Soren Johnson

Soren Johnson (born May 23, 1976) is an American video game designer and programmer. Johnson's games primarily belong to 4X strategy, known especially for coding smart AI, his games are internationally renowned. Soren is best known for his work as a lead designer on Civilization IV, Offworld Trading Company, and his latest title in Early Access, Old World. He also worked on Civilization III as a co-lead designer. In 2013, Soren founded Mohawk Games, an indie studio in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, which later moved to Alexandria, VA in 2020 during the Coronavirus Pandemic. The studio is dedicated to making high quality and innovative video games starting with Offworld Trading Company, and where Soren works to this day. Soren currently works with his wife Leyla, on his game Old World, and worked with her, previously, on Offworld Trading Company. Soren is the father of Sebastian, Connor, and Catherine Johnson, but apparently it is Oliver (the cat) who runs the house. Soren has a cool and dynamic team of creators at Mohawk, some of which have worked with him on previous projects. Soren is known for being one of the earliest developers who involved the internet gaming community in game design, testing, and discussion.

Biography

Early life

Soren Johnson was born in Olympia, Washington; however Seattle, Washington is the place he calls home. Soren grew up with his one sibling, Bjorn Johnson; his childhood friends including: Eric, Allen, William (a.k.a Bill) Hillary, Jan and Joe; and his cousins: Kjell, Erik, and Sonja (who to this day remain close).At age 13, Soren was asked to go to college, but his parents: Kenneth and Ruth, thought that he would benefit more from being around friends. Soren in hindsight thinks that his parents made the absolute right decision, and is glad to this day that he spent time with all of his friends and cousins. Soren is a gamer and has played a wide variety of game genres, ranging from board games to strategy to shooter games and racing, but eventually grew a particular interest in games involved in history and war. His first ever notable gaming platform was a Commodore 64, which his parents bought for the family, when he was 7 years old . He grew up on mid 80's games, and electronic card games of the period. Like many kids Soren early thought that video games magically came from the sky, but eventually Soren learned to program many games. He grew a particular love for games made by renown, strategy game developer: Sid Meier. His mother was often heard quoting him “one day, I am going to go work with Sid Meier!” (which eventually came true when he joined Firaxis Games in 2000). Soren took a hiatus from gaming between the age of 16 to 24 years old for multiple reasons, a couple including the fact that he learned to drive and was attending college. A few notable games Soren played include- Warcraft 3, Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, Starcraft, Railroad Tycoon, Prince of Persia. Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown, Risk, Diplomacy. X-COM, SimCity, Train, M.U.L.E, Seven Cities of Gold. Gran Turismo, Mario Kart, Left 4 Dead, Heroes Might and Magic, Sid Mier's Alpha Centauri, Civilization. Settlers of Catan, Samurai, 7 Wonders, Battle Line, History of the world, and Belter.

College Days & The Mohawk

Soren did not play a lot of games in college, choosing to fully embrace the college experience, resulting in him largely missing the experience of playing Civilization II at that time. Prior to college, Soren was not aware that computer science consisted of learning programming until he first enrolled at Stanford University, where he started by acquiring a BA in History, and eventually a MS in Computer Science. After college, Soren started an internship with Electronic Arts, when a friend interning there got him an interview. At EA, Soren worked on Knockout Kings during his internship, where he worked on its AI. Soren returned to school for a semester at Oxford with his college roommate Christopher Tin, who eventually was hired to work on Soren’s game Civ IV, where he composed the Grammy winning song Baba Yetu. Soren played the Cello in the Stanford Orchestra, and at one point traveled to China to perform with his fellow Stanford musicians. His college friends are many, and till this day they maintain a good friendship, holding the occasional Zoom meetings. Back in college, one of Johnson’s friends, Ratha, won a bet he made with Soren. The bet required Soren to shave his head to give himself a mohawk. Soren’s mohawk photo remains till this day a proof that Soren might lose some challenges, and that he will honor his word. It ended up being the inspiration for the name of his current game development studio: Mohawk Games

Firaxis Games

After finishing his internship at Electronic Arts, where he worked on the Knockout Kings series, Johnson started employment at Firaxis Games from 2000 to 2007. Soren followed the Civilization III development externally and joined his idol Sid Meier, even as much of the previous development team abandoned Civilization III, early in its development. He considered the exodus an opportunity to help his idol and save the franchise from collapse. Soren joined Firaxis in April 2000, along with Jake Solomon, starting mid development on Civilization III with director Sid Meier and designer Jeff Briggs. Almost the entire programming team had already left by this time leaving the only 2 engineers left: the Intern and Audio programmer. Soren was given the lowest salary offer he had ever been presented, but persevered with an intention to use the experience to launch his career. Eventually Soren’s talent and work ethic brought him to the position of co-lead designer alongside Jeff Briggs. Soren had a lot of freedom to work on Civilization III and rewrote a lot of the code from scratch, even with 16 months left to complete the work before launch. Soren simplified Civilization III’s code base so that a lot of new mechanics could be added, without having to simply keep building on top of the previous game in contrast to the way Civilization II’s code was on top of the original. Soren’s hardcore resource features in Civilization III of the 'have and have not' created scarcity in economic terms, becoming a catalyst for diplomacy system. Resource and economics systems would continue to be a key feature in his later games. Johnson’s main role during Civilization III’s development, however, was its Artificial Intelligence; his success in eventually earning him a reputation as one of the best game AI developers. Johnson's ideas, however, were not all well received; including one infamous mechanic involving domesticated animals like horses being limited to certain ingame continents (just like in real history). Rather than leaving these poorly received mechanics untouched however, Johnson headed one of the earliest examples of post release support in gaming, using the feedback from the gaming community to further update the game post release. Johnson further highlighted his community support by making the game modder friendly; designing the AI to adapt and continue to function with changes to game design, even during community modding post game release. Soren provided updates and patches to Civilization III for a year after the initial release, spending plenty of time immersed in the game’s community, judging and absorbing feedback; with many hard learned lessons from post release adding to the later success of Civilization IV. Soren joining Firaxis at this crucial time is commented to be a “strategic gamers move applied to real life”, and is today seen as an action that saved Civilization III and the future of the Civilization franchise.

