The Crazy Part Is, It Worked
Lessons From 25 Years of Staying in the Game
Spend enough time doing something and you improve. Dedicate yourself to it and you get back more than you thought possible. I’m on the eve of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the company my partners and I founded when we were 20 years old. Despite the passing years and an aging appearance, it feels like we just started yesterday. I used to chalk that up to freedom and choice, but I now know it runs deeper.
Repetition and practice turned an improbable experiment into one of the greatest life lesson I’ve had. Life rewards, takes, and shapes you if you’re willing to submit to the unknown that contains it all.
Spoiler alert, I would do it again and regret nothing. I wanted a life less ordinary, and that’s exactly what I received.
Risk is nothing more than uncertainty. You adapt.
Starting a video games company in Amsterdam already sounds far-fetched. In 2001, it was downright absurd.
There were no indie dreams. No digital distribution. Entrepreneurship wasn’t mainstream. Locals, descendants of people who once sailed the seas, invented the stock market, and made fortunes on tulips, would quote things like, “Normal is crazy enough,” or, “If you stick your head out of the grass, it gets cut off,” whenever I explained what we were building.
I don’t blame them. Video games, right after the dot-bomb crash of 2000?
Every pitch was the same. We’re going to make games in Amsterdam for the global market. By day we sell services. By night we build original IP. We were young, talented, and willing to brutalize ourselves to make it work. I usually lost them the moment I said “video games.”
Alongside the ridicule were well-wishers. People who had tried and failed. People who believed in something bigger. That belief and assistance were enough to stand the company up and go for it.
In those early days, I learned how contagious belief can be. People from vastly different backgrounds took a 20-year-old seriously. Because I believed we would make it, they helped. Doors opened that still matter today.
People want to help, sometimes just to glimpse what could have been.
Mindset Matters
Youth has power not because of energy, but because ignorance doesn’t know impossible. At 20, the mind is full of theories and unproven ideas. There is no proof, only emotion, and emotion transfers. We hadn’t yet been polluted by social media or external expectation. We believed craft and mastery justified everything. We didn’t think about optics. We focused on outcomes aligned with the mission. Negativity wasn’t useful, so it wasn’t allowed.
When we lost deals or couldn’t eat, it hurt, but it never derailed the mission. We knew it would be fine. Why wouldn’t it be? As long as we could afford 30-cent beer, rice, noodles, and cheese from Lidl, the German discount supermarket, we believed we would conquer the world. In the depths of malnutrition, I learned a simple truth. Want and need are never the same. My needs were few. My wants unlimited, but subordinate to time. Once I learned to respect time, everything became possible.
Time Is Currency
My first paycheck came nearly two and a half years after we started. I had bills, student debt, and a desire to enjoy life, but all of it took a backseat to the dream.
I learned the power of deferral. Combined with honest conversation, most things can be negotiated. Most people never ask. They accept what’s written. Those who ask sometimes get it. I pushed student loans to their limits and enlisted time as an ally. As my cousin once told me, if you don’t open your mouth, you won’t eat.
Commitment Beats Opinion
Over the years I worked with every type of personality imaginable. The hardest were those armed with unproven opinions. I learned to smile at them. Reality always tells the truth. Commitment and follow-through win every time. Opinions cost nothing. The summer anarchist, winter conformist stands for nothing beyond themselves. Loud, righteous, and absent of real output.
Performative vs. True
Consistency is hard in any industry, especially games. Heroics and rhetoric are always nearby until suddenly they aren’t. After 25 years, I’ve seen hypocrisy, insecurity, and spectacle in abundance. Seeing past that noise to the real human experience is what keeps it grounded.
The industry is dramatic and still searching for its place in the world. Decisions often look ruthless or inexplicable. Commentators rush to explain them, only to discover no one truly knows why.
Volatility is vitality. It’s not a flaw in the games industry, it’s the feature. It creates asymmetry and makes the game worth playing. If you understand that, you recover faster when things don’t go your way, even if you have to grind longer. This industry has always been this way. Read the patterns. Pay attention over time. Enjoy the suck, because as brutal as it gets, there are moments that are extraordinary.
After 25 years, I know volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity aren’t lives most people want. For me, they are the nature of entrepreneurship and the world we’re entering. I was lucky to learn this in an industry I love. Even when it gets insane, and it often does, I can smile and remember it all started with a simple question.
What if we tried?
What if it worked?
The crazy part is, it did.
Photography by everyone who came through our doors.