Imagine for just a moment that you are stranded,
and I mean really stranded, deep in a punishing,
unforgiving jungle in Brunei. Right, like the
kind of place where the canopy above you is so
thick it just blocks out the sun entirely. Yeah,
exactly. And the humidity is absolutely suffocating.
But worse than that, imagine that you are starving.
And not just, you know, skipping lunch starving.
No, no. Desperate biological panic starving.
You have completely run out of your food rations.
It's just an awful situation. It is. In a bid
just to keep your body functioning, you resort
to foraging for wild ferns. You're so desperate
for sustenance that you are literally choking
down rotten fish you managed to find. Wow. Yeah.
By the time this whole ordeal is over, you have
lost a staggering 25 kilograms. Which is what?
Roughly 55 pounds? Right around there, yeah.
And your body is so battered that you actually
require surgery just to repair the physical damage.
That sounds like the inciting incident of a thriller
movie or something. It really does. But now I
want you to think about taking that harrowing
near -death experience, pulling yourself... out
of that jungle and translating that exact feeling
of desperation into one of the most wildly influential
video games of the entire 2010s. It's actually
the genesis of an entirely new genre of digital
entertainment. Welcome to this deep dive. Our
mission today is to map the intersection of extreme
real world survival and digital game design.
And we're doing that by looking at the incredible
life of Dean Rocket Hall. We are. We're unpacking
how a highly disciplined military background
unexpectedly birthed the zombie survival sensation
DayZ and really how one creator's intense personal
drive completely disrupted the traditional gaming
industry. This isn't just a standard biography
of a game designer. We're looking at a fascinating
case study on human resilience today. It is about
how profound physical and emotional trauma can
be synthesized, processed and ultimately transformed
into digital experiences that resonate with millions
of people. OK, let's unpack this, because to
understand the jungle, we have to we have to
understand where this all started. Right. The
timeline kicks off in a place called Omaru, New
Zealand. Yep. Born in May of 1981, he attended
Waitaki Boys High School, and he developed this
really deep fascination with computers early
on. Which was a big deal back then. It was. His
parents bought him an Amiga personal computer,
which became his very first introduction to the
actual mechanics of video game development. You
know, the Amiga was a foundational machine for
an entire generation of programmers. Oh, absolutely.
It was accessible enough for a teenager to tinker.
with its architecture, but robust enough to actually
compile and build functional logic -based software.
It heavily rewarded curiosity. And what's incredible
is that during this time, he wasn't just like
sitting in a dark room coding in isolation. Right,
he was highly social with it. Yeah, he was playing
tabletop role -playing games with a fellow New
Zealander named Chris Butcher. Now that is a
name drop. I know, right? If that name rings
a bell for any gaming fans out there, Butcher
later became the technical director at Bungie.
Where he worked on absolute juggernauts of the
industry. Yeah, Halo and Destiny. That is just
an immense concentration of future industry influence
sitting around a single tabletop. It really makes
you think. I actually want you listening right
now to consider the childhood hobbies that shaped
your current career. You never really know who
is sitting across the table from you rolling
dice, or how those early imaginative problem
-solving sessions are wiring your brain for the
future. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
what is crucial to understand about Hall is that
he did not take a linear path. No, not at all.
He didn't go from that Amiga computer straight
into a major tech hub or a massive game studio.
Right, he took a hard pivot. He really did. He
moved into an environment defined by extreme
rigidity. He served as a commissioned officer
in the Royal New Zealand Air Force for five years.
That is quite the leap, going from the boundless
creative freedom of early computer programming
to the incredibly strict hierarchy of the Air
Force. That's a massive culture shock. And he
didn't stop there. During that time, he completed
a degree at the University of Otago. Which was
funded by a defense scholarship, right? Exactly.
And later, in 2009, he actually re -enlisted
in the New Zealand Army. He served as a commissioned
officer in the Royal New Zealand Corps of Signals.
Now, the Signals Corps is entirely focused on
communications, information systems, and logistics
under extreme pressure. Which seem like polar
opposites to game design on the surface. They
do, yeah. You have the highly structured, disciplined,
zero margin for error world of the military running
parallel to the deeply chaotic creative world
of software development. But they actually complement
each other. Perfectly. The military teaches you
how to manage complex, overlapping systems. It
teaches you how to handle supply chains, resource
management, and how to operate when things inevitably
break down. Which happens constantly in game
dev. Constantly. Those are the exact skills required
to wrangle complex code and manage the production
of a massive video game. His military background
wasn't a detour from his game design career.
