My friends and I found this obscure Swedish golf video game on the Internet. Now we’re addicted

The most nervous round of golf I played this year came at Whistling Straits, where, amid the birch trees and sunflowers and towering windmills, surrounded by small glacial lakes and stark stony mountains, I survived a nervy start to shoot four under and win the tournament.

I see you have questions.

Questions like: What tournament could an 11-handicap like me possibly be winning at a course like Whistling Straits, especially with a score like four under? And speaking of Whistling Straits, when did the windswept, American-links classic suddenly get mountains or sunflowers? And is there even a single windmill on the entire property?

I understand the confusion. The problem is, you're thinking of the Whistling Straits in eastern Wisconsin, the Pete Dye gem along Lake Michigan. Easy mistake to make. I'm talking about the Whistling Straits that exists only in the fever dreams of a Swedish programmer and can only be found on the Internet. Classic misunderstanding.

In the biggest round of my year, I was playing a browser-based video game called Executive Golf. I discovered it on Reddit, tried it out on a whim, immediately became addicted and then passed that addiction to 20 of my most golf-addicted friends on our group Slack. Within a week, we had invented the SlackGA Tour and organized an eight-tournament season. My victory at Whistling Straits in the Slackers Championship (all point values multiplied by 1.5) vaulted me to second in the Race to Slackai. It would prove to be my high point—like Cameron Young after the Players this year, I could never quite equal my performance there, especially at the majors, and I quickly fell down the standings.

You don't care about that. What you might care about is the game itself and how it captured us so quickly and thoroughly. Executive Golf is simultaneously simple and complex, easy and hard, recognizably golf-ish but delightfully strange. You play on nine-hole courses as a character who until very recently looked like the comedian Pete Davidson (you can now edit your avatar’s appearance). For most shots, you hit the ball by stopping the sliding marker on three stroke meters as close to the middle as possible—the aim meter, the spin meter, and the power meter. The marker moves at a reasonable pace, but there's variability built in, so that just like in real golf, even a perfect swing might result in a slight pull or an over-draw or an under-hit.

When you putt, you have to read the direction of the green carefully from a grid, and on drives and approaches, you quickly learn how the wind affects the ball. It can be easy at times to make birdies and go low, but the variability brings unique challenges, and the physics are phenomenal. In terms of roll-out and bounces and behavior on greens, the ball does exactly what it should do, even when that pisses you off. You can change clubs and shot types (you can hit everything from a stinger to a flop shot), and the greatest temptation of all is the "power drive," which can get you an extra 30-40 yards, but at the steep price of higher left-to-right fluctuation. Many a promising round, I can tell you, has perished in the graveyard of the power drive.

In all, it’s the kind of experience you expect to have on a gaming system, but here you're playing on your laptop or your iPhone.

There is a raw quality to the game that brings a certain charm. Every penalty shot is stroke and distance, regardless of whether you go out of bounds or into the water. Until a couple weeks ago, the player would reach down to pick up his ball from the hole even if he holed out from the fairway. Trees and rocks, at least for now, are ghosts that the ball sails through without effect. Once in a while, for reasons I can’t explain, the golfer will appear in his underwear. But the rough and sand are penal, there are good and bad sides to miss on the green, and skill is rewarded—even in our little group, a reliable pecking order has emerged.

The site itself features 11 courses, and while some seem to combine a random golf adjective with a random golf noun—Emerald Hills, Crystal Landing, Mirror Cove, and my favorite, Windhymn Fields—others, for a while, unapologetically took the name of famous existing courses, from Whistling Straits to TPC Sawgrass to the hardest course, The Olympic Club. (To any lawyers reading: Those course names have now been changed to more generic versions.) There are weekly tournaments organized within the game, and a career mode where you move up levels, improve your handicap and improve your skills with "CXP." (Improving means you get a slightly smaller target on the sliders, or slightly more power, and while it helps, it won't override skill and instinct.) You can play a round for fun, and you can play a match against random players in a new points system, but the most rewarding mode for us has been organizing our own tournaments, which can last four rounds, one per day, and accommodate up to 16 players.

The more we got into the game, the more a nagging question ate at me: Where did it come from? I had to know who was behind this odd little marvel.

When I first reached out to the developers in late July, I got an email back from “MIKIM Entertainment.” On Reddit, they had said they were in “stealth mode” and not actively looking for attention, but they unlocked all the courses for me and gave me a trial gold membership. A few weeks later we set up a Zoom call so I could ask them about the development of the game and maybe throw in a selfish strategic question or two for my own gain.

