone from players paying to play to studios paying to be found — Supercell, he estimates, probably spends half a billion a year on advertising.

Clash of Clans and the Finlandia clan

Here Miettinen tells an anecdote of his own. Supercell tested Clash of Clans in Canada first and soon brought it to Finland. Miettinen joined the Finlandia clan, which became the best clan in Finland, and played in it for a year and a half — ranked 25th to 30th of 30 because he would not put money into the game.

Supercell’s small development team followed the clan closely and even invited it for a visit under a non-disclosure agreement. Miettinen says three of his ideas went straight into production, for example that village buildings can also be built with elixir: the balance between gold and elixir had gone askew, with elixir useless and gold too valuable. His conclusion is that Supercell was among the first to understand the development power of a 30-person core player community.

Penttinen qualifies it carefully: it is hard to say whether the company realised it first or the community did, or whether it was deliberate design or opportunism. But he finds the explanation in the company culture. Ilkka Paananen’s principle of wanting to be a CEO with no power, with teams governing themselves, leads naturally to listening to players as well, “rather than sitting in our ivory tower”.

NFTs without the investment hype

Miettinen asks about NFTs, which Jyri Engeström had discussed on another podcast. Penttinen sees them as one piece of the solution: when a player makes something for a game and it is sold, an NFT makes it identifiably authentic and original.

Every time it’s sold on, I can still be paid a commission on that sale.

Today a creator loses all access to what they made even if it becomes very popular. The technology is misunderstood, he says, because people only talk about how “some crazy crypto millionaire bought some picture for 60 million”. Miettinen sums it up as an unforgeable ownership watermark for digital goods.

Penttinen says he is building a new company in Finland that combines the metaverse, role-playing and crypto, especially NFTs, into a world where people create content and others enjoy it. It is at such an early stage that he cannot say more.

Location games, Oculus and the limits of immersion

Miettinen recalls the Finnish Shadow Cities, which was close to the idea of Pokémon Go years before it. Penttinen says it was not simply a matter of being too early: nobody else has yet managed to “get the nation moving” the way Pokémon Go has, and it may have been a Pokémon advantage rather than a second-mover advantage.

Miettinen has tried the Oculus 2 and relays Risto Linturi’s view that Meta’s graphics engine beats Unreal. Penttinen applies the brakes: the Oculus is still poor hardware, and only at the resolution of a headset such as Varjo’s would investment in the graphics engine really matter. “It’s still too early to boast” about the world’s most realistic water while the pixels are visible to the eye.

Why the new generation plays block graphics

The episode’s most surprising observation is about children. They play games like Roblox, where everything is built from blocks:

They were born into a world where realistic graphics are the norm, so for them gaming actually means playing things that don’t look realistic.

Penttinen will not predict whether people will ultimately want a metaverse that looks like the real world or something else entirely. His own children, he says, learned to code because they played Roblox passionately: first you have to make something, then code something, and soon they are watching coding tutorials on YouTube instead of cat videos.

Renegade, snipers and a franchise that did not live on

Renegade was, in Penttinen’s view, ahead of its time as a multiplayer game, but even then he opposed the sniper rifle that kills from afar with a single hit. Many players loved it, and the feature lives on. The series did not, he says, get the support it needed from EA, other games overtook it, and no sequel came.

Games became a social space

Fortnite is well made and fun, Penttinen says, but there is always some 16-year-old with infinitely fast reflexes. The more interesting development to him is that games have become a hangout: a player dies at once and stays chatting with friends. “It’s an acceptable way to spend time.” Many parents consider gaming ruinous, but at its best it is a good way to socialise.

Console rather than mobile

Penttinen once made a mobile version of the same game but concluded that an arcade-style shooter on mobile is pointless for now. In a free-to-play game what people really play is the meta-game — what you earn and what you spend money on — and that is hard to build around a game whose actual play is the main thing. The alternative would be a subscription model like Apple Arcade.

Atari asked him to make a new version of Utopos for the launch of its new console, which became Guntech. After that he got an Xbox Series X dev kit and spent a year on the sequel. His reasoning is a craftsman’s:

Here you concentrate on the game itself, on what you steer and play with this controller — on developing the playability.

He enjoys playing mobile games, but as a developer his passion is arcade-style play.

Where investor meetings actually happen

The episode was recorded just before Slush. Penttinen has been at every Slush since the first and has “never once sat through a single talk to the end” — except his own. For those without a ticket he offers comfort: what matters is networking at side events and evening parties, “where the deals happen”. Good speakers bring in the paying crowd, but “quite a lot of investor meetings these days don’t happen there; they happen in the city centre”.

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list; all 22 chapter marks land on the start of a transcript cue. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context. The earlier version of this article gave the Clash of Clans anecdote to Penttinen; in the transcript Miettinen tells it as his own experience, and Penttinen is more guarded about what Supercell understood. The transcript’s “Gantek” has been identified as Penttinen’s Guntech games from Utopos Games. A couple of names mentioned in passing (Miettinen’s Fortnite coach, one gaming clan) were indistinct in the audio and have not been guessed. The episode opens with a preview montage of about a minute.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 110, published 4 December 2021, running time 39 minutes 33 seconds. Guest Jani Penttinen (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 110 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 4 December 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews games industry veteran Jani Penttinen. Key findings: his career began at Bloodhouse, the predecessor of Housemarque, where Stardust was made; at Housemarque came Supreme Snowboarding, one of the first games to use 3D cards and, as Penttinen recalls, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies; Penttinen reached Westwood Studios in Las Vegas on a Hybrid Graphics gig he took to get free travel to job interviews in London, and his uncertainty-driven “let me think about it” was read as a negotiating tactic, so the signing bonus rose from about four to about eight thousand dollars; at Westwood he worked on graphics for Command & Conquer: Renegade, C&C Generals and Earth & Beyond until Electronic Arts closed the 250-person Vegas studio and split its staff into three auditoriums (a move to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, or a pink slip); Penttinen did not foresee Nvidia’s rise, because crypto mining has nothing to do with graphics but exploits the same parallel computing; the future of games lies in user-generated content, but the model fails if players make the content and the studio makes the money; for him an NFT is a technology for provenance and resale commission rather than an investment, and he is building a new metaverse, role-playing and NFT company; Sami Miettinen tells how his Clash of Clans suggestion to allow building with elixir went into Supercell’s production via the Finlandia clan, and Penttinen links Supercell’s attention to players to its culture of self-governing teams; the new generation plays block graphics (Roblox) because realistic graphics are ordinary to them, and Roblox teaches children to code; games have become a social space; Penttinen prefers making console games (Guntech for the Atari VCS, Guntech 2 for the Xbox Series X), because in a free-to-play mobile game people play the meta-game rather than the game; Slush deals and investor meetings happen at side events, not in the halls.

Chapters

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