Tameem Antoniades is driving nervously. We’re on the motorway from Cambridge to London in his brand-new Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, the same model that broke the record for fastest production car lap at the Nürburgring last year and which costs £350,000. He took receipt of it four days ago in Cambridge, where his games studio, Ninja Theory, is based and had been fretting about the prospect of owning it; he had never driven a supercar before and wasn’t sure if he’d be able to handle it. In fact, he never planned on buying it in the first place.
He had been on holiday in Bologna, Italy, with friends and one of their group suggested they take a look around the Lamborghini factory. Afterwards, they went to a restaurant around the corner. They got drunk. In the white heat of their revelry, a friend convinced him it was a good idea to put in an order for the latest model. “I didn’t even look at how much it cost,” recalls Antoniades. His friends filmed him making the call.
The next day, he wondered what on earth he had done. He went straight back to the showroom and demanded to cancel it. An hour later, well, not only had he been persuaded otherwise, but he had chosen all the options and even agreed to go on holiday to Italy with the dealer for a Lamborghini event.
Such is life when you’re figuring out how to be wealthy. Antoniades recently came into a great deal of money – he won’t disclose the exact figure – after selling his company to Microsoft. Today, sitting at the wheel of his new car, dressed entirely in black – as he always is – the 45-year-old explains he has found the aftermath a steep learning curve. Firstly, there was the sheer practicality of where to put all that cash. “I spoke to loads of banks, but a lot of them felt like car salesmen,” he says. “A lot of my friends asked me to invest in their harebrained ideas, and I didn’t want to do that, and then they got angry about it. I started to feel very unstable.” And then there were the more existential questions. “What do I do with my life? Like, how do I remain useful?”
His response was to throw himself back into work – not simply to make several more video games, but also with a view to doing something paradigm-shifting, in the manner of Steve Jobs. After all, his studio’s recent release, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, was so inventive that it won five Baftas, took motion capture to the next level and ultimately culminated in the deal with Microsoft. “I have this inner arrogance that I can achieve anything I put my mind to. I don’t know where it comes from. However difficult it is, however long it takes, I can achieve it. I recognise that it’s sort of delusional, but it’s only a delusion if it doesn’t become real.” In recent months, he has channelled that confidence into a plan of considerable ambition. He hopes it will result in two projects that could change the world.
The first is called the Insight Project and it aims to break new ground in mental health. Earlier, back at Ninja Theory’s Cambridge studio, Antoniades revealed an embryonic work in progress: a virtual-reality version of a London flat. “The idea is to get as close to reality as possible, to create an environment that works the same way a real environment works and looks utterly, utterly real.” To do this, the team is in the process of painstakingly scanning real-world objects into this virtual apartment and then improving the tiniest details. The layout of the flat is based on Antoniades’ own apartment – he reasons that if it’s a space he knows intimately then he will better be able to judge whether the team has managed to perfect it. Into this cyber realm they are going to place a character that they intend to be the most realistic virtual human ever made, from skin to eyes to clothing. “It’s one area where I think we are world leaders,” he says.
Antoniades, who is tall and has an asymmetric haircut straight out of a video game, is a maestro at creating virtual worlds, but says that he is less at home in the real one. He describes himself as slightly autistic and although he hasn’t been officially diagnosed, he did try an autism test on an app made by Channel 4. For social interaction, he scored zero out of 20. “I definitely have those traits of deep focus, of not understanding how social interaction and groups work – I’ve just not been interested in that side of the world.” It is strange to hear him say this, as he comes across as confident and affable, but he is convinced he has room for improvement. He looks on these challenges less as shortcomings than as puzzles to crack. And having money, in a funny way, has made the puzzles harder. Take relationships. “I’m single. That’s another problem to solve. The thing is, I can’t go out with anyone now without them knowing I’m wealthy, so then the question becomes, ‘Oh, do they like me for me or do they like me for the fact that I’m wealthy?’”
When it comes to his new project, however, he talks with much more certainty. In three years, Antoniades believes, they will be at a stage where their virtual apartment set-up is indistinguishable from film – and a user will be able to step into it by donning a virtual-reality headset and exploring using gesture and voice control. “The thing we can do, that I think no else can credibly do, is make the virtual character [that you encounter in this digital world] interactive, make them actually respond to you, respond to your gaze, your actions.” It’s costing them millions – but what has it got to do with mental health?
