In 2018, Abubakar Salim – classically trained stage actor, filmmaker, and breakout star of hit shows like Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon – realized he had an important story he needed to tell. Five years prior, he’d lost his father to cancer, and had suddenly become the “man of the house.” The weight of the responsibility and the blinding fog of grief trapped him in a dark place for years. Then suddenly, after completing a particularly tough platforming section of Ori and the Blind Forest, it clicked. He had a story to tell about his devastating loss, and it was going to be in the form of a video game.
“[As a child], I always wanted to tell stories,” he reminisced, almost pleasantly reliving that feeling of being a young teen full of colorful ideas and a need to show them to the world. It manifested in him making short films with his friends in his teens and early adulthood, but that hunger to create was muted for a while after his father died. The elation he felt, that many gamers feel, when they conquer a difficult challenge after furious trial and error reconnected him to a young him, that would struggle playing Sonic the Hedgehog and would be met with stern yet proud encouragement from his father when he persevered. For Salim, his father’s at least projected interest in his digital adventures made for a real and powerful connection between the two. Writing what would amount to be a eulogy for him in video game form would be a full circle moment.
There was only one problem: Abubakar Salim had no idea how to make a video game.
“I ask people questions like ‘So, how do you make a game?’ and they reply ‘Well, do you have concept art?’” He didn’t. “Do you have a company?” He didn’t. It never occurred to him that you would need to have these things moving before you could even talk seriously about getting a game developed. “You know, I’m like building as I’m learning,” he said about the very early stages of getting Surgent Studios out of his head and into the real world.
Salim credits the strength of his vision for what would become Tales of Kenzera: ZAU for getting through the early rocky period of discovering all of these unwritten prerequisites for getting a game considered by a publisher the size of EA. With a small, 15-person team “running on my bank account,” Surgent Studios – then Silver Rain Games – produced things like a pitch deck, synopsis, and a playable build of the early ZAU concept in a very tight turn around. His acting chops came in handy in presenting his scrappy studio as AAA-level competent while he was still learning the value of what producers and tech artists bring to the table. Though of the many unexpected things he had to learn when it came to getting the studio off the ground, all of the administrative work involved was the most daunting.
“Shout out to Zoe [Brown], who’s our producer. She got this game through the door. She was stellar.” Salim credits Brown’s experience and professionalism for helping him get his head around all of the things that need to get done for a video game to get to market.
In 2020, EA officially signed Surgent under their EA Originals label to ramp up production of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. Between then and 2023, the team grew to around 30 members, and in early 2024, the side-scrolling action game was released to the masses. Salim looks back on this development period with pride, and fondly remembers not being treated like an outsider when it came to the creative process. “There was really no conflict when it came to communicating that creative vision to the team.” he said. They would sometimes tease him for using other games as shorthand for inspirations for ZAU – a more common practice in his experience in film to try to call out framings and storyboard inspirations from other films or shows. Still, he trusted the expertise of his team, full of avid gamers who love what they do and worked hard to make a game they could be proud of; a game that turned his ideas into fully fleshed out stages, characters, and combat.
On the business side, there was some agita. Navigating the process with the publisher (who had specific expectations with regards to the speed of the production) as a first time studio (tasked with doing it and doing it well out of the gate) was stressful, but also illuminating for him. “I’m talking to experts who are building this thing. It’s like asking carpenters to build your house in three months, and them rightly telling you it will take years.”
Outside of trying to relay these sorts of concerns from the top down to the team, he admits he too was guilty of not always understanding the diminishing returns of scaling up. He thanks Lead Designer Zi Peters for setting him straight with a simple analogy: it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, hiring 8 more women won’t finish the baby in a month.
Tensions aside, the game launched in April of 2024 to what Salim considers to be a solid success. “Metacritic. We gotta hit that Metacritic,” he recalled from his conversations with EA, emphasizing that doing well critically was a make-or-break metric for them. “I remember that was the scariest thing, you know? It’s all opinion-based, how are we gonna do this?” He touted the early reviews, which averaged around the mid-70’s (it currently sits at 76 after 65 critical reviews), as the first sign of promise. “Never made a game before. First time running a studio. Okay, that’s a good hit!” Of course, before they could celebrate this win, the next challenges arose: player counts and sales. The pre-order figures were promising, and the actual launch sales exceeded the studio’s expectations. Salim recalled a bizarre phenomenon he experienced in the face of the release, where a small but at the time growing group took to social media to harass developers they suspected were employing DEI measures in their organizations for some nefarious purposes. “And I think for a while – even though we’re in the seat and seeing the numbers, we’re seeing the facts – we almost were made to feel like it wasn’t.”
All this was before the studio was forced to lay a dozen of its staff off in July 2024. “It was heartbreaking, man. Especially when you’ve built this A team over the years, only to have to face the reality of the beast.” The beast here, being a game’s industry that, in his estimation, is built on a cycle of growth that can never be sustainable.
Salim has seen folks come and go from projects on films and TV sets in the past, but there are structures in place in that industry, like widespread unionization, that makes these cycles feel less dire. “In film and TV, for example, your hair and makeup department, your VFX peeps, your audio team, the construction team; these people are all gonna move on to the next project, until maybe you get picked up for, like, a season two or whatever.” There’s only ever a core group of VIPs that are a part of a project in a permanent way, and everyone going in knows it. There is tons of temporary contract work in games, of course, but full time employees do not get to live with a certainty that they will be a part of the studio in the time between projects, and making a successful game is proving to be less and less of a lifeline. Games spend more and more time attempting to emulate film in their products, but not in the infrastructure that makes them.
Salim isn’t letting these hardships discourage Surgent from taking another shot. As of our conversation in early August, he was actively shopping around the follow up to ZAU, while balancing new film projects and a new recurring spot at the Critical Role table. I asked the multi-hyphenate renaissance man if he had any advice as someone who walked into game development as a fan, knowing absolutely nothing about how the sausage gets made, and eventually shipped a game. His mouth slid into another nostalgic smile, remembering what he was told in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the early days of his training to become an actor, “If you really love this, be prepared to eat beans on toast and water for the rest of your life.”