About the Developer
About the Developer — the story behind Imperium Sine Fine and the person building it.
Peter Norberg
Imperium Sine Fine is made by Peter Norberg, a solo developer based in Sweden, working under the name Aeternum Studio.
Peter's path into game development started not from writing code, but from playing. He was an active play-by-email (PBEM) player for years, particularly of games from KJC Games — the slow, correspondence-driven strategy games where a single turn might take days to resolve, and every decision genuinely mattered because there was no reloading a bad one. Combined with a long-standing love of board games and strategy games more broadly, that experience eventually led to a simple question: could he, together with his brother, build a game of their own?
The answer was Fate of a Nation in 2009 — see History of Imperium Sine Fine for the full lineage from there through Rising Empires, Fate of an Empire, and eventually to Imperium Sine Fine itself.
Studio Name History
The studio behind the games has changed its name more than once over the years, reflecting how the project itself has grown:
- Norberg Games — the name behind Fate of a Nation in 2009.
- Hellhound Interactive — the name under which Rising Empires launched in 2013.
- No studio name at all — for a long stretch after that, every subsequent title was made solely by Peter, without much thought given to branding a studio around it.
- Aeternum Studio — adopted for the Imperium Sine Fine launch in 2025, the name the project carries today.
Why This World
What keeps Peter returning to this particular setting, book after book, game after game, is its lore — genuinely unusual ideas that don't show up in most fantasy strategy games. The unliving Ende, born from a boundary between life and death that most settings leave unexplored, are a good example of the kind of concept the world has room for.
An older design element from previous iterations of the franchise, worth mentioning for anyone curious about where things might go next: earlier games in the lineage featured two separate map levels — the Surface and the Netherworld beneath it — layered on top of each other as a single interconnected world. It's a design Peter has always found genuinely compelling, and while it isn't part of Imperium Sine Fine at launch, it's the kind of idea that could plausibly return in a future expansion.
What Drives the Project
Ask Peter why he keeps building these games, year after year, and the honest answer is straightforward: it's fun. The process of building — solving a design problem, watching a system come together, seeing players discover something you built for them — is more rewarding than any single milestone at the end of it. That enjoyment is what makes it possible to put in the hours a project like this genuinely demands.
That said, enjoyment isn't the whole picture. Peter would also, quite simply, love for Imperium Sine Fine to succeed commercially — not instead of the enjoyment, but alongside it.
Outside the Studio
Peter is married, shares his home with two cats, and lives in Sweden, where his day job is as a project manager in the flooring industry. When there's time for it — admittedly less, lately, with Imperium Sine Fine occupying so many evenings — he enjoys reading fantasy and science fiction novels. His favourite TV series is The Walking Dead.
