Improbable CEO Herman Narula Improbable

Update 12.05.2017: WIRED first covered the story of Improbable in 2014. Since then, the London-based game studio has become the UK's latest billion dollar startup. WIRED's Oliver Franklin-Wallis recently returned to the studio to see how the company has developed in just three years. Read more about Improbable. The original story has been preserved in its entirety below.

Original story


Imagine playing a first-person shooter like Call of Duty alongside thousands of other players from across the world without having to worry about latency. Or a game where your actions can trigger persistent reactions in the universe that will affect all other players. This is what gaming startup Improbable hopes to achieve. WIRED investigates

"We started this company off with a level of audacity that was borderline insane" Herman Narula, Improbable

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You probably haven't heard of Improbable. Despite its low profile, the London-based game studio has been attracting an extraordinary array of talent. At the end of last year, Crytek's general manager Nick Button-Brown quit to join the startup. He's since been joined by developers, animators and artists from triple-A studios, including Lionhead, Ubisoft and Creative Assembly. Improbable also counts Sam Kalnins, a former Googler responsible for developing Hangouts, and several software engineers from Goldman Sachs among its fold.

All of them have something in common: a shared belief that Improbable's technology has a chance to change the games industry and allow for a completely new type of online gaming experience.


Show, don't tell

Improbable was set up and funded (to the tune of £1.2 million so far) by 26-year-old Herman Narula -- son of billionaire construction mogul Harpinder Singh Narula -- with some of his friends after graduating in computer science at Cambridge. Their main aim was to take distributed systems used in high-frequency trading and apply them to games to enable massively multiplayer experiences that have the richness of gameplay of a first-person shooter. "You could have a Call of Duty experience with an entire army. You can have hundreds of thousands of entities in the world with a simulated city with traffic infrastructure," Narula explains.

Wired.co.uk first visited Improbable at the end of 2013 in a large, opulent residential house called Hyver Hall -- owned by Narula's family -- in High Barnet. A dozen or so guys were set up in stations throughout the property working on server architecture, simulation software and games ideas. Many of them were sleeping there at night and there was a palpable sense of optimism, spearheaded by Narula.

Wired.co.uk sits down with Narula, CTO Rob Whitehead, software engineer Peter Lipka and studio head Nick Button-Brown. Narula is effervescent and speaks with the self-belief of a seasoned entrepreneur. Within minutes of meeting he's illustrating how the technology works on a white board, wiping away previous workings with the sleeve of his pristine white shirt. Every now and then his teammates interject with "be humble". Narula will temper his words for the next few sentences before lurching back into game-changing, world-dominating hyperbole. The over-arching ambition, he says, is to be the "Google of simulation". His evangelism is both infectious and a little suspicious -- one part cult leader, one part CEO.

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Later, in a phone interview, Wired.co.uk asks why his team kept on asking for humility. "Because we started this company off with a level of audacity that was borderline insane," Narula says.


Button-Brown confirms this, saying that the company has tried to instill an ethos of "show, don't tell". "Rather than say it's going to be brilliant, let's show it's going to be brilliant," he explains.

Improbable

That quiet confidence has carried the company through the last six months, a whirlwind of hiring, developing and plotting -- all in semi-stealth mode. The team moved into a sprawling office in Farringdon and, by the time Wired.co.uk visited, had almost tripled in size. In early May, Improbable announced that its first partner was Bafta-winning game developer Bossa Studios and the two companies are working together to develop a new type of game.

This has been made possible because Improbable's technology solves two key problems. The first is getting lots of players interacting in the same world in a truly scalable way. This has been achieved through the creation of a distributed system that can move seamlessly between servers, borrowing techniques from other industries where latency is key, including banking (in fact, Narula says that Improbable is responsible for "rehabilitating bankers") and telecommunications -- specifically, the way that mobile phones stay connected even when users move between cell towers. This means that game play is no longer limited by what can be achieved on one engine or a single server.

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Improbable

The second problem is how to model thousands of entities in the world efficiently, and this has been achieved by separating the graphics from the simulation. The simulation continues even when players are not around -- you can view it using a web browser instead of a game engine should you so wish. Crucially, Improbable's technology -- developed in programming language Scala -- plugs into existing game engines, including Unity, CryEngine and Unreal.

The games I'm talking about now are the games I've always wanted to build but have never been able to. We are giving people the tools to build those games Nick Button-Brown, Improbable's studio head

Running the infrastructure and servers in a way that makes all of this cost-efficient is where former Google employee Kalnins' skills have come into play. As Narula points out, getting 20-30 people in a live video chat was the "hardest real-time media problem of our age".

The Improbable promise

With this approach, Improbable promises to allow for online games in huge, living breathing worlds where every action has a universal consequence. An explosion on one side of the world caused by one player may mean that a shipping container falls out of the sky in another player's game. A non-player character who gets knocked over in the street by a player won't "forget" it seconds later -- he will remain angry, and may tell his friends to avoid the player too. A dragon that one player slaughters won't reappear minutes later to be killed by another. "This is the sort of emergent gameplay that comes from fully responsive, intelligent worlds. The idea that the reactions to what you are doing are intelligent and they feel intelligent. It just makes sense," says Button-Brown. "This is about unlocking the power of developers," says Narula, "so that they are not hitting silly limitations that have nothing to do with building games".

