Swen Vincke Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
It was just last year that Swen had to go up on the Belgian Game Awards stage to receive the "Best PC/Console" Award for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and once more he'll have to make room on his trophy display for yet another shiny award.
We want to use this opportunity to look back at a lifetime full of achievements.
A Rocky Road
Swen Vincke founded Larian Studios back in 1996. The Ghent-bases studio started working on RPG’s for different developers a year later, with The lady, the Mage and the Knight as their first big RPG for a German publisher. When the publisher pulled out, Vincke had to pull the plug out of the project.
Larian Studios turned to hired work for some period to keep the lights on and part of the team together. After earning enough to invest in a game of their own, they started working on the first entry in what would become the Divinity series: Divine Divinity.
A New Hope
After working together with publishers on some of these titles and doing some client work on the side, Larian studios decided that self-publishing was the way forward.
They started working on two new games at the same time: Dragon Commander and Divinity Original Sin. The latter would be Larian Studios' last chance of survival. Vincke managed to keep it on track and with a successful Kickstarter campaign which raised near a million dollars, Divinity: Original Sin became a huge success.
A Lifetime of Achievements
After the release of Divinity Original Sin in 2014, Vincke and Larian studios started working on a sequel: Divinity Original Sin II. When the sequel released it was an even bigger success and Larian Studios was accoladed multiple awards. The studio that Vincke started had finally gotten to the point where it fulfilled his ambition.
Currently, the company is working from five different locations across the world and they managed to pitch the idea of developing the much-anticipated sequel, Baldur's Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast.
Swen & Larian Studios helped put Belgium on the map as a game development country and for that, we are eternally grateful!
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