While Paradox is best known for grand strategy games, and more recently the tumultuous saga of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, back in 2011 it published one of my favourite slapstick co-op romps, working with little-known developer Arrowhead Game Studios. This was Arrowhead's first game, four years before it launched the first Helldivers and 13 years before the all-consuming beast that is Helldivers 2. The game was Magicka, and it was incredibly silly.
Most of Paradox's publishing efforts at the time were focused on strategy and grognardy games, though it had also been known to take a punt on things like Penumbra, the horror series developed by Frictional Games before it created Amnesia. Magicka, though, felt like an outlier: a comedic co-op game about death-prone wizards. Still, it paid off. Within a year, it had sold more than a million copies—not bad for a game designed by a bunch of students on a budget of only $400,000.
