Hell, by the time you read this he'll probably have put on another few million and a couple of extra countries. Chris van der Kuyl's meteoric career in the billion dollar global electronic games industry almost mirrors one of his successful products, H.E.D.Z. or Earthworm Jim - rising to a new level of game play at least every year.
Today's wunderkind and the darling of New Labour - dressed in jeans and checked shirt he addressed the Labour Party Conference at Bournemouth last year - is best remembered in the department of applied computing as one of the first students to own a mobile phone. In fact, by taking calls in the silence of the university library he claims to have initiated pioneering instances of "mobile phone rage". Remember we're talking the late 1980s here, a time when such gadgets were the mark of media hotshots and business tycoons.
Now he's definitely joined the ranks of the latter. His three year target is to grow his company VIS Interactive from its valuation of £20 million in late 1999 to £500 million, and 240 staff, within three years. But joining ranks is not the right phrase for van der Kuyl whose business style is famously unorthodox. "Rules are for fools" he says. "All successful entrepreneurs have broken the rules of their business - they've done something to differentiate themselves."
Meanwhile at the company's headquarters in Dunfermline staff work the hours that suit them, they wear what they like and there's a tuckshop at reception. It has all the hallmarks of a student scene. "It's not about rules it's about results," van der Kuyl has explained to many a business audience on the speaking circuit he regularly tours. "When people work and what they wear doesn't really matter. All we're interested in is people who can make the best computer games." Good communication and creative skills are the qualities he looks for in recruits. Note the non-nerd approach. He draws staff from a range backgrounds - from film and TV, universities and art schools. He's taken on lawyers, architects and management graduates as well as artists musicians and mathematicians. Some 90% are graduates, half of them with PhDs. His links with the university remain strong, perhaps particularly so with the school of TV and imaging where he sponsors the degree show in animation each year.
"At VIS we call ourselves The University You Get Paid For," is his line.
At the end of last year the first signs of VIS's expanding vision became very apparent with a branching out from games into educational software. Maybe it was something to do with turning 30, whatever, van der Kuyl announced the creation of VIS Kids in Glasgow to produce "edutainment" videogames for children.
But how did it all begin? It's an oft-told story. A Dundonian of Dutch extraction, van der Kuyl had a couple of extra bonus points from the very first level of game play. First he points out: "I had the good fortune of being Scotland's only second generation multi-media developer, my dad being the first. There is always a good element of fortune in any entrepreneur's story and mine was being around computers from an early age." Nine as it happens, which meant he grew up about as comfortable with computers as with cutlery. Secondly living in Dundee at that time, when Spectrums were made at the Timex factory and readily available cheap, he became part of a thriving local junior games programming scene. At the age of 15 he spent six weeks programming a system for his dad and decided that was the route for him.
During university summers he worked for NCR at a time when they were developing multimedia with terminals for financial services. So after exams while his classmates stacked supermarket shelves he was whisked off to NCR headquarters in Ohio and California. By his final year in 1990-91, days in bed, evenings in DUSA - "the best union on the planet!" - and consultancy work were squeezing out the academic side. He claims to have attended only two lectures in senior honours year and cribbed nearly all his notes from studious friends. On turning up for exams on a couple of occasions he says he was challenged by lecturers demanding to know who he was. Van der Kuyl likes to say he scraped through with a second class degree. In fact he made a very respectable 2 (i) but by this time his ambitions were moving away from a planned PhD and into business.
In 1992 with the backing of the Prince's Trust he set up his own multi-media company, VIS. At first games were not the thrust of the business. Early projects included shopping terminals at Heathrow and an interactive system for the Scottish Whisky Heritage Centre. Two years later he sold the company to Balgray Communications whose chief executive was Duncan of Jordanstone graduate Peter Baillie (Diploma in Design 1974). Two years after that, unhappy at the non-games direction in which the group was heading, he bought VIS back and took Peter Baillie with him. VIS Interactive plc won a major development contract from US games giant Hasbro and they were off to a new level of play.
Van der Kuyl said at the time: "It's no good emulating other games, anyone can do a Doom or a Tomb Raider clone."
His company's originality and creativity have since spawned the likes of H.E.D.Z., a wacky game with an off the wall plot in which aliens regard Earth as a kind of games arena and vie with each other to collect the heads of as many different Earth types - New York cabbies, punk rockers, Nazi generals, rock musicians, they're all there - as they can. Each time they grab a head they gain that person's characteristics. The game immediately made it to the top games ten which makes it a better debut than the Beatles with Love Me Do.
And then there's Earthworm Jim 3D out last Christmas in which the hero is knocked unconscious by a falling cow and must make his way through four huge worlds - happiness, childhood, fear and aggression - where he has to solve puzzles and take on a range of evil-doers including Professor Monkey-for-a-head to reach the ultimate goal...
Today the base in Dunfermline has been described as like a mini film studio, complete with its own recording studio for the all important game soundtracks. Deacon Blue drummer and broadcaster Dougie Vipond played on the soundtrack of H.E.D.Z. - a harkback perhaps to van der Kuyl's early days when he was heavily into the music scene with a band called Big Blue 72. A band which, if their contract with CBS had come through, might have made him a pop star. But that was a different game, a different level...