I found the MIKIM co-founders, Mikael Dahlström and Kim Nordstrom, very good company. Mikael, who lives in the Swedish town of Malmo and goes by Mike, is the technical brains of the operation, while Kim, who lives in Spain, does all things marketing/business (“Kim is not allowed to code anymore,” Mike joked). They've been in the gaming industry for 25 years—Kim has worked for PlayStation and King (think “Candy Crush”), and Mike for Massive Entertainment (“Star Wars,” “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora”)—and this is their third company together. Counting them, MIKIM consists of five employees, and Executive Golf is the only game they're developing.

Early in our conversation, Kim explained the founding ethos to me. "The whole idea was what if we could sidestep making a game for mobile versus making a game on PC versus a game on console?” he explained. “What if we could sidestep all the app stores that take 30 percent of revenue and cater directly to the player with no go-between? Can we build fairly advanced, fairly deep games in a browser environment?"

They looked at a few different genres, but it was a sport from Mike's background that made the most sense. He grew up playing junior golf in Sweden, and the sport lent itself to the browser format for a few reasons. It wasn't hectic—you could execute shots with a few basic maneuvers—it scaled to a variety of screen sizes, and it's not content-heavy in the same way a game with constant movement might be. Plus, they liked it.

“I grew up playing golf games,” Kim said, “and Mike played golf and is a genius at physics.”

The fact that there are about a half billion golfers in the world didn't hurt, either, and helps explain that name, “Executive Golf.” That was mostly a demographic play—they wanted a game for golf nuts who might not play a lot of other video games, and over time the working title became a permanent one.

The very first version of Executive Golf came out in early 2024, and the current iteration is about two years old, although outsiders have only been playing for a little more than a year. It has never had a formal release, since they were still working, but it became available to the public last New Year's Eve and has spread by word of mouth since. Neither one of them regularly watches professional golf, but both began studying YouTube golf for how it looked, how it felt, how the ball flew, what kind of clothes the players wore, and various graphical minutiae—a process he likened more to dissecting and deconstructing than enjoying.

One of the big early choices they had to make involved the physics engine. In the end, Mike decided he didn't like what he found in other games, so he opted to write his own that was tailored for golf, but could also maintain the fun gamified, aspect of what Executive Golf became, where there's an underlying complexity that rewards repeat playing, but where you can still make a birdie in your first round. He's worked on at least five generations of that engine, perfecting the vibe.

“It doesn’t need to simulate reality, but the physics need to be good,” Kim said.

“It needs to feel like golf,” Mike added.

As he pointed out, the game chooses the club and type of shot for you (a player can, and often should, adjust), and three clicks will get the ball airborne. Over time, you can reduce the randomness of each shot by leveling up, but when newer players began to complain that they were only getting beat because of artificial skill gains, Mike ran an experiment where he reduced everybody back to the same level. The result? The best players continued to crush the competition, and they took that as a sign of a good game.

They're still learning from their users' experience, which is why they've done only the lightest promotion. Although they told me that they're not quite ready to show it to the world, still, "the world is welcome."

As of now, around 500 people play every day, with a couple thousand stopping in at least once a week, and that loyal fan base is exactly what they want as they develop. They have some investments from family and friends that gives them enough to pay their small team, and enough money in the bank to go for a while without stress.

“This is it,” Kim said. “It’s not one of those, ‘we'll see if it works’ things. We’re in it for the long run."

The first course they ever designed, L.A. Golf Club, is not, as I originally thought, a reference to Los Angeles. Instead, it's an homage to Lunds Akademiska Golfklubb in Lund, Sweden, where Mike played as a boy. It's the kind of hidden personal touch that shines through in Executive Golf. MIKIM is a small operation; they're never going to sell out, and the game will probably never be finished. But in their quiet way, they've managed to create something captivating and practically eccentric in its approach to golf.

And it remains addicting. Over the course of writing this article, the game has changed—sadly, the era of unlimited free play is gone, replaced after a grace period with a $15 monthly fee—and new features like ranked play (think ELO on chess.com). Player customization also has been added. This was inevitable, and probably necessary, and the good news is the charm remains.

Even though my level dropped off significantly after my Slackers Championship win, I caught lightning in a bottle in the final round of the Slackolonial, which we played at one of the quirkier courses, Emerald Hills. I shot a seven under each of the first three rounds, which wasn’t actually enough to keep pace with the best players, On Sunday, though, everything went right—long putts and one chip-in fell, and I made two eagles. After a final birdie at 9, I had shot 10 under, and the last surge was enough to secure a T-4 finish.

On one level, it’s possibly a bit silly how good that round felt, but on another, it speaks to the uniqueness of a game that, for all its departures from real golf—or maybe because of them—still captures the frustrations and triumphs with a surprising fidelity.