Chris van der Kuyl of 4J studios draws lessons from the games industry, its world-class leadership and supporting innovative industrial clusters to drive prosperity, and social inclusion.
Full speech transcript
May 2026, the world will gaze with absolute focus on Holyrood. The world will not blink until events come to pass that will define the next generation of their lives. Absolutely naff all to do with the Scottish elections and everything to do with Grand Theft Auto 6 coming out from Rockstar North across the street from the Scottish Parliament.
Yes, the Scottish Parliament is not the most important building in Edinburgh to the rest of the developed world. It is the Rockstar North studio in the old Scotsman building. I maybe say that slightly flippantly, but this game, this cultural phenomenon is the world’s biggest entertainment franchise.
This game has taken more time to develop and cost more, somewhere approaching $2 billion than it took to build the Burj Khalifa, the world’s largest building. Let that settle in for a second. A single video game is a more monumental human endeavour than the largest physical structure we have ever built.
That’s what the games industry is. That’s the industry that’s right at the core of many of our businesses. And it’s an industry, as I’ve just demonstrated, in which Scotland leads the world.
It’s not kind of competitive. We are the best at this. And the story for that, and we’ll expand beyond Grand Theft Auto for sure, but the story for that begins, as David Sainsbury pointed out, right back in my hometown of Dundee.
The city of jute, jam, and journalism, and now in the 21st century, is epitomised by my 4J studios, the extra J of joysticks. We have, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, created a city where there are more game developers per head of population than anywhere else on earth, and that’s even counting the fact that our pals at Rockstar North went off to the distant shores of Edinburgh. So if you cut back to the late 1980s in Dundee, what did it look like? Well, some people would say pretty desolate, pretty desperate.
And indeed, it was the dying throes, and it looked like some peak, actually some wonderful things going on, but the dying throes of the jute industry, which turned Dundee into one of the richest cities on the planet at its peak, it was gone, absolutely gone completely. The Marshall Plan businesses that existed in Dundee of Levi Strauss, I can’t remember the name of the fridge manufacturer that came over from the States, but NCR, which was actually pushing amazing technology into the world of cash machines, and Timex were somewhat in their dying throes in the way that Jim talked about those Silicon Glen businesses in the 1990s. But out of those burning embers that were left of Timex came a glimmer of hope.
Good old entrepreneurial legend in the UK, Sir Clive Sinclair, had decided that Dundee was the manufacturing base for the Sinclair Spectrum. And I remember when it launched in the mid-1980s, every single one of us aspiring geeks, we were desperate to get a hold of the Spectrum across the UK, and I would actually hypothesise for you the Spectrum’s responsible for the phenomenal software industry that we have in the UK today, maybe along with the BBC microcomputer, but I’m not going to waste time on that today. I’m going to tell you about the Spectrum in Dundee, manufactured, the cheapest home computer anybody in the world had really seen at that point, selling for between 150 and 200 pounds unless you lived in Dundee, where for the princely sum of a fiver and a well-positioned pack of Embassy Regal cigarettes, you could acquire a Sinclair Spectrum for home use.
I personally had six at that point. But these were things, mass manufactured, lots kind of slightly defective, not quite useful for full retail. Every kid in Dundee had one.
And out of that, I promise you, came the games industry that’s there today. David Jones, one of the founders of DMA, who originated the game called Lemmings, which in the early 1990s was an enormous success, bought by Sony. His company then went on to develop Grand Theft Auto.
My own origin story comes from my best friend and I who met at school when we were 11. We graduated from Edinburgh and Dundee in computer science. And I wanted to start a business up for some unknown reason.
I spent about a year and a half thinking it wasn’t going to be in games. And then after Ferrari, after Ferrari, and Porsche, after Porsche passed me coming out of the DMA car park, we decided that we were going to follow those. And there’s David’s point on cluster.
If you know and you can see people achieve close by you, it becomes normal. Why do lots of people in LA go to the movie industry? Because everyone knows somebody from the movie industry. Dundee is the Hollywood of the games industry.
Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it really is. Everyone in Dundee knows somebody that works in the games industry. And about, where are we now, 2025, 15 years ago, pretty much, our lives changed.
We’d built a fantastic business in games. We’d built one business, we’d sold it. We actually had a pretty poor exit process with that business, and we’d started again.
And we were on business two, we were about five years into business two with 4J Studios, when the fateful call came to invite us up to Stockholm to meet the founders of Mojang, the guys who’d created Minecraft back in 09, 10. And at that point, we saw that they had something special, and we were at a time in our career where we agreed to take risk and effectively take a piece of that Minecraft business and develop it here in Scotland. That decision that we made then has led us to become, alongside Rockstar, responsible for one of the most successful games ever made.
A game that we thought would possibly sell a million or a million and a half copies, went on, in our case, to sell 70 million copies, 260 million pieces of extra content that we built for it, as a franchise that sold 300 or 400 million copies globally. You know, almost as good as a blockbuster drug, to be honest. But we went on, and that went on to be bought by Microsoft a few years ago for over $2.5 billion, five years after it came out of bedroom in Stockholm.
