Ghost Ship Games is a Danish video game developer and publisher based in Copenhagen, built from the ground up around a single guiding motto—"Co-op First"—and a mission to take cooperative multiplayer to the next level for the core gaming audience. The studio was founded in the spring of 2016 by a small group of veteran developers, several of them former colleagues from the recently shuttered Danish studios Press Play and Deadline Games, who had accumulated credits on major international action franchises before deciding the time had come to build a company of their own. Backed initially by a Danish games-focused investment fund and led by chief executive Søren Lundgaard alongside creative director Mikkel Martin Pedersen, the fledgling team set out to combine the open-ended, procedurally generated exploration of sandbox survival games with the frantic, teamwork-driven combat of cooperative shooters. That vision crystallized in a debut cooperative first-person shooter casting four players as a crew of space-mining dwarves who blast, dig, and spelunk their way through fully destructible, randomly generated cavern systems—a title that entered early access in 2018, reached full release in 2020, and went on to sell well over fifteen million copies while earning a reputation for one of the most welcoming and positive player communities in all of gaming.
Central to the studio's success has been its philosophy of "open development," working transparently and folding player feedback directly into ongoing updates, an approach that fostered exceptional goodwill and long-term engagement around its flagship universe. Swedish developer Coffee Stain acquired a minority stake in the studio in February 2017 and became its publishing partner, a relationship that deepened until Ghost Ship became a subsidiary of Coffee Stain Holding in 2021, placing it within the broader Coffee Stain group. Deliberately keeping its core team small even as it grew to around forty people, Ghost Ship later established its own publishing arm to back outside developers and to expand its beloved subterranean franchise through spin-offs spanning roguelike and survivor-style genres, some developed in-house and others in partnership with external studios. Continuing to operate from Copenhagen as part of the Coffee Stain group, Ghost Ship Games remains committed to the cooperative-first design, community transparency, and craftsmanship that transformed a six-person startup into one of the co-op genre's most respected names.
