KEOKEN INTERACTIVE

From the kitchen table to the stars: how a pair of sibling dreamers achieved lift-off

- CHRIS SCHILLING

Talking to Paul Deetman, one half of the sibling duo that founded Keoken Interactive, you get a sense that space was the studio’s destiny from the start. It was partly in the Deetman DNA, after all – their grandfather, a keen astronomer, had built telescopes. And as children, Paul and brother Koen would regularly head into the back yard of their family’s home in Hoofddorp with a video camera to make amateur remakes of popular movies, Star Wars being a firm favourite.

Later, as students, they moved into different disciplines: Koen studied games and IT, while Paul developed a keen interest in music production. The two soon had stars in their eyes in a different sense. Deciding to pool their creative talents and try their hand at game development, the pair looked at their compatriots at Amsterdam’s Guerrilla Games and wondered why there was only one studio in the Netherlands operating at that kind of scale. “We thought, let’s try and follow in those footsteps,” Paul says, the rest of his answer punctuated by hearty laughter. “And that’s pretty hard! So now we understand why there was only one.”