THE LAST PLAYER: A Novel of Demis Hassabis

London, 1991. Demis is fifteen years old.

The Amiga 500 arrives on a Tuesday in February and by Friday Demis hasn’t slept.

Not an exaggeration. Not teenage hyperbole. His mother has knocked on his bedroom door four times in three days and each time he has said yes, coming in the voice of someone who has no intention of coming, and each time she has stood in the doorway of his room and looked at her son, hunched over the keyboard in the blue-white light of the monitor, surrounded by printouts covered in annotations she cannot parse, empty glasses of water lined up on the desk like a small civilization and decided that the conversation can wait five more minutes.

The five minutes have now accumulated into seventy-two hours.

“Demis.” This time she opens the door fully. The light from the hallway cuts across the room. He flinches, slightly, like a creature disturbed in a cave.

“I’m at a critical point,” he says.

“You’ve been at a critical point since Tuesday.”

“This is a different critical point.”

She crosses the room and looks at the screen. It shows a grid. On the grid, small figures are moving, not randomly, but with something that looks almost like purpose. Like intent. She watches for a moment.

“What are they doing?” she asks.

“Trying to solve a problem,” he says. “But they don’t know they’re solving a problem. They think they’re just moving.”

She looks at him. He is fifteen, and he has her cheekbones and his father’s relentlessness and some third quality that belongs entirely to himself, a quality she has never found a satisfactory word for. The closest she has come is elsewhere. Even when Demis is present, some part of him is elsewhere.

“Bed,” she says. “Two hours. Then food.”

“One hour.”

“Two.”

He looks at the screen. Looks at her. Runs a rapid calculation she can almost see happening behind his eyes.

“One and a half,” he says.

She leaves without answering, which both of them understand to mean yes.

***

The game is called Theme Park.

Or it will be called that, eventually, when Bullfrog Productions publishes it in 1994 and it sells four million copies across twelve platforms and wins awards and gets written up in every gaming magazine in Europe and spawns a genre. Right now, in this bedroom in North London, it is called the project, a management simulation game that Demis has been designing in his head since he was thirteen and has been building, in stolen hours after homework and on weekends, since he got the Amiga.

The core idea is simple. You build a theme park. You manage it. You try to make money.

The execution is not simple. Because Demis is not interested in building a game where you place objects on a grid and watch numbers go up. He is interested in building a game where the people in your park behave like actual people, where they get hungry and tired and bored, where they queue and complain and leave if you don’t manage their experience correctly, where the simulation underneath the graphics is rich enough that the player is actually learning something true about human behavior and systems management without realizing that’s what they’re doing.

He is fifteen, and he is trying to build an artificial society.

He stays up the extra half hour. His mother, to her credit, doesn’t check.

***

Peter Molyneux finds him through a mutual contact in April of that year.

Molyneux is thirty-one, the founder of Bullfrog Productions, the designer of Populous, a god game that sold a million copies and established him as one of the most inventive minds in British gaming. He is brilliant and chaotic and prone to promising features that don’t exist yet, a quality that will follow him through his entire career like a shadow.

He calls the Hassabis house on a Wednesday evening. Demis’s father answers.

“I’m looking for Demis Hassabis,” Molyneux says.

“He’s my son,” Simon says, with the particular caution of a father who has learned that unusual calls about his son are usually the beginning of something complicated.

“How old is he?”

A pause. “Fifteen.”

“Right.” Another pause. “Is he home?”

Demis takes the call in the kitchen, standing up, because he has learned that he thinks better standing.

“I’ve seen the design document you sent through,” Molyneux says. “The theme park game.”

“Yes.”

“It’s extraordinary.”

Demis says nothing. He is running the conversation forward in his head, trying to locate the catch.

“I want to talk about bringing you in,” Molyneux says. “To help develop it. Here at Bullfrog.”

“I’m still in school.”

“I know.”

“A-levels. Cambridge entrance exams.”

“I know.” Molyneux’s voice has the tone of a man who knows all the reasons this is complicated and has decided they are someone else’s problem. “Can we meet?”

****

The Bullfrog offices are in Guildford, which is forty minutes from London by train, and Demis takes a Tuesday off school, telling his mother, correctly, that he has a meeting, telling her nothing else, because the nothing else would generate a conversation that would make him late.

He arrives in a building that smells of instant coffee and cigarettes and something electrical, something warm, the specific atmosphere of a place where people are making things out of nothing. He is fifteen in a school blazer and he walks through the open-plan office and the developers look up from their monitors and a few of them look back down and a few of them keep watching, because there is something about the way this boy moves through space, the deliberateness of it, the lack of self-consciousness, that doesn’t fit the category teenager.

Molyneux comes out of a glass office, hand extended. He is tall and enthusiastic and has the energy of someone who is always slightly ahead of the sentence he’s currently saying.

“Demis. Peter. Sit down, sit down.” He waves at a chair. “Coffee? No? Good call, it’s terrible.” He sits. Opens a folder. “I’ve read your design document four times.”

“And?”

“And I want to know how old you were when you wrote it.”

“Thirteen,” Demis says.

Molyneux looks at him steadily for three seconds. “You were thirteen.”

“The first draft. I’ve updated it several times.”

Molyneux puts the folder down. Leans back. “The AI behavior system. The bit where the visitors have internal states, hunger, happiness, the queuing psychology. That’s not standard. That’s not how anyone is doing it.”

“I know.”

“How did you come up with it?”

Demis thinks about how to answer this. He thinks about the chess games and the Hungarian master and the option space and the whisper that is not magic but is something he doesn’t have precise language for yet.

“I watched people,” he says. “In actual places. Queuing. I went to Thorpe Park twice and I just watched. How they moved. What made them leave a queue. What made them stay.” He pauses. “The game is wrong if the people are wrong. You can have perfect graphics and perfect audio and if the people move like robots, the player’s brain knows something is false. The whole thing collapses.”

Molyneux is very still. “Yes,” he says quietly. “That’s exactly right.” He says it like someone who has been trying to articulate something for a long time and just heard someone else say it perfectly.

The temperature in the room shifts. Not dramatically. Just slightly the way the air changes right before weather arrives.

“I want to offer you a job,” Molyneux says.

Demis doesn’t blink. “I have Cambridge entrance exams.”

“After.”

“I’m going to university.”

“After university. Or during summers. However you want to structure it.” Molyneux leans forward. “I’m not asking you to choose. I’m asking you to keep the door open.”

This is the moment. This is, though Demis won’t understand it for years, the first of many moments in his life when someone opens a door he had not expected to find in this particular wall, and he must decide, in real time, with incomplete information, whether what’s on the other side is an opportunity or a trap or something that doesn’t have a name yet.

He looks at Molyneux. He runs the calculation.

“I’ll keep the door open,” he says.

He is fifteen.

He shakes the man’s hand.

On the train back to London, he sits by the window and watches the suburbs dissolve into the city and he feels something he will spend the rest of his life chasing, the specific electricity of a future that has just expanded, that has just grown by one dimension, that contains possibilities it did not contain this morning.

He does not sleep on the train. He is already designing the next version.

***

Theme Park ships in 1994. Demis is credited as lead designer.

He is seventeen.

He is also, simultaneously, studying for the A-level exams that will get him into Cambridge.

He does both. He does not see why anyone would think this was remarkable.

His mother keeps the magazine review, Edge, December 1994, four and a half stars out of five, in the same drawer as the chess tournament clipping.

The drawer is getting full.