Stieg Hedlund
Stieg Hedlund, born in 1965 in Portland, Oregon, is a game designer, artist, and writer who has helped create more than 30 video games. He is best known for his work on action RPGs and has also contributed to real-time strategy, shooting, and adventure games.
Hedlund started his career at the Japanese game publisher Koei in 1990, working in both California and Japan. He led design on games like Liberty or Death, Celtic Tales: Balor of the Evil Eye, Gemfire, and Saiyuki: Journey West. Koei California closed its game development around 1995.
In the mid-1990s, he worked at the Sega Technical Institute as an artist and designer, contributing to titles such as Comix Zone, The Ooze, Sonic X-treme, and Die Hard Arcade.
In 1996, Hedlund joined Condor as lead designer after being impressed by their Diablo project. Blizzard later acquired Condor, renaming it Blizzard North. Diablo, released in 1996, became one of the most acclaimed games of its time. Hedlund went on to design Diablo II and helped work on StarCraft and the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion.
In 2000, Hedlund announced he would leave Blizzard North after finishing his work on Diablo II to start a new studio, Full-On Amusement Company, with partners from various game companies. He also briefly collaborated with filmmaker David Lynch on an unreleased project, Woodcutters from Fiery Ships.
Hedlund then joined Konami as Creative Director, working on titles in the Frogger and Contra series. In 2002 he moved to Ubisoft/Red Storm Entertainment as Creative Director, contributing to Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2, Rainbow Six: Lockdown, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. He also worked with Oddworld Inhabitants on Stranger’s Wrath.
In 2004 he joined Perpetual Entertainment as design director for Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. The game was shown at E3 2006 and earned several awards, but its technology proved hard to stabilize. After several delays and layoffs, the project was suspended in 2007 and the game was released in 2011.
When Perpetual closed in 2008, Hedlund shifted to independent and big-publisher work. He founded Turpitude, a design consultancy focusing on monetization and social gameplay, working with Disney, Zynga, and Playdom. He spoke at industry conferences about player retention and engagement. In 2010 Turpitude began focusing on social game development, releasing Wedding Street with The Knot. He also contributed to the MMORPG Villagers & Heroes, released in 2011.
In 2011 Hedlund joined nWay Games as Vice President of Creative for the action RPG ChronoBlade, a web and mobile game released with regional partners. ChronoBlade’s rollout included a publishing partnership with Netmarble in South Korea and later a 2015 collaboration with NetEase for China.
After leaving nWay, Hedlund held senior creative roles at Zynga and its Gram Games subsidiary, contributing to Merge Dragons!, a major mobile hit. He then became Vice President of Design for King’s New Games division. Following Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, King paused some new game projects as it refocused on existing titles.
In 2023 Hedlund was named Vice President of Design at Quell, a UK fitness game company, for its debut title Shardfall, funded by a $10 million round led by Tencent. In 2024 Quell announced it would end active development of the Impact hardware platform, moving Shardfall to a perpetual offline version.
Hedlund has been recognized as one of the top game creators of all time by IGN (ranked 62), and is noted by several outlets as a leading figure in game design. His work spans some of the most influential games of the late 1990s and 2000s, with many titles earning awards and enduring recognition in the industry.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:13 (CET).