They say boys will always be boys and that as boys grow, so do their toys! Is that bad? To be honest, in the case of 2 talented EUC students, George Neocleous and George Tziazas, it’s worked! Having the spark, the enthusiasm of a little child inside, ready to ignite a fire at any given minute, is what brought together these 2 talents, to create something not short of amazing.
What is that? Well, you might have heard of a little game called ‘Crash Force’, after all, more than 30000 users play the game daily. Magic happened when Neokleous and Tziazas decided to join forces, create their own company and with the valuable help of Microsoft’s Innovation Center, they launched ‘Ascanio’. ‘Ascanio is a magic move in cards that transforms any four cards you’re dealt with, in four aces’ Tziazas reveals. ‘That’s our goal, to go from complete strangers to three very successful aces in the industry’!
‘Following computer science was something I wanted since I was a little kid’ says Tziazas, a time when Neocleous remembers himself to just mess around and… reassemble computers, component by component! As it turns out, choosing it as a field of study was even better than they’d imagined. ‘With programming, is like giving life to something you’ve created’, says Neocleous whereas Tziazas admits that crossing paths with EUC’s head of Center for Game Studies (CGS), Dr. George Christou played a nodal role for focusing on gaming. ‘There is a lot of theory behind it, there are many things that you have to take in consideration’, he claims.
It was Mr. Christou that urged them to join an internship program, at the CGS, with one specific goal. Create an interactive, fun and current game, that gamers would love! ‘Create a game from scratch? What is the procedure, the design needs, the decisions you have to make on every single aspect. This was a very exciting month’ according to Neokleous whereas Tziazas realizes that ‘this was a kind of an early stage of what Crash Force is today’! ‘It’s was what led us in creating our own company, it was the… kick off’ Neokleous admits. ‘We took a risk. It took us 2 to 3 years but we did it, we quitted our jobs, launched our own company and decided that this was it. This is what we really wanted to do! Design games!’ and you can see that Tziazas is talking his truth, as his eyes sparkle every time he even mentions the word ‘gaming’.
Neokleous really wants you to believe in you as he did in himself and his team. ‘Believe in your potential, even if you are scared of it’, he urges EUC’s students, during our short interview. ‘I always want to be on the side that takes a risk and waits to see what happens rather than having doubts or ‘what if’s’ in my mind’, Tziazas concludes. And judging by their results, these are two people you should definitely listen to!