The virtual character becomes your guide through this environment – a kind of proxy therapist. You, in turn, are wearing kit that captures biometric data, such as heart rate and eye movements. This allows the computer to represent your inner state – anxiety, say, or dread – in the virtual world. Perhaps it might be represented as an enemy. You then attempt to vanquish or appease this character using only your mind. In other words, you learn to overcome that undesirable mental state. That skill can in turn be used in the real world when you feel that state of mind coming on – or perhaps are alerted to it by a wearable device, such as a haptic wristband. There would also be a benefit to clinicians. The hope is that as more and more people go through the experience, it will help define a whole host of inner states in terms of their physical signatures. Psychiatrists could then use those signatures to diagnose more accurately what patients are feeling inside. Ninja Theory is collaborating on the project with Paul Fletcher, a psychiatrist and professor of health neuroscience at Cambridge University. Fletcher is calling it a “new kind of clinical science”.
The experience will also be given a game-like sense of progression. The team is still working out what form this will take, but Fletcher says that this is vital. “If a self-help book says that in order to [solve a mental health problem] you’ve got to train yourself, and it’s probably going to take a couple of hours a day, a lot of people will put the book down after a week. Whereas if you give someone a game and say, ‘You’re allowed two hours a day on this,’ they’ll say, ‘Well, can’t I have more?’ It’s an amazing training setting.”
To be effective, the virtual environment has to be wholly convincing, which is why a games company such as Ninja Theory, says Antoniades, is in prime position to deliver this new tool. Not only does the company have experience in virtual avatars, human-computer interfaces and data analytics, but what it's building could also be repurposed for a game in the more traditional sense. That means they can justify investing heavily in it. “We can spend millions of pounds on it and create the best assets, beyond anything researchers have ever seen.”
As the project moves through prototypes, Antoniades and Fletcher will verify their results through experiments and make them available via established scientific channels. It will join a number of other recent VR-based projects designed for psychotherapy, such as the US Department Of Defense-funded Bravemind system for helping soldiers with PTSD.
Simultaneously, Antoniades will also be getting underway on a separate but connected project, drawing on hyper-realistic VR worlds and characters for a further enterprise. He is calling it Project Dreadnought and he hopes it will represent nothing less than the last new entertainment medium.
Antoniades had an anxious childhood. He was born in Afghanistan and moved to London with his mother at the age of two, when she decided to flee his birth father. He lived there until the age of six, at which point she had met his stepfather, Andreas Antoniades, a Greek-Cypriot former assassin turned Customs And Excise informer. He was recruited by the British in the Fifties to inform on Eoka, which fought a guerrilla campaign against British rule in Cyprus. Andreas subsequently became one of three leading moles inside the gangs bringing billions of pounds of heroin into the UK. His underworld lifestyle meant that the family occasionally had to move countries: Paris for a couple of years, Barcelona for six. With some frequency, Andreas would wind up in various prisons, at least until his handlers got him out; at one stage the then-foreign secretary Jack Straw had to intervene to free him from jail in Germany. Along the way, Tameem’s mother got caught up in her husband’s affairs and also went to prison herself. “My parents were absent for months, if not years, at a time at various points,” he says. “Once a family member sat me down and said, ‘Look, your parents are not coming back. You’re going to have to go up for adoption.’” And then that didn’t happen, because both his parents were released.
He got through it all thanks to what he describes as his Spock-like ability to bury his emotions. “My parents would call me ‘The Robot’ because I was focused on things that I would make. I wanted to be an inventor.” In particular, he wanted to make video games. In France, he had been introduced to them; in Spain he had became obsessed with them. When his parents would go out gambling, they would give him and his brother a bag of money and they would spend up to eight hours playing games in the arcades. He developed quite a talent. The inflection point, however, came at the age of 13. He got a Commodore 64 and learned how to programme games himself.
Having returned to the UK, he went to A-level college in North London and fared terribly, then did computer science at Queen Mary University. “I was really lazy. I barely scraped through.” Despite his poor grades, his programming abilities landed him a job at Millennium Interactive, a games studio in Cambridge that would later be acquired by Sony.
While working as a coder, he harboured aspirations to design games and decided to pitch an idea. The Sony marketing machine in London liked it and asked him to get it off the ground, much to the chagrin of the studio’s career design directors, who were having their own pitches rejected. Then a new boss came in and canned the project. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m only in this business because I want to make stuff and other people are stopping me from making stuff. So the only solution is to set up my own company so that no one can tell me not to.”
He quit Sony and in March 2000, with two ex-colleagues, Nina Kristensen and Mike Ball, started a company called Just Add Monsters. They had £3,000 and were working out of a bedroom. Yet the games they had been working on at Sony were sufficiently well regarded that the world came knocking. “We had Disney executives wanting to visit this bedroom and we didn’t have computers that could run a game. It was a joke. We would try to meet somewhere else because it was really embarrassing.”
What followed was a tale of survival. Just Add Monsters was bought by Argonaut Games and made a beat ’em up called Kung Fu Chaos (2003) for Microsoft. Things were looking up. But then Argonaut went bust and the trio were forced to remortgage their houses to start a new company, Ninja Theory, with Antoniades continuing to lead the design department.
