Soren Johnson

Soren Johnson (born May 23, 1976) is an American businessman, game programmer, and video game designer.

Johnson's games primarily belong to 4X strategy, with a number of his titles having been critically acclaimed.

He is best known for his work as a lead designer on Civilization IV, Offworld Trading Company, and Old World.

He also worked on Civilization III as a co-lead designer.

Johnson joined Firaxis in April 2000 and, along with Jake Solomon, started mid-development on Civilization III with director Sid Meier and designer Jeff Briggs.

By this time only two engineers remained on the team: the intern and audio programmer.

Johnson was offered his lowest salary to date, but persevered with an intention to use the experience to launch his career.

Eventually Johnson became co-lead designer alongside Jeff Briggs.

Johnson had a lot of freedom to work on Civilization III and rewrote a lot of the code from scratch, even with only 16 months left to complete the work before launch.

Johnson simplified Civilization III's code base so that a lot of new mechanics could be added, without having to simply keep building on top of the previous game.

This was in contrast to the way Civilization II's code was on top of the original.

Johnson's hardcore resource features in Civilization III created scarcity in economic terms, becoming a catalyst for diplomacy system.

In 2013, Johnson founded Mohawk Games, an indie studio in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland.

They later moved to Alexandria, VA during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic.

The studio brings together people he has worked with in the past, along with new talent, to create new intellectual properties.

Their first game, Offworld Trading Company, was released to moderate critical acclaim.

Johnson is known for being one of the earliest developers who involved the internet gaming community in game design, testing, and discussion.

Soren Johnson was born in Olympia, Washington to Kenneth and Ruth Johnson.

He grew up in Centralia, Washington with his one sibling, Bjorn Johnson, and his cousins Kjell, Erik, and Sonja.

At age 13, Johnson was offered the opportunity to go to college early, but his parents thought that he would benefit more from being around friends.

In hindsight he has stated that he thinks his parents made the right decision.

His first ever notable gaming platform was a Commodore 64, which his parents bought for the family, when he was 7 years old.

He grew up on mid 80's games, and electronic card games of the period, playing a wide variety of game genres, ranging from board games to strategy to shooter games and racing.

Eventually he developed a particular interest in games that involved history and war.

In particular he loved games made by renowned strategy game developer Sid Meier.

Johnson did not play a lot of games in college, choosing to fully embrace the college experience, resulting in him largely missing the experience of playing Civilization II at that time.

Prior to college, Johnson was not aware that computer science consisted of learning programming until he first enrolled at Stanford University, where he started by acquiring a BA in History, and eventually a MS in Computer Science.

After college, Johnson started an internship with Electronic Arts, when a friend interning there got him an interview.

During his internship at EA Johnson worked on Knockout Kings, developing its AI.

Johnson returned to school for a semester at Oxford with his college roommate Christopher Tin.

Tin would eventually be hired to work on Johnson's game Civilization IV, where he composed the Grammy winning song Baba Yetu.

Johnson played the cello in the Stanford Orchestra, and at one point traveled to China to perform with his fellow Stanford musicians.

While in college, one of Johnson's friends, Ratha Harntha, won a bet he made with Johnson.

The bet required Johnson to shave his head to give himself a mohawk.

Johnson cites this as proving that while he might lose some challenges, he will honor his word.

It ended up being the inspiration for the name of his current game development studio: Mohawk Games.

After finishing his internship at Electronic Arts, Johnson started employment at Firaxis Games.

Johnson followed the Civilization III development externally and jumped at the chance to join his idol Sid Meier.

At the time he joined, much of the previous development team were abandoning Civ III, which was still early in its development.

He considered the exodus an opportunity to help Meier and save the franchise from collapse.