NARRATION: I'm Drew Scanlon.
I'm exploring the world through the lens of games, and I'm doing it with the support of
people like you on Patreon.
Help us out at Patreon.com/ClothMap
In the wake of the Yugoslav wars, industries of all kinds were slow to grow in the Balkan region.
This, of course, extended to the game industry.
We’ve touched on the Bosnian side, but things were tough across the border in Croatia as well.
More than 15 years after the war, a gaming conference called Reboot Develop was started
by Damir Đurović, who explained to us that even then it was a struggle.
DAMIR: There was literally nothing.
Not only that, but people were not even aware of the size of the games industry at that time.
There were literally few studios that were known.
In Zagreb, that was obviously Croteam because they are the oldest studio in the whole region–
–actually, one of the oldest in Europe–that still lives.
And then, on the Serbian side, there was Nordeus, with their huge success of Top Eleven Football Manager.
And a few studios doing some outsourcing work and stuff like that.
All in all, you could maybe count all of them on the fingers of two hands, and that was it.
DREW: It seems like there was sort of a "chicken and the egg" situation happening, where people
wanted to develop games but there wasn't a game industry so it was hard to get funding.
DAMIR: Basically, at that time, there was no Unity, there was no Unreal, so it was really,
really hard to even start developing anything.
You needed a lot of resources, and you needed super talented people, to basically start
building your own engine from scratch.
Croteam was one the very few ones that decided to do that, in the end to great success.
They are still working on their own engine, of course, the Serious Engine.
But at that time, it was harder to start in the games industry all around the world.
Here, even more so, because there was a lack of financial resources.
NARRATION: If you've heard of one game developer in the Balkans, chances are it's Croteam,
the studio responsible for games like Serious Sam and The Talos Principle.
We spoke with chief creative officer Davor Hunski about the studio's early days.
DREW: How long have you been with Croteam?
DAVOR: Well, I kind of founded Croteam–of course, with my guys–but it was my dream
even in late elementary school.
I have been with Roman, which is our CEO, since first grade of elementary school.
That means from seven years old, so now almost 40 years together.
That's a long, long time.
One of our friends had a brother, and that brother, Robert Zeljko, created with two friends
from ex-Yugoslavia, the first game in this area.
It was called Sbugetti Junction.
It was a ZX Spectrum game.
An ancient machine, the ZX Spectrum.
NARRATION: In fact, the Spectrum was popular in Yugoslavia for one very specific reason.
DAMIR: The fact about it was, it was super common because it was super easy to smuggle
it over the border, through the taxation office, because it was so small.
It was super small.
So it was pretty casually taken from Austria, Italy, or other countries nearby.
NARRATION: Of course, it was around that time that war broke out.
DREW: Do you think games can provide an escape from things like that?
DAVOR: Of course.
I wasn't aware because we were all living in fantasy worlds, sci-fi books and movies and stuff.
That's what we were thinking about.
If you didn't have that, maybe you would go into politics, maybe you would end up in the
army, or stuff like that.
Our minds were always occupied by things that were not down-to-earth.
Like all geeks do, right?
The government decided that people who go to university should not go to the army.
That was the rule. So we went to universities.
Well, we would otherwise go to university to learn stuff, but it prevented us from going to the war.
It was a hard time here because there was no financing. The country was in ruins.
Even today, we are trying today to catch up with more advanced European countries.
DREW: There was no game industry here.
DAVOR: No no no.
Actually, we had so many issues with our parents.
It was always the question, "OK, Davor, you're making games, but what will you do for a living?"
There was no idea, not nearly, that you could live by making games.
That was like 10 years ahead of the time.
But we hoped that we could do it.
Our first game was a football game that we did because we loved playing football, soccer.
It was during the European championship– we always had fun watching that stuff–
and so we made a football game. We like football, right?
Then there was Doom and Duke and all kinds of first-person stuff that blew our minds,
and we did Serious Sam as something that we would like to play.
We liked open, bright spaces.
We were inspired by ancient civilizations like Egypt and stuff like that.
So it's an expression of what we think about, live, talk about every day.
The same with Talos.
When we lunch, we have discussions about the future, A.I., religion, culture, humanity.
DISEMBODIED VOICE: You are risen from the dust and you walk in my garden.
Hear now my voice, and know that I am your maker.
DAVOR: When we created the first football game, it gave us a little bit of money,
but more than money, it showed us that it can be done.
After that we spent five years making the first Serious Sam game.
At that time it was really, really hard.
There was no money.
Unreal was there, but it was like a million dollars or something.
It was really expensive.
So there was no way.
We couldn't afford coffee, right?
So we couldn't afford anything like that.
So we had to create our own engines.
We worked every day, 12, 13 hours.
We almost didn't sleep.
Our will, our desire to do that, it was so, so huge.
And we almost failed.
We sent our demo to many publishers.
I think that demo was really great.