The company’s next title, Heavenly Sword, turned Sony’s head, saving Ninja Theory from bankruptcy. “But it was a really terrible deal we signed. They knew we had just founded. They knew we were cash poor and we had to sign away everything – the technology, the IP – and we had to work with them exclusively.” It was the kind of big production Antoniades had wished for – Andy Serkis directed and provided motion-captured performances – but, despite warm reviews when it came out in 2007, the game was ultimately unprofitable. The games they made after that also struggled to find any kind of commercial success. The founders split the company into smaller teams to take on multiple projects – work for hire, indie games, mobile games – just to survive. “I was pretty much ready to give up, but I thought I’d give it one more stab. So I took a small team aside and made Hellblade.”
Hellblade was different. Not just as a game but as a business model. Strapped for cash but full of ambition, they had to find a way to punch above their weight.
Here’s how the games industry traditionally works. A publisher either develops a game internally or signs an external developer, much like a book publisher signs a writer. That developer is then given an advance, creates the game and then earns off the advance through royalties. Once the advance is paid off – plus other agreed costs – the developer receives the royalties themselves. Usually a game retails for around £50 and the royalty will typically be around £2 or £3 per unit. For the developer to see any of those royalties themselves, therefore, requires selling millions of units. Take Ninja Theory’s title DmC: Devil May Cry (2013): it was critically lauded and a multimillion seller, but the royalties that Ninja Theory received were not enough to ensure its survival. So, for Hellblade, Antoniades came up with a new approach. He called it “independent AAA”. In his words, it is about creating, funding and owning a game of “AAA”, or blockbuster, quality but with the more focused design, lower price point and open development process that defines indie games. This translated into a title that was around eight hours long, about half the running time of a AAA game, with a price of only £25, from which Ninja Theory would receive £19 per unit. It was made with just 20 people over three years and the development budget was £8m, including marketing. When you consider that AAA games are made with £20m to £100m and up, they were doing it on a shoestring.
What they created, however, was groundbreaking. The idea came from Antoniades’ reaction to a friend who had a psychotic episode. She was hearing voices, she was seeing things and it left Antoniades perturbed because he couldn’t understand what she was describing. He started reading about it. “I remember being in my bed reading about this stuff. And then I remember feeling very afraid. I started to feel like I could see shadows and I had a heightened sense of anxiety. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is really powerful. Just reading about this stuff is making me afraid. We could do that in the game.’ And then I told the team, quite excitedly, ‘Why don’t we do this about psychosis, about mental health?’” The team was rather less excited. What if people said they had misrepresented or trivialised the condition? It could be a media firestorm.
Antoniades was resolute. He decided to get a specialist on board and enticed Professor Fletcher to join the project. They also assembled groups of patients with lived experience of psychosis, who gave them feedback throughout the development process on what they were getting right and what they were getting wrong. For instance, initially the main character, Senua, a Pict warrior on a quest to rescue her dead lover’s soul, would hear a good voice and an evil voice. That’s not right at all, the patients said – different characters should move in and out of a ceaseless chatter. Ninja Theory committed to giving those patients final approval on whether the game was ready before they released it.
The budgetary constraints of the production meant that Ninja Theory was forced to innovate. For the motion capture, the process by which the movements of real people are used to animate the characters in the game, the studio collaborated with Epic Games to come up with a new technique called “real-time cinematography”, allowing them to reduce the whole process of producing a motion captured sequence from weeks to minutes.
For Antoniades, the project took a toll. When it came out, he was in tears, bedridden, for days. “I suppressed all emotion during the making of the game. It had felt like such an exhausting project to work on. But also it really hit home that it wasn’t just Senua, the character, it was a culmination of all of these people’s input, their life experiences. That was just sad.”
The team braced itself for how the game would be received. While some critics had reservations, the depiction of psychosis was generally celebrated in the press and, more importantly, by people with mental illness and their families. The studio received hundreds of messages. “I’ve never seen a poem, book, song or game that depicted mental health so well,” read one. “It fills me with warmth to know that I am not alone. I hope those around me, and my own partner, can now understand how real the darkness can be. Thank you for this gift.” The Royal College Of Psychiatrists recognised it with an award and Antoniades and Professor Fletcher were invited to talk about their work at the Houses Of Parliament, Ten Downing Street and Kensington Palace, as well as several science conferences. It became profitable after generating more than £10m in revenue from 500,000 sales in three months, vindicating the independent AAA model. At the 2018 Baftas, the game was nominated for nine awards and won five – one of them was in the category of “Game Beyond Entertainment”.
Shortly after, Antoniades was woken up by a phone call from his business partner Nina Kristensen. “I have just got off the phone with Microsoft,” she said. “Would you be interested in selling the company?”
“No,” said Antoniades.
“Are you sure?” said Kristensen.