It was the ultimate training ground for it. Here's
where it gets really interesting, though, because
all that theoretical structure and logistical
training is about to be violently tested in the
real world. This is the Brunei trip. Yes. So
in 2009, during his time with the army, Hall
was posted on an exchange program with the Singapore
Armed Forces. And as part of that exchange, he
was sent to Brunei to complete a grueling survival
training course. And we should clarify, this
was not a simulated classroom -style training
exercise. Oh, no. Not at all. This was a brutal
physical test of human endurance in one of the
most unforgiving environments on the planet.
To make matters worse, Hall was not used to the
local diet to begin with. That immediately put
him at a physical disadvantage before the hardest
parts even began. He was already running on a
deficit. Right. So as the training progressed
into the actual survival component, things went
from difficult. too genuinely life -threatening,
he completely ran out of food. That is when the
desperation truly sets in. Yeah, he resorted
to foraging for those wild ferns I mentioned
earlier. He tried to eat rotten fish just to
get some kind of caloric intake to keep moving.
We really have to consider the psychological
toll of that kind of severe caloric deficit.
It changes you. It rewires you entirely. When
your body starts consuming its own muscle and
fat for energy, your mind begins to fracture.
The primal instinct to survive just overrides
higher -level logic. Everything else fades away.
Every decision becomes exclusively about the
next calorie, the next drop of water, the next
hour of survival. And the physical toll was just
devastating. By the end of this training in Brunei,
Hall weighed 25 kilograms less. He sustained
injuries that were so severe he required surgery
to repair his body once he was finally extracted.
He went to the absolute brink of what a human
body can endure. He did. But when he finally
recovered, his brain did something extraordinary.
He didn't just want to move on and forget the
trauma. No, he wanted to capture it. Exactly.
He experienced a profound realization about how
we train people. Hall realized that traditional
military training was highly focused on tactics.
You know, where to point a weapon, how to read
a map, how to flank an enemy. The mechanical
stuff? Right. but it fundamentally failed to
train soldiers for the raw, visceral, emotional
reactions of a true survival situation. The panic,
the despair, the way your decision -making completely
degrades when you are starving and exhausted.
Precisely. He wanted to use video games as a
method to simulate that emotional crucible so
soldiers could experience those feelings of desperation
and learn to manage them in a safe, simulated
environment before they ever hit a real battlefield.
So he takes this brilliant, deeply personal concept
and he pitches it to the leadership within the
army. He essentially says, I have a technology
-driven way to make our soldiers emotionally
resilient using game simulation. And the military
shows absolutely no interest in the pitch. Which
is wild to me. But wait, I have to ask, why would
they reject that? If the goal of the military
is to create the most prepared soldiers possible,
why reject a tool designed to make them emotionally
bulletproof? It really comes down to institutional
inertia. Large traditional organizations often
struggle to see the value in unorthodox technology
-driven solutions. Especially back in 2009. Exactly.
Especially when those solutions try to quantify
something as messy and subjective as human emotion.
The military excels at measuring physical fitness
and marksmanship. Measuring a soldier's ability
to handle simulated despair on a computer screen
was likely just too abstract for the brass at
the time. That rejection is the catalyst for
the pivot of a lifetime, though. Hall decides,
okay, if the military doesn't want this survival
simulator, I will release it to the public. But
he couldn't just release a starvation simulator.
Right, to make a grueling emotional simulator
appealing to everyday gamers, he needed a hook.
He needed a recognizable antagonist to force
the player into that state of scrambling for
survival. So he added zombies. He added zombies.
By adding a fictional supernatural element, the
zombies. He was able to deliver the stark, hyper
-realistic psychological simulation he originally
intended without it feeling like a dry military
training module. He releases this as a mod, which,
for those who might not know, is a player -made
modification that alters the existing code of
a game for the tactical military shooter Arma
2. And that mod becomes DayZ. The legendary DayZ.
The genius of DayZ is how the mechanics enforce
the psychology. The zombies are dangerous. but
anyone who has played it will tell you that the
true danger is always the other players. Because
resources are so incredibly scarce. Exactly.
