Yessica Klein
8 min read
09 November 2025
Halldór S. Kristjánsson grew up in a small town in northern Iceland. He moved to Reykjavík to pursue his studies and stayed there to build a game studio. “I always knew I wanted to make games,” he says. “At age twelve, I was already applying to game companies abroad.” That passion eventually led him to cofound Myrkur Games, where he devoted many years to building Echoes of the End, an ambitious narrative fantasy title for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox X|S.
The idea for the company was born during university, when Halldór met his cofounders in a game-design class. “We were supposed to make a relatively small game in three weeks,” he says, “but we went full send and developed something quite ambitious – and pulled it off.” That collaboration and its success sparked something bigger and riskier. “We started a more ambitious project from scratch. No team, no technology, no funding.” Myrkur released Echoes of the End, which blends Icelandic landscapes with high fantasy, in August of 2025.
What makes building a game studio different from other startups?
If you’re building a software company, you can often ship something minimally viable in months. In games, especially big games for PC or consoles, it takes years – three to seven years, on average. If it’s your first game, with no team, no tech and no existing tools, it can take even longer. You’re not just building the game; you’re building the studio as you go. It’s like building the plane mid-flight.
How did you approach building credibility as a first-time founder?
Coming out of university, we had no track record, so we had to build trust from scratch. That meant producing something tangible – prototypes, demos, pitch decks – and being persistent. We had to prove that we were serious, even if we didn’t have prior experience. That kind of early hustle is essential.
Why stay based in Reykjavík?
Creatively, it really helps to have the whole team in one place. We’re making a single-player narrative game, which means years of deep collaboration. Personally, I love it here. I love the climate, the changing faces of the landscape. I’m from the north, so I grew up under the northern lights and with nature all around. That’s hard to live without. And we’ve woven Iceland into the game itself: we’ve scanned real locations, worked with Icelandic actors. It’s not a historical game, but Iceland is the visual backbone.
"It’s calm here. Safe. You don’t spend your life in traffic. You can build a studio, go for a walk in nature, and still make it home for dinner. It’s hard to put a price on that."
What makes the Icelandic gaming scene unique?
The scene here really started with one big company, CCP, the developer of the popular MMORPG, Eve Online. Now there are over 20 studios thriving in Iceland making a very diverse set of games. But we’re still a small country, so there’s a kind of informal truce: we don’t poach each other’s teams. Instead, we try to grow the talent pool together. It’s collaborative, not competitive. If you need help, you can always call another studio for help, and they’ll share what they know. I find that to be a lot less common in other industries.
How do you find the right people when the local talent pool is limited?
It’s a challenge. You can’t rely only on local hires, so we recruit internationally. That means convincing people to move to Iceland, which is easier if they already love the idea. The nature, the safety, the healthcare and education systems: they all help. But you also have to understand what each individual needs. That’s part of the job.
What was it like raising funding for a single-player game?
Very hard. We came straight out of university with a huge vision and zero credibility. That’s not an easy sell to any investor. But we really believed in it, and we worked for years without salaries to make it real. Eventually, we found both VC and publisher support. In our space, publishers play a big role. They fund development and help with distribution and marketing, which is essential when your product only ships every five years.
What keeps you motivated?
We’re building the game we all want to play. I think that’s the best motivation you can have. Knowing we’ll be able to share that with people around the world, to give them something they’ll hopefully love and want to talk about with their friends, that makes the stress worth it. I usually say: as long as your motivation for the result outweighs your level of anxiety of getting there, you’re doing fine.
“It’s just a magical place. Iceland has so many different faces in terms of what nature has to offer and what you can do to explore.”