Ten years of building worlds, then the intelligence to fill them.

Pyry Parkkola

Chairman of the Board & Co-Founder

Building interactive 3D experiences since before most people had heard of VR. The technical backbone of Virtual Dawn's shipped work across 50+ projects.

• Professional VFX career: Energia VFX (2010–2011) — Iron Sky, internationally distributed Finnish sci-fi film
• Co-founded Midnight Forge Oy (Virtual Dawn) in 2012
• OG: Maze (2016) — one of the earliest consumer VR games on Steam
• Creator of the XR Museum portal — multiplayer WebXR heritage experience
• Lead developer: FISTAGON (Tokyo Game Show Top 80)
• Leads AI co-development for institutional customers — OSAO, Karelia UAS, Vamia and other deployment partners
• Technical lead for Helsinki XR Center and Finnish Defence Forces delivery
• Oversees the Unity SDK — 500+ creator community on Discord

Antti Martikainen

CEO & AI Systems Architect

Nordic Game's own speaker page introduces him as “The King of Dreams” — head of development for the AI entity system behind SIELUNE, bringing humanlike complexity to AI characters. The bridge between business problem and technical product, background running from workforce services to AI architecture. Also composes every Virtual Dawn soundtrack.

• BBA, Jyväskylä UAS (2009–2013); exchange at FH Düsseldorf (2011–2012)
• Ran an HR services company for long-term unemployed people (~2014–2020) — 5,000+ people placed into work, exit completed
• 13+ years training and coaching experience — 100+ trainings per year at peak
• Joined Virtual Dawn in 2020, took over as CEO
• Lead architect of the AI runtime now known as ELMU/SIELUNE
• Built the long-running independent validation environment used to stress-test agent behaviour at scale
• 2× Nordic Game main-stage speaker (2024, 2026) — the Nordic region's most prestigious games industry conference
• 2026 session: “Building Scalable AI NPCs: A Production System Handling Thousands of Unique Personalities”
• NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft for Startups, AWS Activate member

Ohto Arponen

Unity Developer

Creator of Evacuation Zone: Tampere. Builds gameplay systems and interactive worlds across Virtual Dawn's Unity projects.

Niko Ranta

Unity 3D Developer

Unity 3D developer on FISTAGON (Tokyo Game Show Top 80 selection) and other Virtual Dawn titles.

Joonas

Programmer

Programmer with university courses in IT security. Built the Unity-based SDK creation platform codebase.

Jussi Ijäs

XR & UI/UX Designer

Creator of Chef Ops (Nordic Game Pitch Battle winner) and Parabless. Leads UI/UX design for the XR Museum and related XR heritage work.