MARIE MEJERWALL

Born in Sweden, Marie got her first console, a FAMICOM, at the age of 5. When she read her first PC Gamer at the age of 7, she knew she wanted to work with games - but not how.

As a teenager,  she started taking her first steps in 2001 when she started to play Counter-Strike and registered her first clan on Clanbase ladder system. This is when her life-long passion for esports began. In 2003, she became a writer for the worlds biggest female gaming community, Femina Gaming (later merged into Femina United) and soon grew internally to be one of its leaders as the org started organizing tournaments at Dreamhack - something she kept doing until 2010. However, esports was not yet a business she could work full-time in.

Leading competitions onstage at DreamHack around 2005

In parallel, Marie studied computer science, hoping to work with cool tech. She did lots of other game related things as well as opportunities opened up. In 2005, she was a game reviewer for Nordic Gamers online magazine and in 2007, she was starring weekly talking about games in tech show Metro Teknik, broadcasted on Swedish TV. She countinued speaking about games in TV morning shows every now and then.

Speaking during Sweden's largest morning show TV4 Nyhetsmorgon 

In 2008, she took her first steps as a game developer when she moved to Silicon Valley for an internship at IBM, working on Second life and researching the metaverse. When she returned, she joined a student group to develop Snow Hard, her very first game that she competed with in Swedish Game Awards 2009. Sadly, the industry in Stockholm at the time was in a slump, so she took the long route through doing her thesis in online poker at bwin 2010 and continued to build her experience as a developer with casino games at Net Entertainment in 2011.

Meanwhile, she was very active in the Stockholm BarCraft (StarCraft 2) scene. 

Demo:ing Batman Arkham Origins at Tokyo Game Show 2013

In 2013, she got her first job in AAA as she started as associate gameplay programmer at WB Games Montréal, where she worked on Batman Arkham Origins. The game was built on the source code from previous installment Batman Arkham City (GOTY 2011) and Marie was hands-on in almost all parts of the game's core combat and gameplay. She also got to work on the game's first boss - Killer Croc - which introduced Game AI in her life, that quickly became one of her specialties.

At the same time, she was - you guessed it - now involved in the North American StarCraft scene and helped out as admin at Dreamhack Montreal.

Attending BlizzCon 2016 with several StarCraft 2 professionals

Her game dev career continued, as programmer at Eidos, Technical Designer and then finally designer at Funcom (renamed Nvizzio), working on RollerCoaster Tycoon. The transition was planned all along - Marie always aspired to be a designer, there just hadn't been any education for it back when she attended university. At Funcom, she was recognized for her talent by Marc Albinet - industry legend and one of the first employees at Ubisoft back in the 1980's - and was taken under his wings where she quickly learned the ropes of game design.

Organizing SMITE tournament at Meltdown bar Montréal in 2016

During this time, Marie was heavily involved with SMITE - first as a clan leader, community builder and then as an amateur caster, volunteering for SMITE Central and ESL. She also produced a YouTube show about SMITE gameplay and organized tournaments at Meltdown Montreal gaming bar. As her game understanding grew, she became an analyst and was then approached by three separate teams to be their coach. One was a semi-professional org and another climbed from amateurs to North American League rank #12 under her guidance.

Posing with SMITE players of teams she coached or casted Hi-Rex Expo in 2017

In 2017, Marie moved to Vancouver to work at Capcom as a game desiger on Dead Rising until the studio sadly shut down. Her career instead continued in the UK as she rose to Senior Designer working on a new action game in the RuneScape universe at Jagex.

As Brexit hit, she moved on to Berlin, and here, a new era started - one where she started combining her passions into one by being a game developer on esports games. She started out as Lead Designer on The Cycle where she nurtured a small esports community who passionately held tournaments.

Streaming The Cycle and doing Q & A with the community

As the game pivoted away from esports, she moved on to take a temporary contract as associate design director at Ubisoft Stockholm to then join a mobile startup where she was director over her own esports game, building her team, designing and leading the project in its entirety.

In 2021, Marie decided to step out of working at a game studio, and instead open her own boutique advisory. This also enabled her to focus more on esports, and to really explore a side-career as a hostess and stage personality. The result was overwhelming - 29 speaker and hosts bookings in 2022, across both gamedev and esports comferences. She now does both as part of her business, and it complements her advisory well.