A View from the Top: Green Man Gaming CEO Paul Sulyok on dreaming up a business

Tall, rugged, muscular, stubbly, with a strong handshake, a nose that has been in a few fights, and a dash of derring-do about him, I can see Paul Sulyok as a potential hellraiser in Call of Duty, Black Ops 4 or an unstoppable tough guy in Grand Theft Auto. Or even, possibly, as the CEO and co-founder of Green Man Gaming, which markets these and between six and seven thousand other video games to enthusiasts around the world.

In reality, Sulyok hasn’t, to my knowledge, gone about stealing cars, but he has actually done more than one tour of duty in war-torn, far-flung places. Which has stood him in good stead in the rough old realm of business.

Son of a Hungarian father and English mother, he was brought up in Vienna. Even as a kid, he pinned up a large photo of a British armoured battle group, several hundred-strong, on the bathroom door, thus scaring his mother. After studying economics at Sheffield, he felt he was “too young for a real job”, so he went to Sandhurst and spent six years in the Light Infantry regiment, now known as “the Rifles”.

He rose from second lieutenant to captain and he reckons his army career could have been even more stellar if not for his inability to march in a straight line. As I would expect of a hardcore video game soldier, he got only two hours sleep a night on account of having to do punitive drill at 5am outside the colour sergeant’s office.

Sulyok learned Serbo-Croat and served in Bosnia during the war, working with the Blue Berets and guarding UN convoys to Sarajevo. “It was tragic,” he says in the Green Man Gaming office around the corner from King’s Cross in London. “There was a girl on the Muslim side who asked us to send her regards to her sister on the other side. Families were split. Everyone was forced to take sides.”

When he came out of the forces, he worked first with GE Capital then moved to Citibank. “Ex-military have an inherent skill set,” he reckons, “in building teams and human management. And we’re mission-focused.” He got the taste for “running my own ship” on a mission to Tokyo, implementing an algorithmic trading engine.

In 2009, after a couple of false starts, Green Man Gaming was born out of a conversation in the Green Man pub, just off Oxford Street. The original idea was a simple one. “How many iTunes products do you find on eBay?” Answer – none. But it should be possible not just to buy digital products but to re-sell them. This is the core concept, which Sulyok has patented.

But Green Man discovered that they were very good at e-commerce, selling games – Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox – on 19 different platforms in 95 countries using 82 different payment systems. “I’ve sold video games in Vatican City and Vanuatu,” says Sulyok, with a degree of pride.

Given that the World Heath Organisation has now classified “gaming disorder” as a mental health condition especially affecting young people, I have to ask him, aren’t video games addictive? Sulyok agrees that they are. “But everything you do is potentially addictive. Too much of anything is bad for you. Too much sport kills your joints. Too much sugar gives you heart disease. Even too much sex can harm you. Anything can be taken to excess.”

Sulyok, 51, has two children of his own, a girl aged 14 and a boy aged 18. He says that parents have to exercise some measure of responsibility. “They [his kids] can play video games, but they still have to do their homework and join us for supper.”

The underlying reality is that video games are now huge, commercially, bigger even than movies. The entertainment industry is worth a total £215bn globally. Of that, video games are worth more than a third, some £73bn – two and half times movies, and six times digital music. I can see Red Dead Redemption advertised on the side of every other bus going by. And there are posters for the new Fallout 76 (from Bathesda) on the Underground too (an “open world multi-player post-apocalyptic game”). Grand Theft Auto was the fastest selling entertainment product of all time.

Sulyok points out a couple of things of which I was blissfully unaware. One is that the initial investment for creating these games has dropped considerably now that you can rent out the “physics engine” that is responsible for calculating images in different directions. Before you had to build your own. So the emphasis is more on story creation. And the other significant fact that struck me is that Red Dead Redemption is created by Rockstar, based in Edinburgh. There are 150,000 people employed in the video games industry in the UK.

“We are very good at making video games in this country,” says Sulyok. “They combine two of our great skills. One, our imagination: look at our literature and films. Secondly, we’re a bunch of techies. So we’ve got all the talent right here. All of it goes into video games.”

Green Man Gaming is getting more into producing and developing games, at least “the last 10 yards”. Sulyok definitely has what President Bush senior once called “the vision thing”. Within approximately 60 seconds of our meeting, he was summoning up an idyllic picture – without recourse to Playstation, screen or pixels – of an ideal world (for me anyway) of a Mediterranean hillside where I would be growing olive trees and marinating my own olives (in the video game version, I imagine all hell would then break loose and I would be obliged to hunt down villainous rival olive farmers).

He says this is what a CEO has to be good at. Not olives as such, but rather coming up with a vision of an alternate world in the first place. “You start off at the kitchen table with nothing, and then you conjure up a dream. Then you have to sell it to investors. It’s all about the belief. You hope the belief will rub off.”