THE FRONT LINE

At Tension we thrive by mixing old and new technology and software. You will find us at the threshold between hardware and system design, in the gap where new gizmos want to find functional use, and where traditional concepts need a boost of innovative ideas. We've been bridging gaming platforms, code standards, graphical content, crazy new ideas and hardware that doesn't make sense since our conception in 1999. All this sounds pretty abstract, we know. But that's where we want to be. At the front line, making, breaking and coming up with new concepts that don't even have proper names. Yet.

Way back in -93 our Boss decided that 3D was the coolest thing on earth (yes, because Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and such) and abandoned his wannabee programming career. Boss went straight to Silicon Graphics and started importing these huge refrigerator-sized computers which made virtual dinosaurs and spaceships possible. And a motion capture system. And ancient 3D programs which costed nearly as much as the refrigerators they ran on. Not to mention the compositing systems. Anyway, in just a few years time Megafront went from a one-man company to Scandinavia's biggest reseller and support provider of all that stuff, to the great joy of the budding game and visual effects industries. Boss was happy - but there were dark clouds gathering on the digital horizon.

You see although the hardware and software were now readily available (if you could afford them) the problem soon became the guys and gals who were supposed to operate them. They were simply too few! So, facing this, Boss made another transmogrification and decided to start a school for educating people about virtual dinosaurs and spaceships.

PlaygroundSquad was one of the very first educations of its type, now it's the oldest one still running in Europe. Many of us now working for Boss went there and learned about dinosaurs before getting out in the industry. Over the years Tension became the biggest supplier of virtual terminator competence in Scandinavia, as it ran not only PlaygroundSquad but also masterclasses for people already working in the business.

But Tensions history doesn't end there. Actually, that's almost where it started for real. Because during this decade Boss acquired a whole building (the Tensionhuset), set up a Game Incubator for business start-ups, got game development kits from Sony for both internal projects at Tension and the educations, procured new hardware such as "motion bases" (motorized chairs where you can pretend you are driving spaceships), became a game publisher, bought a shiny new motion capture system, made us work with mobile platforms, GPS tracking, virtual reality headsets, bulldozer steering, augmented reality, and many other things. Oh, and I almost forgot TenGine. Of course. At the heart of it all is TenGine, our framework that manages to magically combine all that hardware, all those platforms, all the software and languages, and get them to communicate properly!

Hm, it's all very complicated to explain. Come and visit us and see for yourself instead. Bring your project and your ideas, you'll be surprised what we can do! As long as they aren't boring. We don't do boring. Here at the front line, we like to do new virtual spaceships.