This is Ludvig Forssell. He might look more familiar when he’s covered with bandages and pretending to be a Swedish game designer named Joakim Mogren.
Or maybe we’ve just been staring at his picture too long. We’re tossing this one to you readers to decide.
Why might Ludvig Forssell be the bandaged, supposedly-Swedish developer “Joakim Mogren”, who has been hyping The Phantom Pain a new Metal Gear?
Forssell is a composer — a “sound creator”, if you will. After studying music in Tokyo, Forssell, who’s Swedish, joined Metal Gear publisher Konami in 2011. He’s done some soundtrack work on games like Senritsu no Stratus (listen here) and is currently based at Konami’s headquarters in Japan and composing the Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes soundtrack.
As for “Mogren”, we’ve most recently seen him in an interview on GTTV. In that interview, Mogren claims that all will be revealed about that game he’s working on at next week Game Developers Conference. At that conference, Metal Gear mastermind Hideo Kojima will be showing off his studio’s new Fox graphics engine, which is used in Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.
Whether Joakim Mogren is CG or a real dude, there’s a chance Forssell is the face behind the bandages. Have a look:


Kotaku reached out to Forssell and Konami for comment, but did not receive responses prior to publication.
No bags under the eyes, eyebrows are different, bridge of the nose is different, teeth are different.
Nice try, but I don’t think so.
Upper lip is different, eyes slightly different colour…
Agreed. Too many differences. Someone should run it through that facial recognition software they use on the television though, just to be sure.
Let’s enhance the image…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
They look like two completely different people.
Probably not him. Main clues:
– lip shape and thickness
– eyebrow position and colour
Other:
– facial structure is a little different, although that could be done by adjusting bandage thickness in places.
– eye colour of ‘Joakim’ is darker, although the room he’s in is darker so that might just be very dilated pupils concealing the iris colour
– I’m not sure how natural the mouth shape in the second picture is for ‘Joakim’, but Forssell’s top row of teeth look naturally more visible than Joakim’s. Which may seem minor but it’s hard to pull a face to conceal things like that without looking ridiculous. Then again, he’s wearing bandages.
Eyebrows and lips are clearly different. This post wasnt really thought threw
The bottom pic looks eerily like the love child of Josh Thomas and Tom Ballard
lol, and gross.
Nope.
The latest rumour doing the rounds is that Joakim is CG. It was a brilliant showing of the new Fox Engine.
That’s not the latest rumour. That was reported on yesterday.
Brian covered that already.
Joakim is an anagram of Kojima.
New Konami sound guy, maybe he’s the voice behind the CG.
You know what’d be great? If this was really Sanitarium 2. I mean, they’re dressing up like Max Laughton and everything.