Demis Hassabis, a 23 year-old computer-games wunderkind, could merit a place on the world's brainiest man shortlist.
The story is that at 17 Demis co-created Theme Park before going on to get a double first in Computer Science at Cambridge. When you consider the numbers that Hassabis has to compute, his degree isn't wasted.
Theme Park went straight to World Number 1. It has now sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.
A smidgen of self publicity might be at play with this story. Electronic Arts, the games publisher which owns Bullfrog, the company which developed Theme Park, downplays Demis' role.
"He wasn't a creator, he was one of the programmers," state their press office.
However, in a new media industry worth over £5 billion Hassabis is certainly a player now. In August 1999 Eidos, publishers of the Lara Croft vehicle Tomb Raider, acquired a 5 per cent stake in Hassabis' company, Elixir Studios.
Given the potential return it's obvious why Eidos is paying Elixir £3.6 million to develop three new games.
Complete insomniac
Despite knowing his age, his success and wealth carry more psychological weight, so shaking hands with someone so young makes you double-take.
He doesn't waste time. Though the interview is scheduled for an hour, when you enter Hassabis country you're in a different time zone.
His focused, streamlined conversation is as sleek and efficient as an iBook. His massive intelligence seems to have the capacity to slow down time and half an hour with Hassabis equals three hours with anyone else.
And it's clear from his lifestyle that he works on a different time scale to the rest of us.
"I'm not an early morning person. I get up about 10 then I'm there till two at night. I'm a complete insomniac. I find I don't need more than three or four hours sleep a night."
"That's another reason why I can pack a lot of stuff in. I tend to get five minute power-naps. I find I do my most creative stuff in the early hours of the morning so I tend sleep at four or five in the morning."
Power napping
The power-naps keep Hassabis at optimum efficiency. He's a one man Robo-entrepreneur, doing everything from running the company during the day, having meetings, coding between six and midnight, and designing in the early hours and at weekends.
And on the eight day he re-invented the week. But it's easy when his business is pleasure. As Hassabis says "I enjoy it all I treat the business side very much like a game. I'm a fanatical game player so it's like a game of chess or diplomacy."
This game obsessive was rewarded when he won the prestigious Pentamind gold medal (a series of games like the Pentathlon) in the 1998 Mind Sports Olympiad.
But you never feel you need extra RAM while talking to Hassabis. His conversation melds rational hard-headed analysis with the kind of visionary streak that you might expect from a games designer used to indulging bizarre leaps of the imagination.
Taking on the movies
Which is why he was circumspect about the recent figures showing that the games industry turnover had outstripped the film industry for the first time.
"I think it's interesting that it's bigger than Hollywood and the music business in terms of value. But it's still not yet as mass market. Obviously games are much more expensive than going to the cinema or buying a CD.
The straight financials belies the facts that music and Hollywood still influences popular culture much more than games at the moment."
So though the naked data suggest that the art form of the 20th century is being replaced by the art form of the 21st, Hassabis understands the business of culture.
Gaming mainstream
"It's still a minority thing playing games, it's still a very male orientated thing, fairly solitary it's still not a mainstream thing where everyone knows about the latest game."
He points out that the influence of games is limited when the launch of a new game just doesn't have the snowballing publicity of a film release like Eyes Wide Shut. It's something that will have to change if gaming is to become a mainstream activity.
"A successful game happens when everyone who's a gamer will buy it, if they have got that system. But people who are not in the games will never have heard of it. That's what's changing and that's something I want to do with our first game. I hope that it's going someway to addressing that.
Like the Kubrick film, which had a publicity blackout, Hassabis is intriguingly silent about his first game for Eidos. Perhaps a similar marketing strategy is at work.
"The only thing I can say about it is that it's totally original. It's a huge epic scale, strategy, simulation cross genre game.?
The game is called Republic and is scheduled to come out for Christmas 2000. The games press is already slavering over it.
- for programming: Microsoft Developer Studio
- for the art: 3DS Max 3.0
- hardware: 500Mhz Pentium III
"We are trying to do some things with it that have never been done before in terms of ambitiousness. And in terms of what I've just been talking about, trying to get through to this non-gamer market as well as the gamer market.
"Part of that is the setting that it's in which is real world. Not sci-fi, not a fantasy. So I think that might help. That's all I can really say about it. Probably more than I should say."
He argues that the Playstation has to some extent made into the mainstream. Sony has spent money on ads that are a talking point. The fact that there are of 25 million Playstations out there is a genuine pop culture phenomenon.
Theme Park power
But Hassabis increasingly has his eyes on purely on the mainstream, something that Theme Park was incredibly successful at capturing.
"We were quite surprised as to how successful it actually turned out to be. A lot of that could be that it was non-violent. I know a lot of women like playing it. Women in general don't like gratuitous violence."
"I know lots of parents bought it for their kids. That probably explains maybe half the sales. The other half was probably hardcore gamers who like Sim City and Railroad Tycoon. And it's in that kind of genre where you tinker round with things and build something up."
And here you begin to get a sense of where Hassabis is in the games business. His family friendly game not only bucked a trend it nearly bucked an entire technology given the kind violence that popular games depend on. And you feel his pleasure is not just in developing an exciting game, but part of the excitement is its potential to be a hit.
Citizen Demis
But will there ever be a game that could have the same impact as Humphrey Bogart or Harrison Ford have on our culture? "I just think that we need to see more mature themes than what we are seeing now. We are still in the infancy of game design at the moment. "
"But there will be games that are famous that will have that kind of effect. You won't have a Humphrey Bogart because games don't have actors but you'll have something that's like Citizen Kane."
There will be a Citizen Kane? "Yeah I think so. I don't see why not. Maybe we are a few years off of that. But maybe sooner than people think."
Perhaps. And Hassabis may prove to be an Orson Welles. But I don't think so. He's more of a Spielberg, a junkie of his chosen genre, someone who knows how the business works and can perhaps (we shall see) deliver interesting work to a wide audience.
But as far as the future of games are concerned because of his scepticism about the influence of games, his ultimate confidence makes you trust his judgement .
Breaking Hollywood
"I'll tell you one thing of the reasons why games will potentially be bigger than cinema is that cinema is quite American-centric. There are British films but it's Hollywood based."
He might have added that games simply don't have the distribution problems that independent cinema has.
"Whereas Games are not based in any one place, it's truly international. Which mean that you don't have anything centralised like the Oscars and in some sense there's nothing for the press to focus on. But overall it's potentially more influential. It's multi-lingual as well."
So are there any games that have impressed recently "There's a game called The Sims which is really interesting. That's a sort of sim soap opera. I don't know whether it will work but if they manage to pull it off it will be amazing."
But how would you win? "You just get this person a successful lifebasically. It's pretty cool." Hassabis already has a head start.