10 CHAMBERS / 10 YEARS

One day, Ulf Andersson meets Svante Vinternatt – now COO at 10 Chambers – and right at the bat, Svante told Ulf Andersson: If you ever start a new game company, count me in! “I’ll make coffee and shit”, was his exact words.

“My nightmare at the time was the idea of starting a new company, so I turned him down.”

Not long after that, Ulf and Svante meet again at a bachelor party. They get grouped for a gaming session, and as he sits on the couch, Ulf sees how Svante organized everyone – getting shit done.

Coming home later that night, Ulf thought for himself: “He probably can’t start a company, he wouldn’t get the backing. But I can get the backing, and he will keep it organized.”

Vattugatan 15, Stockholm.

The planning for what would later become GTFO starts. A lot of whiteboards were hurt in the process.

From the get-go, we knew we wanted to make a game that we would enjoy playing ourselves – together. From our background in creating co-op games – from Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 to PAYDAY 1 & 2 – we started discussing how we felt that co-op gaming had lost sight of what makes it special: teamwork.

How better change that than with a hardcore cooperative FPS?

Our very first press release. We needed to get the word out but we – honestly – maybe didn’t have that much to say at this period of time.

FUN FACT: GTFO has always been a controversial name; it got its fair share of haters, but also those who think the name fits well with the theme of the game. However, GTFO was not the first name that came to our minds. The game had a couple of other names planned, among them:

Any skillful private detective could find that our first legal company name was “After Impact AB”. And there’s a reason: for a while, the name for GTFO was planned to be After Impact: GTFO, where After Impact would be a “franchise” and GTFO one of the games.

Another name was “Scavengers”. But we’ll save that story for another time…

Somewhere mid-2017, we started having discussions with Geoff Keighley about a potential trailer placement on his show, The Game Awards. For a small independent studio like us, this would change everything. With a marketing budget closer to 0$ than 100 000$, it’s invaluable.

Apparently, Geoff liked what we showed him and said he wanted our trailer on his show. To make the trailer happen – which would be 100% produced by ourselves – we had to re-plan the game’s development to set aside time for recording and editing. While this may have impacted the release date, the value of being featured on the show outweighed the negatives. And we’ll forever be grateful that he had us on his show.

FUN FACT: During the interview, after the trailer is shown, Ulf can be heard saying that the game releases “later this year,” which put the team back home in something similar to a stroke. When the show aired, we had 23 days left of that year…

All that play time, late nights and early mornings, felt easy when media started coming back to our corner of the booth to give us nominations and awards. Here’s a cute video of us receiving the nomination for PC Gamer’s Best of E3 Award.

HIDEO KOJIMA!

We’ve built hype, so what now followed was months – turning to years – of extremely hard work. When we had time to close our eyes, the Unity interface was burnt into our eyes.

An unfortunate part of game development is that it’s hard to predict exactly when a game will be finished. “Shit happens” really applies well to game development – you run into problems you didn’t expect, adding months of more development than you first thought.

This was also the case with GTFO, and by the end of 2018, we had to inform our community that we will have to delay GTFO, that was supposed to be released during 2018.

Having needed to delay GTFO, and disappoint our community, is definitely one of the reasons were extremely reluctant to give a release date for Den of Wolves, that were in development of now.

A testament to this is when you, if you scroll down, see how close to the actual release date we announced it.

GTFO used a unique concept for delivering new content, called the Rundown. Basically, our take on “Campaign” was “the Rundown”, where we would wipe the previous Rundown and replace it with a new.

As it was something new (and a bit controversial), we made this video to explain it to our community.

December 9th, 2019. The time had come, and we felt proud enough over GTFO to release it to the public as Early Access on Steam, almost exactly 2 years after our first gameplay trailer on The Game Awards 2017.

To say we were nervous when we clicked the launch button in the Steam backend, would be a gross understatement.

GTFO was funded with money from our own pockets. A failure would hit us hard, not only because of all the time we’ve put into its creation but also due to the enormous economic impact.

“I remember us having discussions about sales numbers, and that everyone had to be pleased if we hit 50-60,000 copies sold during its lifetime.”

Seeing GTFO climb the global top sellers list on Steam in real-time, right to the top spot, was unreal.

10 Chambers reclaimed the development budget and broke even in 9 days after the release of GTFO, after about four years of development.

One especially fond memory we have at the studio, was when we saw Markiplier complete an expedition solo in GTFO. Anyone who ever played the game knows how challenging this is. It’s not even meant to work!

You can find the full video here.

We believe the description was deliberately written for GTFO:

“Best Game You Suck At” – This is the game that rewards persistence, and is not for the faint of heart. It’s the toughest game we’ve ever loved.

To be able to make the vision of our new heist game reality, we needed to grow our team of around 10 people to a team closer to a 100. This meant new office space was needed, as our current could barely fit us already! After looking around for a long time, we found a beautiful office space. Fittingly for what we work with, it’s in the old building of the Royal Institute of Technology  in Stockholm.

And why so? When Ulf Andersson started his first game studio they had their office in his mothers house. In Sweden you don’t wear shoes inside your house, and there and then the no-shoe policy was invented and it rules to this day.

Exactly when the “development of Den of Wolves” started is hard to pinpoint. It has existed in Ulf’s brain for over ten years – it’s the heist game he always wanted to make, but didn’t have the resources for it back then.

But somewhere here, the conceptualization of the game starts at the studio, and this is some of the early concept art where we tried to nail the direction of Midway City, an unregulated innovation zone created to combat a global data security threat caused by deep learning AI.

After about 8 years of total development time, it was time to bid farewell to GTFO. Spending more time in those dark tunnels would not be good for us.

Again, live at The Game Awards, we premiered the last GTFO trailer: the trailer for Rundown 8.0—Duality.

Of course, saying goodbye to a project you’ve been working tirelessly on for so long was bittersweet. But at the same time, we were superhyped to give our all to Den of Wolves.

GTFO is available on Steam and contains 8 Rundowns and 83 expeditions.

And while we were there, we lit up the sky of Los Angeles with 1000 drones equipped with pyrotechnics.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? MORE GAMEPLAY! At PC Gaming Show 2025 in June, we aired a new gameplay trailer for Den of Wolves.

We also made a BRIEF visit to the Future Games Show! We would be happy to come back again and visit.

And here we are. Working harder than ever to make Den of Wolves a game we can be proud of, and you can enjoy together with your friends.

The year ain’t over yet and we can promise you will see more gameplay footage before it ends.

If you didn’t do it already, GO AND WISHLIST IT ON STEAM, NOW!