The games that made me

It started with a city on fire. Sunrise City — a persistent-world MMO shooter where gangs replaced governments, economies ran on reputation, and every bullet mattered because the world never stopped. Published by THQ. Built on Unreal Engine 3. Shipped globally with two expansions.

This was the school. Not of code — I'd been writing that since 2000, from RenderMan shaders to custom DX9 engines. This was the school of scale. Of understanding what it takes to make a world that thousands of people live inside simultaneously. Trade systems. Loot economies. Gang territory control. Content pipelines that never sleep. The moment you ship an MMO, you learn that a game isn't a product — it's a living organism.

CrimeCraft taught me that the most beautiful engineering is invisible. Players never see the servers. They feel the world.

From the chaos of gang warfare to the precision of a braking point at 280 km/h. SimBin Studios — one of the most respected names in sim racing — brought me in to lead their headline project. The task: build a game-as-service racing framework from the ground up.

What we created became RaceRoom Racing Experience. A free-to-play simulator so authentic that professional DTM and WTCC drivers use it for training. Eurogamer would later call it the best racing game most people had never heard of. Over a decade later it's still running, still being updated, still fast. 11,000+ Steam reviews.

The lesson was about fidelity as an art form. When you model tyre physics well enough that a real driver nods — that's not engineering. That's craft. The gap between simulation and reality is where beauty lives.

You've played it. I can't show you the screenshots — it's EA, you know how it is — but you've played at least one game from at least one franchise I worked on. You know you have.

Studio Technical Director at DICE. The biggest stage in gaming. Not a place for small ideas. A place where every system operates at a scale most engineers never encounter, where the technical challenges exist because nothing has ever been built at this resolution before.

What I took from it wasn't about the size of the budget or the brand on the box. It was a confirmation: the best technology is invisible. Sixty-four players sprinting across a collapsing building don't think about the netcode. They feel the moment. And that moment — that's what all this engineering is for.

We co-founded Game Labs to make the games we always wanted to play. The first obsession: the Age of Sail. Not the romantic version. The real one — where yard angles matter, where the wind is your enemy, where a ship is a machine of 10,000 decisions.

Naval Action became a game where even the waves are calculated on the server — making hacking impossible by design. Fifty historically accurate warships. Realistic ballistics. A player-driven economy built around clans, ports, and trade routes that span the entire Caribbean. Steam named it one of the best Early Access releases of 2019.

It was, at its heart, a love letter to simulation. The same instinct that drove RaceRoom — that obsessive need to close the gap between the virtual and the real — but now applied to canvas and cannon. The patience of a 45-minute battle. The beauty of a first-rate ship-of-the-line catching the wind at dawn.

A hundred square miles that never generate the same way twice. Cities that grow. Railways that spread. Patrols that learn your patterns and adapt. An AI that doesn't follow scripts — it observes, thinks, responds. This was the most ambitious thing we'd ever built.

This Land Is My Land was a stealth action game on paper, but in practice it was an experiment in emergent storytelling — what happens when you drop a single person into a world that has its own plans? The world doesn't wait for you. It develops. It evolves. It fights back.

And then the real world fought back too. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Our team — a small group of addicted developers from Kyiv — had to pause development to save their families. Some went to war. The game froze in time. But the lesson it taught me didn't.

The lesson: a world that lives without you is the most beautiful kind of world to build.

Same team. Same era — 1899, the dying breath of the American frontier. But this time: first-person. Extraction-based. A world where your gun behaves exactly like its historical counterpart — ballistics, smoke, reload mechanics — and where every raid could cost you everything you've built.

A Twisted Path To Renown was the convergence of every thread: the persistent economy from CrimeCraft, the simulation fidelity from RaceRoom, the living world AI from This Land Is My Land. Homesteads. Farming. Mining. Trading. An extraction loop wrapped around a frontier sandbox.

It launched. It reached 1.0. And then, like so many ambitious things, it ended. Closed. Removed from Steam. A chapter complete. Not every story gets a sequel — but every story teaches you how to write the next one.