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For those who call bullshit on what Improbable claims to have achieved, there is an open invitation to come and see the technology. "Come into the office," says Button-Brown. "We've got something working. It's not perfect, but it's hard to say it's not working when it is working." The team won't be arrogant about it, he says, but the fact that they can now show people instead of telling them means they can afford to be slightly less humble. "The games I'm talking about now are the games I've always wanted to build but have never been able to. We are giving people the tools to build those games."

I want to create games where an individual can make choices and those choices fit into a gargantuan universe where millions of other players can make those choices and create great stories Imre Jele, Bossa

The partnership with Bossa will likely deliver the first publicly visible fruits of Improbable's labour in the shape of a demo for a game called The Jackal Story. The game features a huge battle that results in piles and piles of bodies. Unlike other games, these fallen bodies don't just disappear after a few seconds. Instead, they get preyed upon by scavenging jackals, which have their own ecology. When there's more food around, the jackals proliferate and become an emergent threat within the game. Players can either take on the jackals as they appear or build defences to prepare for the surge, or even try and tempt a creature that happens to hunt jackals into that area to control the population.

Either way, the solution doesn't have to be scripted.

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Bossa cofounder Imre Jele told Wired.co.uk that he wants to build games where choices matter. "If I paint on a wall, the paint will be there until someone deletes it," he said. "I want to create games where an individual can make choices and those choices fit into a gargantuan universe where millions of other players can make those choices and create great stories."

Gamer Network's cofounder Rupert Loman is excited by the possibility of real cause and effect within MMOs: "For a long time game designers have promised the idea that your actions in a world will have serious implications as the world evolves, but that's always been scripted, predetermined or limited when it comes to the reality of it." If Improbable cracks this it could be "a Holy Grail of game design".

But how can developers create any sense of narrative structure in these huge simulation-backed games? Jele says that cut scenes interspersed with jumping and shooting have traditionally been what game studios associate with narrative structure. "I prefer to use the word narrative setting, a playground in which a story can take place," he says. "Imagine you arrive in a new city and you find a group of buildings and wonder what happened. Why did the people abandon them? Did they die? Did they move to a better place? What happened? Suddenly I can tell these stories via the environment by leaving clues, creating a huge backdrop that makes you excited. In there you can make your own stories -- perhaps you get lost and meet another person in the game who tells you something else about another part of the world..." "Maybe the writing is not that glorious -- it will be just how people talk to each other online, but the story will be theirs.

That's a huge emotional boost."

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Loman is more cautious. "Accurate simulation and things happening in one part of the world having wide implications over thousands of users in a virtual world is powerful, but ultimately video games are about entertainment and gameplay."

The business model

At the moment, Improbable has placed its technology on servers based in Bossa's studios so that all of the developers can collaborate on the same project live. There's an additional web-based dashboard that connects to the server system, allowing them to change assets and make updates to the online game.

Eventually, as more clients come on board, Improbable plans to offer a software as a service (SAAS) product, where it will be responsible for running a cloud-based server system, taking away the burden of deployment and maintaining version control systems. "You don't have to worry about scaling if someone tweets a link to your game and 30,000 people pile in," says Narula.

By solving hard, server-side architectural problems in an invisible way, the company hopes to make it easy for small studios to scale their games. The plan is to allow for live development, so the system world is always on and developers can continually push content and improvements to it. "Say you are a game developer and you have 1,000 people playing your game and you are bored of the king's hat being green -- you want to make it red. We will let you modify the king's hat, press a button and that change is reflected on the screens of all of those players live immediately. It's just streamed down. That's pretty cool," Narula explains, adding that some of his team hacked together a working prototype of this using Unity over a weekend.

Down the line, Improbable plans to adopt an app-store model, whereby one games company might develop, for example, a combustion algorithm (that dictates how in-game objects might burn) that they could then sell to others. "We are already doing this in a primitive way to share code with Bossa," says Narula.

Although the focus has been on video games, applications for Improbable's technology are potentially much more wide reaching, extending into disaster simulation and economic modelling. "If people want to do large-scale traffic simulations, military simulations, see how a disease might spread or anything where you are simulating outcomes with large numbers of autonomous entities, our technology can help," Narula says, adding that he's speaking to a "whole bunch of professors" as well as a number of "really unlikely non-gaming application areas", including an airline.


Deals, he assures, will be imminent.

But what happens if those deals don't come through and it doesn't work out? Narula responds: "I don't have any doubt that we can deliver on the tech. But the doubt is whether or not game developers can fully take advantage of what we are offering, whether the business case is there and whether there are powerful non-gaming applications," he says.

His voice suggests that doubt isn't keeping him awake at night. "We have managed to put together an amazing group of people and have solved a lot of problems that have value to other companies." "If we did nothing else but create a really neat scaling solution for FPS games it's OK. And if it does fail, at the very least we'll have made enough of an impact that we'll inspire people to look again at games tech."