And common sense would be to take it because we were cheap, completely new engine, completely
new design style.
It was such an easy call for "yes," but everybody said no.
We made a free demo for the internet, and that demo was the most played thing of the
year–or of the summer–and people started constantly poking publishers: "What's going on?
Why is nobody taking this awesome game?"
And then they started calling back.
SAM: Uh oh.
DAVOR: Since those times, we always try to do as much as we can for our fans.
You do games so you can have people having fun enjoying them, and when you see such warm
expressions in their comments, it gives you so much power.
Whenever I am kind of sad or I need some, I don't know, encouragement or filling up
of my reservoir, then I just go to Steam to see some new comments
on Serious Sam or, especially, Talos.
And that's good for six months of goodwill.
And you know why you're doing it.
Croteam's DNA is a very strange thing, but I think that's also what people love.
I don't know.
DREW: Why do you say it's strange?
DAVOR: Well, we are not always motivated by business success.
It's kind of a family thing, I don't know.
We never plan what will sell well, we always do what we would like to play.
You don't do first-person puzzle games.
They don't sell.
You have Portal and that's it.
I clearly remember how, on one side, if it doesn't go well, we will probably have financial issues.
That's for sure.
But on the other side, we were so sure that it was such a great game, and we couldn't
wait for people to try it.
DISEMBODIED VOICE: My temple awaits you, child.
Go forth.
DAVOR: We believe that if we enjoy making it, we hope that people will enjoy playing it.
You could say the opportunity cost is huge, right?
We could make flight games and make much more money.
But I don't know, that's what I'm talking about.
We sometimes go by heart.
We always go by heart.
We're confident we can do any type of game that we want because we have quality in programming
and design.
Feeling and passion is there for all kinds of stuff.
NARRATION: There's also a strong passion to help others in the region, which Croteam does
with their incubator.
Elsewhere in the building, at least four other teams were working on projects like
Serious Sam: Tormental, a top-down cooperative version of Croteam's long-running series.
DEVELOPER: All rooms are, of course, procedurally generated.
DREW: I am now a geyser of blood.
NARRATION: A turn-based tactics game called Battle Bolts.
DEVELOPER: You need to put in four commands here, and after you put your four in, I put
in mine, and everything plays out at the same time.
DREW: Oh, got it.
NARRATION: A Serious Sam-themed endless shooter called I Hate Running Backwards.
DEVELOPER: We flipped the shooter upside down.
You have to watch out for the enemies at the bottom and also the traps that can come at
you from the top side.
NARRATION: And Hand of Merlin, a squad-based tactical game.
DEVELOPER: We basically combined two of the games that we personally enjoy playing the
most, that we are really passionate about, which are FTL and XCOM, and I think we have
something really exciting.
DAVOR: The first game is really the hardest one to do, right?
So that's why Roman and Croteam try help the young ones, the indie ones, to get them on
their feet and maybe get over the first game and hopefully become game developers that
can sustain themselves over a longer period of time.
We'll see.
We feel a moral obligation, as Croteam, to be, I don't know, a cornerstone of Croatian game development.
We want to help out, that's it.
We feel morally responsible for helping people.
NARRATION: As it turns out, even with help, some of the challenges here can be difficult
to overcome.
DAMIR: Croatia, for some weird reason, and the United States don't have a mutual law
that says we can skip double taxation.
You end up paying 30 percent in the United States, and when the money comes here, you
end up paying the tax again.
So you end up with only half of the money.
That's one of the huge, huge practical hindrances right now.
The other thing is, or was before, was the lack of investment.
But that slowly is changing.
A lot of big-time investors from the West are actually seeing this as an amazing opportunity
because, for a 10 million investment here, you can get five times the size of the studio
you would get in, I don't know, the U.K., France, or wherever.
And the talent is as good as there.
DAVOR: It's a really fast environment, right?
Look at stuff from three years ago and ask what will be in three years.
I really don't know.
We started before the internet.
For our first game, we went to record disks and sent them out in the post.
Now we're in VR.
Who knows what will be next, right?
People, when they get older, they kind of grow up and become not as good as they were
as kids.
I don't like that.
I don't think that should be happening.
But somehow it happens around me and I'm glad that I'm not a part of it.
You can learn skills and become very skillful at something that you do, but in your heart,
it never changes.
I am 18 all the time, frozen then.
That's it.
NARRATION: War in the Balkans fractured more than just Yugoslavia, but Croteam and others
are trying to reverse that and find ways to come together.
It’s a slow process, but one Davor seems committed to.
DAVOR: As many people as we can get into the game development world, the better.
We will help as much as we can, really.
You need to be pleasant and a good person to everybody else to enjoy life, because life
is kind of short.
It passes in a second, and you should not spend one single minute being nervous or in
a bad mood or stuff like that.
There is so much good, so much amazing, creative stuff in the world that you can dream just
from that and not from problems, issues, whatever.
I don't do that.
Makes no sense to me.
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