The game forces you into constant moral dilemmas.
If you find a can of beans and you run into another
player, do you trust them enough to share it?
Or do you assume they will kill you for it, so
you decide to kill them first? It strips away
societal norms and drops you right into the emotional
tension he felt in Brunei, the degradation of
trust under pressure. The military rejected a
serious emotional conditioning tool, so Hall
essentially disguised it as a horror game, and
millions of teenagers and adults downloaded it
to test their own morality. That's brilliant.
And the rise of this game was meteoric. Before
Daisy exploded, Hall was already working his
way through the industry. After leaving the Air
Force initially, he worked as a producer at Side
Interactive in Wellington, New Zealand. They
worked on Speed Racer, the video game in 2008,
right? Yes, exactly. Then he briefly went back
to Army, which is when the Brunei incident happened,
and then returned to the industry on a contract
at Bohemia Interactive to work on Arma 3. And
it was during this time he created the DayZ mod
for Arma 2. It became such a massive phenomenon
that it was nominated for the Online Innovation
Award at the GDC Online Awards in 2012. GDC being
the Game Developers Conference, one of the biggest
industry events in the world. The success of
the mod was so undeniable that Bohemia Interactive
quickly brought him on as the project lead to
develop a standalone, fully -fledged retail version
of Daisy. He went from eating ferns in the jungle...
to leading one of the most anticipated game developments
on the planet. But what I find so compelling
about Hall is that the self -reliance he learned
in the jungle didn't just apply to his game design.
He brought that exact same defiant energy to
the business side of the gaming industry. What's
fascinating here is how openly he challenged
the established business models. He really did
not care for the status quo. Not at all. By 2012,
the video game industry was heavily reliant on
the traditional publishing model. Major publishers
held all the funding, the marketing power, and
the physical distribution channels. But Hall
looked at the landscape and saw a massive paradigm
shift. He publicly stated that the seventh generation
of consoles, the major platforms of the time,
like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, were at
the end of their lives. And that the PC platform
was the space actually driving true innovation.
He turned down many, many publishers who wanted
to swoop in and acquire the rights to DayZ. He
just rejected them outright. And he bluntly asked
them in very public forums what value they actually
provided in a modern context. He looked at the
gatekeepers of a multi -billion dollar... It
was a very bold move. Have you ever looked at
a gatekeeper in your own industry, someone standing
between you and your audience, and had the courage
to ask, what value do you actually bring to this
transaction? It takes immense confidence to ask
that question, because for decades, the publisher's
answer was simply, we hold the keys to the storefront.
But Hall realized the Internet had removed the
locks entirely. His mod had already proven that
a direct to consumer model worked flawlessly.
He exposed the fact that the traditional publishing
model was in many ways an antiquated system trying
to tax a modern digital workflow. And he put
his money where his mouth was. In November 2014.
Hall left his highly successful, highly visible
position at Bohemia Interactive. He packed up
and went back to his roots in New Zealand to
found his very own independent game studio, Rocketworks.
Building an indie studio is an enormous financial
and professional risk, but it afforded him total
creative autonomy. No more gatekeepers. None.
He no longer had to compromise his vision for
complex, simulation -heavy ideas to appease a
corporate board. The trajectory of Rocketworks
really showcases a studio willing to experiment
and fail. They announced a debut title called
ION at E3 in 2015, which was an ambitious project
that ultimately got canceled. But that didn't
stop them at all. No, they ventured into virtual
reality with a game called Out of Ammo in 2016.
In 2017, Hall announced Stationeers, a game drawing
heavy inspiration from the cult classic Space
Station 13. That one focused heavily on incredibly
detailed, granular system management. Stationeer
is a perfect example of his design philosophy.
You aren't just building a base. Right. You are
managing the atmospheric pressure, the mixture
of gases, the electrical grids. It requires an
almost obsessive attention to detail. And then
in December 2021, Rocketworks released Icarus,
which is a massive session -based PvE survival
game. PvE meaning player versus environment.
Right, where instead of fighting other players
like in DayZ, you are battling the harsh, unforgiving
weather and wildlife of an alien planet. He just
kept building these intricate, challenging worlds.
This relentless drive to conquer difficult, complex
systems isn't just limited to his digital life
though. It bleeds directly back into his physical
reality. What stands out to me here isn't just
his professional ambition, but how this drive
manifests outside the studio. Dean Hall isn't
just surviving jungles. He is actively seeking
out the most punishing environments on Earth.