That’s the speed and pace which games can change the fortunes of those involved with them, and build and build scale. So, that journey continues in Dundee, and I don’t have time between here and your lunch to tell you about the phenomenal number of successes that are happening. But believe me, it’s only the beginning.
And it’s the beginning of a scale-up and cluster story that I truly think can be enormously impactful on the Scottish economy, not just a nice sideshow or part of a bigger story. And that comes down to one thing that I believe. When we talk about inclusivity, there is no better social welfare policy than a well-paid job and a fulfilling career, and an ambition that permeates a society, that a society believes and has confidence in itself.
And those incredible industries like ours, like the drug discovery businesses that can come out of places like University of Dundee and the biotech clusters, these are what we need to shoot for. And we can’t undershoot, we can’t underestimate, and we can’t be, you know, we can’t lack in confidence when we believe that those are the beginnings of what comes next. But to do that, and I’m delighted to come with sort of semi-prepared piece today and listen to some of the comments that were made because it was incredible comments that got right to the heart of the challenge of education.
You know, I don’t need to repeat the wonderful contribution earlier about the lack of talented teachers and resource to turn out the talented human beings that are going to help me scale to the next generation of what we’re doing now. But it’s a disaster out there, and it is a disaster that I think will be partially solved by AI-delivered, technology-delivered, and supported solutions. It’s the only way because nobody’s truly listening.
You know, that classic thing of the right time to build a forest or to plant trees was 25, 30 years ago. Well, we actually did that in the games industry. Abertay University were incredible in the early years of actually listening to us as an industry, taking a massive risk and becoming the first university in the world to formally certificate computer games as a subject area.
Today, they are the only university outside the United States in the top 10 globally in this sector, and they remain an absolute pioneer. That’s when we did it. The second best time to plant trees today is get on with it and do it.
And we need to plant trees though. As multiple people have said, this cannot be solved in a year, cannot be solved in a parliamentary cycle. We need to invest for decades to come in the talent base that needs to be fit for purpose in a world which I’m fond of saying has never… We’ve never existed in a time of faster change than we exist today, and it will never be as slow again.
Just let that drop into your head. It’s as fast as it’s ever been. We’re struggling to cope with the pace of change.
It’ll never be this slow again. It’s going to exponentially increase in terms of pace of change from here on in, and we need to equip every human being in our society to be part of that, to be productive and constructive and create full stop which will create wealth. So, ladies and gentlemen, from my perspective, I think Scotland is entirely set up for success.
If we believe it and we grab the opportunity and we align ourselves with everyone around us to send that message out there for people to come here and create based on the one natural resource that we have more of than I think as a percentage of population than anyone, and it’s talent. Yes, wind power is fantastic. Those bits of infrastructure we’ve got, great.
But really, it’s all about raw talent. I’m going to leave you by telling you that five years ago, my business partner, Paddy, and I knew that our journey with Minecraft was coming to its sunset. We were delighted.
We thought we’d maybe get 18 months out of this deal. It’s now 15 years and we’re still part of it. The movies helped us this year.
For anybody that knows what a chicken jockey is, I pity you. But from here, five years ago, we started planting the seeds for our next generation of technology. We looked at NVIDIA GPUs and what they could do for us, not just accelerate graphics, not just generic AI, but specifically, we put our best technologists five years ago into developing algorithms, in our case, which help procedurally generated worlds exist in a way that they’ve never done before.
And believe me, we’ve done it. We have a technology that’s 100 times faster empirically than anything else in the world. We’ve got global businesses in our industry who are desperate to know how they can partner with us and what we’ve done.
We announced it to the world in September. Three weeks ago, we made it available to 512 people to give us a preliminary test. Nobody reacted.
That means there are absolutely no geeks in the room because 512 is a quite important number in the world of computer science, along with 1,024 and others. But those 512 people in three weeks have generated millions of data points for us. We’re measuring and using analytics in our own AI platforms to help them inform where we go with the future.
This game that we have built is so powerful. We believe our purpose now is to serve a community which will, we believe, number hundreds of millions of people to engage in our game called Reforge for decades to come. And our analogy is we’re like Fender.
We make the greatest musical instruments on the planet, and I can kind of play them, but not very well. I’m looking for Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and Brian May to come to our game and take us to the world. And it’s going to happen here in Scotland.
It’s going to happen in our studios in Dundee and Edinburgh. It’ll happen worldwide, but the world, in our industry, the world is really coming to Scotland. In September this year, we are hosting for the first time the American Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, equivalent of the Oscars for games, their European conference.
And the Scottish government have been phenomenal in supporting me to make sure that comes to Scotland. And they helped me invite, for the first time in our history, one of the main board of Nintendo, an incredibly quiet and tight company, is coming to Scotland for the first time to really find out why the magic happens here. And I think our relationship is going to develop for years to come.
So I just wanted to give you a quick flash of, hopefully, excitement about one sector. I could speak all day about the many other related sectors that we invest in. But Scotland’s future is unbelievably bright.
The jobs of the future are here. We just need to make sure that we put ourselves in a position to win. Thank you.
