Dennis Gustafsson

Dennis Gustafsson is a Swedish game programmer and designer best known as the creator of Teardown, the voxel-based sandbox game where every wall can be smashed, and as co-founder of Mediocre, the studio behind the mobile hit Smash Hit. He specializes in physics and rendering technology and designs his games around the tech he builds.

Gustafsson began his career in game physics middleware before co-founding Mediocre with Henrik Johansson in 2010. The two-person studio made physics-driven mobile games including Granny Smith (2012), the Sprinkle series and PinOut (2016). Its biggest hit, Smash Hit (2014), was a rail shooter about throwing metal balls through glass: Gustafsson programmed it and wrote its glass-shattering physics engine and custom audio mixer. Released free in March 2014, it was the most downloaded game on iOS that month and passed 280 million downloads by October 2024.

After winding down Mediocre in 2017, he started experimenting with destructible voxels and ray tracing, sharing short clips on Twitter from 2018. The videos built such a following that he skipped traditional marketing. He founded Tuxedo Labs in Malmö in 2019 and announced Teardown that October, a heist game where players plan routes by tearing through buildings. It was among Steam's best sellers when it entered early access in 2020, won Excellence in Design at the 2021 Independent Games Festival, and fully launched in 2022, selling 1.1 million copies by August 2022.

On July 1, 2022 Tuxedo Labs was acquired by Saber Interactive, part of Embracer Group. Gustafsson stayed on as chief technology officer and hired a CEO so he could focus on development. Tuxedo Labs later became a direct Embracer subsidiary and, in 2025, part of Coffee Stain Group. Because he now works inside the company he sold, IndieMakerList lists him as a former maker.

Teardown reached 2.5 million players by December 2023 after its console release, and its Lua modding support has produced thousands of Steam Workshop creations.