Swen Vincke

Swen Johan Vincke (born 30 May 1972) is a Belgian video game designer, programmer and director. He is the founder and CEO of the video game company Larian Studios, where he has led the development of the Divinity series and Baldur's Gate 3.

Early life
Vincke was born on 30 May 1972 in Bruges, Belgium, to Robert Vincke and Josiane Goderis. He grew up in De Panne, where his parents ran a restaurant. He also has an older sister. Vincke developed an interest in programming, arcade and computer games, as well as basketball at a young age. He was particularly fascinated by Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing video games such as the Ultima series, which became inspirations for his own games in the future. Vincke made his first game, which was a hunting simulator, for his father, while still at school. He attended Ghent University, graduating with a degree in Computer Science. He was originally interested in doing speech recognition, but decided to devote himself to making video games when he saw how much fun people were having with his projects.

Career
Vincke founded Larian Studios in 1996. As CEO and creative director, he plays a central role in the company and the development of the games. He was the project leader and lead programmer of Larian's first published game The L.E.D. Wars (1997), followed by the first two installments in the Divinity series, award-winning Divine Divinity (2002) and its sequel Beyond Divinity (2004).

Vincke was also responsible for the design of KetnetKick (2004), an educational video game developed for Flemish children's channel Ketnet. This game has later seen licensed implementations by several other children's channels, such as the British channel CBBC (titled Adventure Rock), French channel Jeunesse TV (titled GulliLand), and Norwegian channel NRK (titled Superia). Later he led the creation of a series of new educational games called Monkey Labs (2009) and Monkey Tales (2011).

Vincke served as the director, game designer and script contributor on Divinity II, first released in 2009, with the final version released in 2012. Around that time he came to the decision to make Larian a self-publishing company. He then oversaw the production of the spin-off Divinity: Dragon Commander, released in 2013.

At the same time, Vincke worked on the fourth installement in the Divinity main series, titled Divinity: Original Sin, which was released in 2014. The game became a critical and commercial success. He subsequently directed its sequel Divinity: Original Sin II, released in 2017, which was hailed as one of the best role-playing games of all time.

After this, Vincke has led the development of Baldur's Gate 3 as its creative director. The game was released in August 2023 to universal acclaim, winning over 200 Game of the Year awards.

In 2020, Vincke became the first recipient of the Belgian Lifetime Achievement Award for his career and influence on the Belgian games industry. In 2023, Variety included him in the index of the 500 most influential business leaders shaping the global media industry.

Personal life
Vincke lives in Ghent with his wife and four children. In addition to his native Dutch, he speaks fluent French and English.