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Neon Giant
August 17, 2026 at 10:31 PM
Removed a duplicate internal link and added the studio's stated reference points and its flow-state working practice
Neon Giant AB is the Swedish video game development studio behind NO LAW. Based in Uppsala, Sweden, the studio was founded in April 2018 and operates as a small team of experienced industry veterans. Neon Giant is a subsidiary of KRAFTON, Inc., which acquired the studio in November 2022.
Neon Giant was founded by Tor Frick, Arcade Berg, Jonathan Heckley, and Erik Gloersen. The founders had previously worked on major AAA titles at larger studios, with backgrounds spanning franchises such as Bulletstorm, Far Cry 3, Gears of War, Wolfenstein, and Doom. They established Neon Giant with the intention of building dense, reactive worlds as a small, focused team.
The studio received early support from Goodbye Kansas (later renamed Amplifier Game Invest) and earned one of 37 developer grants from Epic Games in June 2018 for work on an unannounced cyberpunk project.
Title | Year | Genre | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
The Ascent | 2021 | Cyberpunk action RPG | Twin-stick shooter; PC and consoles |
TBA | First-person open-world shooter RPG | In development; PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S |
KRAFTON, Inc., the South Korean publisher known for PUBG and other titles, acquired Neon Giant in November 2022. KRAFTON serves as the publisher for NO LAW. Despite the acquisition, Neon Giant continues to operate as a small, focused studio in Uppsala.
Neon Giant remains a deliberately small studio, with the team behind NO LAW numbering around two dozen people. Co-founders Tor Frick and Arcade Berg both serve as creative directors on the project, and the studio emphasizes that every artist, designer, and programmer leaves a strong imprint on the world, which it views as the reason its games carry a recognizable personality.
The studio has also stated that no generative AI is used in the production of NO LAW, and that the team builds its games the way it wants to, with its creative independence intact after the acquisition.
NO LAW represents a significant evolution for the studio, moving from the isometric twin-stick perspective of The Ascent to an immersive first-person open-world experience. Managing Director Claës af Burén has described it as the next step for the studio, applying everything learned from their debut to a completely different kind of experience, one that is bigger, more reactive, and more personal.
Neon Giant describes its guiding principle for the project as density over scale. Rather than chasing the largest possible map, the studio concentrates on how much detail, reactivity, and gameplay possibility it can pack into each street, alley, and interior of Port Desire. The small team treats this focus as the reason a roughly two-dozen-person studio can build a world with the texture of a much larger production.
The studio has said it takes its reference points more from comics, anime, manga, film and places the team has actually visited than from other games, and that it treats cyberpunk as science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s rather than as a forecast of the future.
Neon Giant credits its output to getting the team into a flow state where they can be fully immersed in the work, which it describes as the reason a small team can produce a large amount of content and detail in a short time.
The studio publishes its own timeline, which places the KRAFTON acquisition two years before work on NO LAW was made public.
Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
2018 | Neon Giant founded |
2018 | Unreal Dev Grant received |
2021 | The Ascent released |
2022 | Cyber Heist expansion released |
2022 | KRAFTON acquires Neon Giant |
The studio sets out four values, and they line up closely with how it has described building Port Desire: a small team, high detail, and a deliberate refusal to compete on scale.
Value | How the studio describes it |
|---|---|
Groundbreaking | Aiming to create the unheard of, the next level of gaming |
Craftsmanship | Success is in the details; the specialist skills of every team member are key |
Smartness | A small team where each individual is equally crucial, with no overheads |
Competitive | Treating the work as a competition the studio intends to win |
The studio is based in Uppsala and recruits on the strength of that structure, describing itself as an indie developer paying at AAA level, with creative ownership handed to individuals rather than held centrally.
As of August 2026 the publisher describes itself as a network of 19 creative studios, of which Neon Giant is one. The studio has said its creative independence survived the acquisition, and that it continues to decide how its games get made.