Robert Bäckström

Robert Bäckström was born in 1976 in Hökarängen, Stockholm. In childhood, Robert’s first encounter with games was through Dungeons and Dragons at six years old. Ever since, creating worlds and games have been an important part of his life.

A growing interest in music made him take part of the Stockholm hardcore scene, where he played in bands, put up shows and released demo tapes. This later evolved into running a label of d-beat and käng HC vinyls  (Skrammel records) and “Get in the van” punk tours touring European squats.

His higher education was at Stockholm University, Kulturvetarlinjen with Children’s Literature as a major. He also spent a year in London and half a year in Nelspruit, South Africa during his education years.

After a year living in Piteå in the far north of Sweden, he and his wife and three kids are now back in Stockholm.

Through music, he got into music video production and started a production company, and together with director Yasin Hillborg he later produced the music documentary Så Jävla Metal (2011).

He got into the video games industry in 2006 through a team of indie developers in Stockholm to develop a massive MMORPG. The game never got released but the group of developers later moved on to found Fatshark in 2009 where he stayed for 9 years before he decided to move from development to publishing via the indie publisher Raw Fury in 2018. 

In 2019, Robert also started his career as an angel investor into games or game related business and has since then been part of more than 15 investments and done three successful exits (Raw Fury, Fatshark and Hat Rabbit). During his stay in the North he took part in the founding of Aurora Punks, a collective of indie developer studios where he now acts as an operational founder and CEO.