Things happen: junior high, high school, lots of distractions. How did you get into video games?

I was quite a nerd. My high school was a math-based high school. I started to do computer science engineering. In Italy you have a bit of a difference between pure computer science, which is part of the sciences, where you have mathematics, physics, and then you have engineering informatics, which is the computer science part of engineering. So I did that one, because there was more specialization in artificial intelligence. That is what I wanted to do at the time. And I had the opportunity, when I started to do my master's thesis in Rome, at La Sapienza, to have really good mentors. One is also here working with us, Andrea. They taught me a lot about coding, about C++, and in that lab we were doing a lot of robotics as well. And with our professor, it was really exciting. There were two main classes at that time, also with Andrea; he was the assistant of the teacher at that time.

You and Andrea go all the way back to high school?

From university. It's quite a long time. And I think he has a super strong background in lots of stuff. This is why I'm super happy to have him on board, because he has skills and knowledge about AI, not just about what we do, but even things that we might want to do in the future, and more research topics as well. But yeah, basically we did a lot of classes about learning, about vision. We applied it to robotics and stuff like this. And once I graduated, I started to apply to lots of video game companies. I was hoping to start with an internship or something like this. And then I got an offer in Rome first, from a company that was making software for satellites. So I started there, since I didn't get a lot of answers from video game companies. I was like, okay, this is still pretty interesting. C++ code, so it was something that I still wanted to do. And then after my first week there, I basically got an offer for an interview with EA for an internship in Germany, a country that I pretty much didn't know anything about at that time. But my wife, at that time girlfriend, was studying in the US for six months in New York City, doing her thesis at Columbia University. And at that time I was like, it seems like a good opportunity. We're far anyway, I can do six months as an intern in Germany, and then we both come back to Italy and I find a game company in Italy. And I was working at EA Phenomic. I was an intern on this game called BattleForge, which was an RTS game based on cards. It was one of the first EA games based on trading and collecting cards, but the cards were used to summon units in an RTS world, and then you would use them as in an actual real-time strategy game. And after that, I basically moved to Crytek. I got an offer from Crytek. I started to work for engine licensing, so I was hired as an engineer for engine licensing. But I think the good thing there was also that the team was not super big, so I had to learn a lot of the stuff for the engine in general, and I had the opportunity to work with a lot of really, really talented people. Marco has been one of my major mentors at Crytek as well. And I had the opportunity to learn a lot of stuff, not just about AI. I recognize that a big chunk of my knowledge comes also from learning about other systems, because I think having the larger overview of how things work is really powerful sometimes. And at the beginning, it was like, but I want to do this other thing, and I need to fix all this other stuff. But it was really powerful in terms of knowledge. And this, I think, is very classic in a career, where you start as a junior or as an intern, and sometimes you're like, oh, but I need to really fix this bug. Similar to when you study, and you say, why do I need to study that subject? When is this ever going to be useful? And then you say, oh, that's where it was going to be useful.