Due to his success in Civilization III, Soren Johnson became the sole lead designer of Civilization IV, once again writing all of the AI. For Civilization IV, Soren brought in Civilization fans and members of the gaming community to test the game ahead of release, which proved highly effective in making the game stable and balanced before release. This set the precedent for Sorens future development process, and continues to be part of the winning formula for his games. According to Soren, there are generally 2 types of AI in video games, 'good AI' and 'fun' AI. Good AI competes to beat the player and win, whereas fun AI does not necessarily try to win a game but tries to give the human an enjoyable gameplay experience. A game like Civilization IV would have an AI that has features from both, their balance dependent on the difficulty setting. According to Johnson, building a successful AI for gameplay is not based on any novel technique, but requires a lot of hard work and coding. Soren also had a considerable role in the development of the main theme music: Baba-Yetu, by working with his old classmate and composer, Christopher Tin. Christopher and Soren, wanted to capture the essence of the view of earth from outer space in a musical piece, but also giving a deeper feel to the song with an extra layer of lyrical meaning. The result was a masterpiece, being the first game soundtrack to win a Grammy. Some fans of Civilization IV reportedly ended up leaving the menu screen open just to hear the global beat on repeat. When Johnson was asked if Christopher Tin was 'as cool in real life as he is on Reddit' Johnson answered with a simple "Yes". Civilization IV earned arguably the most critical acclaim of any Civilization game, with many fans believing it to be the best version of Civilization even after its 2 sequels. Despite Soren's success in games, its a wonder why he lacks the same skill with the UK forces in the Desert War scenario in Civilization IV, having been soundly beat by a German player.[1]

EA & Zynga

On April 17, 2007, it was announced that Johnson had left Firaxis to rejoin Electronic Arts (Maxis) to start mid-development on the genre bending game based on evolution, Spore. The game simulated 5 phases of evolution, starting the player as single cell and ending as a intergalactic civilization. Soren was hired to help with the 4th stage: "Civilization" which saw your the player's procedural generated organism begin a primitive civilization on its home world.[2] Spore would end up to be a disappointment for Johnson due to the game’s mixed reception from critics and fans, its failure he later attributed to the divisions in the developer team’s vision and the lack of outside player feedback. At EA, Johnson also worked on the design of Dragon Age: Legends, a mobile game. Johnson left EA in September 2011 to join the social network game development company Zynga on an unnamed project that was never published.

Mohawk Games

In 2013, Soren founded his own game development studio Mohawk Games in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. Their first video game launched April 28, 2016 titled Offworld Trading Company: an economic real-time strategy game for Microsoft Windows and OS X using an extended and more detailed version of his signature resource system, seen in his earlier Civilization titles. This game would be Soren Johnson’s first use of Early Access, making changes to the game based on player feedback, even before its full release. Offworld Trading Company is a unique game in the genre, as it is an economy-based RTS. When commenting on the creation of Mohawk games Johnson said, "Mohawk puts gameplay first," "Our goal is to make games that will be played for years, based on elegant, replayable systems that are not limited by finite content creation. Our development process emphasizes rapid iteration above all else, requiring our games to be playable as soon as possible so that we have time to find the fun." Christopher did more musical pieces for Soren on Offworld Trading Company, including the theme 'Red Planet Nocturne'. Once again Soren and Christopher shared ideas on how to make the music sound "other worldly", with Christopher heavily synthesizing his music for the game. Offworld Trading Company would end up being a great success selling over 600,000 copies.

With Offworld Trading Company, and Leyla by his side, who is the president, the producer, one of the designers and head-writer at Mohawk, and after the development of Offworld Trading Company, Soren started work on a new historical based Civilization-inspired strategy game initially called Ten Crowns. Due to financial complications of their publisher Starbreeze, (who originally financed Offworld Trading Company). Mohawk Games was offered a deal by Epic Games, and thus having a distributor. The title received a name change to Old World after the switch and the game is in current development, which entered Early Access on May 5, 2020. He was a bi-monthly design columnist for Game Developer magazine and is on the Advisory Board of the Game Developers Conference. He also runs the game design blog Designer Notes and hosts the game designer interview podcast of the same name.

Works
Video GamesYear ReleasedRole
Civilization III2001Co-Designer
Civilization IV2005Lead Designer
Spore2008Lead Designer
Dragon Age Legends2011Lead Designer
Offworld Trading Company2016Lead Designer
Old World2020Lead Designer[3]
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gollark: Don't they *use* some?
gollark: Spoilers, or the AR thing?
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References
  1. discord chat
  2. "Interview: Soren Johnson - Spore 's Strategist". www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 2020-05-23.
  3. Crowley, Nate. "Preview: shape nations and annoy kings in Old World, the new 4X from Civ 4's Soren Johnson". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved 9 May 2020.
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