Matematik i Måneby

The history of Matematik i Måneby

Matematik i Måneby came out in 2005 and became one of the most widely used Danish maths games in schools in the years that followed. Even so, the game's history has all but vanished from the web today: the Danish Wikipedia article was deleted in 2024, and the company behind it closed more than ten years ago. This page gathers what can be documented, with sources at the bottom.

Bitfrost Interactive

Bitfrost Interactive I/S was a small Danish game developer and publisher, founded on 5 August 2004 and based in Herlev. The company had five founders: Ole Steiness, Simon Gjerløv, Kim Riedel, Jakob Ivarsson and Christian Engelbrecht. In 2005 the team was made up of three multimedia designers, a webmaster and a programmer who had trained as a biochemist. Ole Steiness, the producer of Matematik i Måneby, had previously spent more than seven years as a game reviewer.

Besides Måneby, Bitfrost managed to release Det Vilde Naturspil (2008) and Kroppens Krigere (c. 2010-2011), a game about the immune system with voices by, among others, Ghita Nørby. A Danish-language game with the working title "Ordkløverne kommer" and a physics and chemistry title were on the drawing board in 2005, but never seem to have come out. Bitfrost Interactive closed on 19 May 2014.

The launch in 2005

Matematik i Måneby came out in September 2005. The home edition was sold through the Merlin chain, and on Friday 9 September 2005 Bitfrost held a launch event at Merlin in the Friheden shopping centre in Hvidovre, where children and parents could try the game and meet the developers. According to the local paper Din Avis, the game was in Merlin's top 10, and the home edition cost around 200 Danish kroner.

Before release, the game had been tested at Risbjergskolen in Hvidovre (4th and 6th grade) and at a special school for autistic pupils in Albertslund, with a positive response in both places. Bitfrost itself stressed that the game could not stand alone in teaching but was meant as a supplement.

The main menu of Matematik i Måneby
The game's main menu.

In Danish schools

School licences were sold directly through bitfrost.dk, which also had a demo. In 2007 a school licence cost 2,650 Danish kroner for schools with more than 400 pupils, and the game was on CFU-Århus's list of recommended IT materials for maths in the middle years. The game was also distributed to schools through UNI-C's SkolePro scheme, and several schools bought it as early as 2005.

The teachers' magazine Folkeskolen reviewed the game in issue 41, 2005. The review was moderately positive: the tasks trained and revised skills already learned, and some of the games were entertaining, but the reviewer doubted how long it would hold the oldest pupils and criticised the layout and the narrator's voice. The libraries' material assessment likewise found that the game appealed most to the youngest year groups. The teachers quoted in the local press at the launch, on the other hand, reported unusual motivation and concentration among their pupils.

Måneby+ and the later editions

The game was developed further over time under the name Matematik i Måneby+. The best-documented editions are version 1.3.63 (including a UNI-C SkolePro edition) and version 1.4.5 from around 2010. The Danish library records cover releases from 2005 to 2011, both on CD-ROM and online. A full list of versions is on The game page.

In its final years the game was sold by Mikro Værkstedet A/S in Odense, which in 2011 and 2012 sold Matematik i Måneby+ as part of the Skole Aftale+ schools agreement, aimed at 1st to 6th grade, on DVD or as a download. The product logo was still on the company's domain in 2014, when Mikro Værkstedet changed its name to MV-Nordic; in 2017 the company became part of the Swedish Vitec Software Group under the name Vitec MV. The game has long since left their range. Whether any rights came with the distribution, or whether Mikro Værkstedet merely sold the game on Bitfrost's behalf, cannot be determined from the surviving sources.

A Nordic school game

Måneby was not only Danish. Every disc holds five complete language versions, switched with the flags in the game's setup: Danish, English, Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk. All menus, instructions and task texts exist in all five versions, and both Swedish and Norwegian speech was recorded, not just translated text.

Traces in the neighbouring countries confirm that these versions were used. Norwegian users remember the game as a classic from "IKT timene" (IT lessons) at primary school, a Swedish forum user described back in 2013 how he played it on the school computers, and the game appears on a Swedish list of PC games with Swedish speech. Among Nordic fans it is well documented how to change the language: you edit the "Sprog" line in the file BrugerT.txt inside the game folder.

The English version is another story. It sits complete in every copy sold, with its own title artwork under the name MoonVille Math, but its flag is switched off by default, and there is no trace of an English release anywhere. Everything suggests the translation was finished for international sales that never happened. Fans who ripped the game's logos in 2024 found the English artwork and noted drily that they were not sure it had ever been used.

The legacy

After Bitfrost closed in 2014, the game gradually disappeared from the market, but not from memory. The demand has never gone away: at least 25 threads on Reddit from 2017 to 2025 remember, ask for or share the game, including a handful that are simply "where can I download it?" threads. As recently as March 2025, a post in which a user shared their own copy got more than 150 upvotes.

The school licence is precisely the barrier that makes the game hard to go back to. One user tells of finding the game at a flea market for ten kroner and discovering at home that it required an administrator licence from a school. Others are looking for a place where the old Danish maths games can be found and played again.

Four independent uploads on the Internet Archive (2022-2024) have just over 5,000 views between them, and a fan upload on Game Jolt around 4,800. The game's soundtrack has been ripped and uploaded on its own, and speedrun.com has a leaderboard with verified runs from 2022 to 2024; the record video has been watched around 21,000 times. The view counts were taken in September 2026 and keep growing.

A Danish Wikipedia article about the game was created in 2022 but deleted by consensus on 3 May 2024, citing a lack of notability. With it went the only complete account of the game's history.

Today Ole Steiness runs Darkhill Games in Søborg, whose own "about us" page highlights Matematik i Måneby as the team's best-known game. Internationally he is known as a board game designer, not least for Champions of Midgard.

Sources