“I guess,” Antoniades replied, “there’s a price…”
The head of Microsoft Games flew to Cambridge to meet the pair for dinner. Antoniades had been at a punk concert in Paris. “It was a proper one with stage diving and doing things I probably shouldn’t be doing at my age. No, fuck that, should be doing.” The plane back to Cambridge was late, so he had to go straight from the airport to the meeting, wearing punk clothes, nail varnish and eyeliner and set about negotiating the deal.
Having found success through the independent AAA model, the team was initially nervous about the idea of selling to the Microsoft juggernaut. “We’ve been fighting for independence all our lives,” he says, “but what I eventually understood was that [Microsoft] wanted us to remain independent as a creative studio and make anything we want.” The deal was done. Suddenly, Antoniades was extraordinarily wealthy.
The Lamborghini pulls into the underground car park at the 36-storey City Of London skyscraper that Antoniades calls home. We take the lift up to the penthouse. At 6,000 square feet and set over two floors, it is, says Antoniades, the biggest in the City. It has a fitness room, a home cinema, a room with a retractable roof that turns into an indoor-outdoor patio, and was listed for just over £9m. You might assume that the owner of such a place would be a committed materialist. In fact, Antoniades owns so few things that, beyond his clothes (all bought from the cult Berlin menswear store Darklands), he moved in with only a rucksack. He lives among the show-home furnishings and says that he likes the flat less for its luxury than its function.
In order for the Insight Project to gain teeth and have a meaningful impact, he believes he needs to raise his profile and tap into influential networks in worlds beyond gaming. He couldn’t do that from Cambridge, so he needed a foothold in London. The flat, he says, is a platform. “I can host dinners and people [see the flat and] understand that I’ve made something of my life, so I’m not an idiot – not that you have to prove it in that way, but people understand that on a basic level.” Sitting in a chair by one of the huge living room windows, looking over the city laid out like a model railway below, he explains that for all his new ideas he has found his new life as a wealthy man to be discombobulating. When he moved into the flat last winter, there was no internet and the home entertainment system didn’t work. He felt isolated, both geographically and emotionally. “I felt very insecure and didn’t want to tell anyone that I’d become wealthy. And then, on the work side, we stopped doing all our work-for-hire projects. So I had to come up with new projects for the whole of the team from scratch and organise that. So work became very anxious and unstable as well, and that made me quite paranoid and quite depressed.” Throw in the new property and things soon became overwhelming.
That all changed chiefly thanks to a stroke of luck. A friend of the person who sold him the apartment was able to offer financial advice and introduced him to a social circle of people who had also risen to the top of their industries, from art and music to finance and pharma. “I’ve met people in positions that dwarf mine and they are having a good, productive and happy life, so it can be done. I can ask them for advice and they’ll give it to me.” Take his relationship conundrum. One of his new wealthy friends counselled that he shouldn’t worry about whether would-be partners like him for his money. “That’s just who you are now,” they advised him. “Just don’t get married.” He hopes when the time is right this new group of friends may also be able to help with the Insight Project – and also that scheme of even loftier intent, the entertainment-focused Project Dreadnought. It’s named after the British battleship that launched in 1906 that was so technologically advanced it made other naval vessels redundant.
Antoniades believes his Dreadnought will be equally revolutionary. He wants to create virtual worlds that the user can step into using a headset and have an extraordinary experience. Perhaps you could be Jason searching for the legendary Golden Fleece or a soldier landing on the beaches of Normandy. As with the Insight Project, it will be indistinguishable from real life and, unlike current VR, will contain virtual humans that participate in the experience and respond to you in a meaningful way – like being in the Matrix. “It is going to redefine what entertainment, or even reality, is,” he says. “It will be a new medium, probably the last new medium, because you can’t get any closer to reality.” Hellblade, the Insight Project, everything that Ninja Theory is working on – they are all test beds for Project Dreadnought. “I’ll do that, then I’ll probably quit.”
As the evening draws in, Antoniades gazes over London and reflects on what motivates him in his new efforts. He recalls one of his best friends, Peter de Bourcier, who cofounded play.com, cashed out and was diagnosed with cancer soon after. Before de Bourcier died, he invited all of his friends, one by one, to chat and say goodbye. Antoniades went to see him. They got drunk and discussed how ridiculous it is that humans fear death when we’re all going to die. Instead, they agreed, the real fear should be not making the best use of one’s time. That impulse is why, for Antoniades, the next step in his life can’t simply be more games.
“Whether I [succeed] or not is irrelevant. If I don’t make it, no one will care. Just like nobody cares about whether you and I exist right now. So that sense of failure is transitory. But the knowledge gained in trying could be enough for either us to succeed or for someone else to. And so then it becomes worthwhile,” he says. “I just have this fear that if I don’t try to do that, what am I going to do?”
This story appeared in the December 2019 issue of GQ
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