The early days I was born in 1970 and I've been painting as long as I can remember. Probably the first thing my parents did was to put a pencil in my hand. In 1983, I got a Texas TI-99/4A as a christmas gift, and after testing what it could do, I tried to draw a picture on it. This was done by desperately typing in numbers in Basic. Most of the time, it didn't look like it should; strange pixels and patterns appeared all over the screen, and hardly any colours were displayed. After trying a hundred times to get the picture together, I got tired of it and I started to dream about a Commodore 64. I remember my cousin had one, and I was impressed by how good everything looked. After what seemed like an eternity, my parents gave me my own C64. It took a while before I tried to do anything creative with it. I guess I was hooked on all those fantastic games. But after approximately two years, I started to draw. My father and I put an ad in Commodore User because we wanted to swap games and utilities. We got a lot of replies and one of them was from a guy called The Beast. He was the leader of a group called Mutants 2001 and after seeing some pictures I'd done, he wanted me to join. I joined the group and thought: "Cool! I'm in the scene and I'm going to get my pictures spread!". JOL becomes The Sarge JOL is short for JOachim Ljunggren. I had those initials in school, so it was kind of a natural choice when I started out on the C64. But after a while, me and The Beast both thought the name was a bit lame. Other people in the scene took their names from gods and warriors, and that was much cooler. One day I was looking through Commodore User and found a review of Combat School. The caption read something like: "The sarge is drilling his boys". I liked "The sarge" a lot, and so it became my new name. I made that first red logo almost instantly! A little later on, I designed the big grey one and lots of people thought I was a punk rocker because I used the anarchy symbol in it. I was, and still are, in to synth and industrial music. And it was not a political statement or anything, it just looked good. After a couple of years I got fed up with "The" in The Sarge, so I considered changing my name again. I choose Taito, and I went as far as putting it in a logo I drew, but it was never released. From Mutants 2001 to Triad I had only been a member of Mutants 2001 for a few weeks when another group called Front contacted me and asked if I wanted to join. They were quite big and so I accepted. Things really started to take off and I was doing lots of work for the demos we released. We had fun and there were many cool guys in Front. Saruman and Getafix were in fact among the nicest people I ever talked to during my C64 days. I stayed in Front until Ixion offered me to join Triad. I was a bit reluctant and started to think that this was getting a bit too big for me, but I accepted after a couple of days of thinking. I was really nervous! How could I make these famous guys happy? One thing was sure: I had to do much better than what I'd done the last couple of months. I started to paint like a madman and as soon as a picture was done, I sent it to Ixion. The whole group loved them! I made many demos with 801 DC of Triad and we became good friends. We never met but talked a lot on the phone. It was 801 DC and me who made those Xecution demos. We were tired of all those lamers that were calling us asking for games. Our egos had also grown too big because we were members of the greatest group in the world. So we began to write demos with weird scrolltexts and stupid pictures of ourselves slaughtering people. 801 DC also made the packaging of a couple of my SEUCK (Shoot'em up Construction Kit) games. And talking about SEUCK: I remember the funny intro that Pär Winzell (Janitor of Triad) made for Tiger Hell with that little pink elephant squashing a Fairlight logo. That was just a part of the friendly war between the two groups. I never went to a single copy-party and that's something I regret. I was very close to go to the Alvesta party one year. I remember that 801 DC was calling me about five times that day telling me to jump on the bike and get over there. But I didn't go. I guess I was too shy to show up. How I worked on the C64 I've always had tough demands on myself. Back then, I thought that I had to create something the very same day I came up with an idea, or else I'd spoiled it. I was always searching for motives to paint while watching movies, reading magazines etc. If I couldn't find anything to paint, I got really upset. But when I found something that I thought was cool, I drew it on a piece of paper before transfering it to the C64. And when I think about it... Where are all these drawings? Probably gone forever. Because I was using a 14 inch TV with my C64 set and A4 paper when I was drawing, I had a big advantage. They matched each other in size, so I put a clear celophane plastic on top of the paper-drawing and traced the outlines with a waterproof pen. I then put the plastic on the TV screen, drew the outlines with Koala Painter and when done, removed the plastic to find the outlines ready to be coloured and detailed. This process helped me a lot, because copying, pasting and nudging something in Koala Painter was almost impossible. It was very important to try to get the contoures on separate characters (one character in multi colour mode had 4x8 pixels) because each character could only hold three colours plus the background. If I used three colours to paint a face and three other colours for a sky in the background, I had quite a few things to think about while I was drawing. Careful planning of where to place the objects was absolutely necessary. The pictures were often made in one day. I sat nonstop those days and I don't think I even saved before the picture was finished. But I was pretty safe anyways. I can't remember Koala Painter ever crashing. :) I tried a program called Doodle a couple of times but it couldn't do multi colour, and single colour wasn't my cup of tea. I also tried a trackball, but I had always used a joystick when I painted before, and was rather pleased with it. No Mercy and Rubicon I decided to quit Triad and join Fairlight because me and Fredrik Kahl (Gollum of Fairlight) were working together on a game called No Mercy. A german games company called Digital Marketing published it, but we hardly got any money for it. What we did get though, was a taste of the game making industry and that inspired us to start work on a new game called Rubicon for Hewson Consulants. Fredrik did some stunning programming for it, and especially the revolutionary technique that made it possible to have huge monsters on the screen. I drew those monsters in a program called Sprite Machine, which was a pain because this utility could only show one sprite at a time. So I had to paint the monsters and characters on a paper matrix first and then in the editor. We worked hard for more than a year and when the game finally was released, it got rave reviews in Zzap!64. This was a dream come true for us! Totally, I made six games on the C64: Tiger Hell, Twin Cobra, Ikari Warriors 2, Di-Art, No Mercy and Rubicon. After Rubicon, we thought we should try to do a game on the Amiga. It didn't turn in to anything, just a couple of programming tests by Fredrik and a some maps and sprites by me. At the time, Fredrik was studying hard and part time working as a programmer, and I was working in a factory. The time to finish a new game just wasn't there. I was still doing some pictures for Fairlight, but it was nothing like the C64 days. It was too easy now. I had 4096 colours and I could use all of them at the same time if I wanted to. When I reflect over this today, I don't understand why I was thinking like that. I should have been glad! Creative freedom is what everyone strives for, right? Just when I was moving on to the Amiga, the FLI (Flexible Line Interpretation) technique came out. I remember thinking that this was cheating because all the hard work with getting the colours right was now gone. I tried it a couple of times but the C64 days were over for me, so nothing came out of it. When I look at those FLI pictures today, I just can't believe that they were done on the C64! They look so much better than mine ever did. Where I'm at today I never thought that I could make a living out of doing graphics, but one day in the beginning of the 1990's, I quit my job at the factory and bought a 486 PC with an amazing 4 Mb RAM! I discovered Photoshop and practiced hard and I was studying even harder to get somewhere. About one year later it paid off: I got a job at TV4 Halland. I moved on to MTV Produktion, producing ID's and graphics for Scandinavian TV-stations. That's where I am today, doing more or less the same thing I've always done. If you're interested to see what I've done the last couple of years, head over to my website. Thanks for reading!

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