The Cottage (video game)

The Cottage
Swedish cover art
Developer(s)	Viggo Kann Kimmo Eriksson Olle Johansson
Publisher(s)	Scandinavian PC Systems
Platform(s)	Oden (DEC-10), IBM PC
Release	1978 (Oden) 1986 (IBM PC)
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

The Cottage (Swedish: Stugan) is an adventure video game that was initially made available in 1978 for the DEC-10 mainframe computer Oden in Stockholm, and later published by Scandinavian PC Systems for IBM PCs in 1986 in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and English. It was the first publicly available Swedish adventure game and one of the first commercial Swedish video games.

The game is set in a cottage in Småland, Sweden; the player explores the cottage and its surroundings by typing simple commands to indicate what they want to do or where they want to go. They aim to find items and perform certain actions to raise their score and rank, while avoiding traps and enemy characters, with the ultimate goal of getting inducted into the cottage council.

The game was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Viggo Kann, Kimmo Eriksson and Olle Johansson, three children who had played the game Adventure and wanted to create a similar game in Swedish. The Cottage began as a collection of smaller games the three had previously developed on their own, with the player moving through an amusement arcade to choose what to play; as they found it more fun to move through the arcade than to play the games, they ended up expanding the area to explore and removing most of the smaller games. Several thousand copies of the IBM PC release were sold; despite this, the developers did not receive much money from it outside of pre-paid royalties. The game had a cult-like status among Oden users at the time, and was commercially important to the computer center in Stockholm.