He is an accomplished mountaineer. He climbed
Mount Cook in New Zealand, and then in May of
2013, right in the absolute middle of the daisy
cultural phenomenon, he summited Mount Everest.
He became the 42nd New Zealander to ever reach
the top of the world. Hall has stated that his
experiences in mountaineering actively form part
of the inspiration for his game design work.
When you analyze it, the parallels between climbing
Everest and his game mechanics are striking.
How so? Think about mountaineering, especially
at the level of Everest's death zone. It is an
environment that is completely indifferent to
your existence. It is brutally unforgiving. A
single mistake can be the end? A single mistake
regarding your oxygen supply, your footing, or
misjudging a weather window can be instantly
fatal. It requires constant, meticulous resource
management. Which is exactly what you are doing
in his games. Exactly. That is the core loop.
the central repeating actions a player takes
of almost every game hall designs whether you
are managing the atmospheric pressure in station
years monitoring your oxygen tanks in icarus
or rationing a single dirty bandage in daisy
he's digitizing the mountain he takes the grueling
punishing reality of climbing a mountain in the
death zone and distills it into digital mechanics
he builds systems where patients preparation
and a deep respect for the environment are the
only ways to avoid failure. He is simulating
the Everest experience for people sitting comfortably
at their computer desks. And his ambition to
build these extreme simulation sandboxes is still
driving his current work. Even today. Let's bring
this right up to the present day. In 2024, the
gaming industry saw the reported closure of Intercept
Games and a development freeze on the highly
anticipated Kerbal Space Program 2. For context,
the original Kerbal Space Program, or KSP, was
an incredibly beloved, highly technical spaceflight
simulation game where players literally had to
learn orbital mechanics and astrophysics to successfully
launch rockets. It's notoriously complex. When
the sequel's development froze, Hall saw a massive
void in the community. In October 2024, he announced
that RocketWorks has started work on a brand
new game titled Kitten Space Agency. His stated
goal for this project is to replicate the same
feeling, commitment, and challenge of existing
KSP. Notice the emphasis on the word challenge.
He continually seeks to replicate extreme difficulty.
He survived the jungle, so he simulated starvation
and paranoia. He climbed Everest, so he simulated
unforgiving alien environments. And now this.
He sees a community mourning the loss of a complex
aerospace simulator, so he steps in to build
an orbital physics engine himself. He is a person
who looks at the most difficult, complex systems
imaginable, both in the natural world and in
advanced physics, and says, I want to build a
sandbox where people can test their intellect
against this. So what does this all mean? When
we take a step back and look at the whole picture,
from tinkering with an Amiga in Uomaru, to mastering
logistics in the Royal New Zealand Corps of Signals,
to the starving days in Brunei, to the summit
of Everest, to the boardroom battles where he
completely bypassed traditional publishers. Dean
Hall's story is about a man who repeatedly, almost
compulsively, pushes himself to the absolute
physical and mental brink. It really is an incredible
arc. And instead of keeping those intense experiences
to himself, he translates that raw intensity
into code. He creates these intricate, unforgiving
digital spaces so that the rest of us can safely
experience a fraction of that challenge and maybe
learn something profound about our own resilience
and decision making in the process. It is a remarkable
translation of real -world adversity into interactive
art, but it does leave us with a rather profound
implication to consider as we wrap up today.
If Hall originally designed his survival simulation
to train soldiers in emotional resilience, to
literally condition the human mind to handle
panic, starvation, and the betrayal of trust,
and then, after the military rejected it, he
released it to the public, as an entertainment
product. Okay, I see where you're going with
this. Are millions of everyday gamers accidentally
receiving the exact psychological conditioning
the military rejected? This raises an important
question. Next time you find yourself playing
a grueling, hyper -realistic survival game, sweating
over a digital can of food, you have to ask yourself.
Are you just having fun, or is the game actually
training you for the worst -case scenario? That
is definitely something to chew on the next time
you boot up a survival simulator. Are we playing
the game, or is the game training us? Thank you
so much for joining us on this deep dive. We
hope you enjoyed exploring the incredible intersections
of survival, military discipline, and game design
as much as we did. Until next time, keep questioning
the systems around you and stay curious.