About

I played Doom 3 in 2004, went looking for who had built it, and found John Carmack. That was the end of the question “what do you want to do with your life”. Everything since has been the long version of the same answer.

I grew up in Greece and studied in Larisa, building games in student teams that crunched harder than any studio I have worked in since. One of them took us to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond as Imagine Cup world finalists — sleep-deprived, slightly feral, and completely convinced.

The way out of Greece was a game engine. I gave myself a year, worked hundred-hour weeks, and used it as the portfolio that got me hired abroad. It worked. Then I never stopped working on it, and twelve years later it is still the same codebase.

Since then: an ambitious PSVR title at Sony that got cancelled, Dirt 5 at Codemasters, two years at AMD embedded inside other people’s engines making their frames faster, and now graphics and engine work at BeamNG.

What I optimise for is simple enough to write down. Hard work, altruism, and not compromising. I would rather build the right thing slowly than the acceptable thing on time. And I value personality over skills, because skills can be taught and character cannot.