Sharky Games: How would you describe the look of the game and the art direction? Does it fit with traditional Norse mythology?

Timothy Gerritsen: : [The art] is sort of like a Frank Frazetta painting. He is a famous old fantasy artist and is still around. He did the old Molly Hatchet covers with these big rugged warriors with giant axes. So we decided to do the game something like that, within the Viking mythology. We are really excited about it; there is so much good stuff there. It is an exciting set of stories to dig into.

It is kind of a double edged sword, though. You have people for whom this is their life study based on some historical sources, so while the Vikings might not actually carry a horn or a weapon like that (they didn't wear horned helmets, we know that) but it is also an action/ video game. So we are trying to walk the tight rope between keeping it as true to the source as possible but at the same time keeping it fun and exciting for modern audiences.

Sharky Games: Did the location of Human Head help with the game, that being that the Wisconsin/Minnesota area that has lots of people of Scandinavian descent?

Timothy Gerritsen: We certainly have a lot of Viking mythology resources in this area. There's a lot of Scandinavian descendents here, and so it is pretty easy to find source materials.

Sharky Games: How was the research done on Viking mythology and the background for this game?

Timothy Gerritsen: We have a huge library with lots of shelves of books and also the artists each have shelves filled with books on Vikings. We used historical sources, mythological sources, some fictional sources, and we just sort of read on all of them. The thing about mythology is the fact that they did not have the Internet and TV so there was no single cannon in any story or mythology, and it varies from teller to teller. So a village on one sort of the mountain had a story about Odin and what he did, while over the mountain it was totally different, “well, Thor in fact did that,” so it is hard to stay 100 percent historically accurate. Usually what happens is that people study one source, and that's the fact and every other source is bad. But we just tell people “it's a game and we are having fun”.

We designed Rune to be a fun game where you play a Viking hero caught up in a sweeping story. If you know something about Vikings, you will enjoy some of the neat touches we put in, but if you have no clue what Vikings are all about, we feel we made a game that allows you to still get the most out of it.