Geoff 'Zag' Keene, design director of Abiotic Factor, has 1,160 hours in PUBG and de-stresses using a Blizzard classic: 'Instead of going to therapy, guys will literally boot up Warcraft 2'

Geoff "Zag" Keene first encountered PC gaming by watching his dad play Blizzard games at night through a crack in the doorway. The first time he saw Diablo was at a LAN party organised by his dad's coworkers. "They all had these computers in the basement, like 10 of them or something," he says. "I remember clicking around and just being kind of lost … I think that must have been the first time I was thinking about videogames as more than just a thing that's around, but actually like a hyper-fixation."

Keene entered the games industry with his first company, Sandswept Studios. Its initial project, the ill-fated survival sim The Dead Linger, offered a hard lesson in the challenges of game design. But after developing Unfortunate Spacemen and a brief stint at Rocketwerkz, Keene founded Deep Field Games, creators of the brilliant survival sim Abiotic Factor, where players assume the roles of scientists exploring a giant underground research facility.

Deep Field is now working on a new project, while also planning more updates for Abiotic Factor. "We'll have a new roadmap soon for ABF," he says. "All through 2026, we're doing updates. We've got some DLC planned. We're following some other story threads. We have a bunch of stuff we want to do with ABF because it's so much fun to work in."

Keene briefly stepped out of his hazmat suit to take me on a tram ride through the concrete warrens of his PC, which took us from the dusty archives of RTS gaming to extraction shooter R&D.

What game are you currently playing?

The big one I've been obsessed with is Arc Raiders, for sure. What a work of art, honestly. If I made an extraction shooter, that's the game I would have wanted to make. It's so good.

What Arc Raiders has is that it's got the vibe. It's not just about mechanics. It's not just about different guns and attachments and all this shit … it understands it's this world you want to spend time in. That's what I guess I define vibe as. Where do I want to spend my time? Do I want to live in this world? Do I want to breathe it and feel it? And I think that's what it's really good at, despite the very stunted, shitty AI voices that they should get rid of.

I play every Saturday. I play with my partner and a friend. We play different co-op games all the time, and Deep Field's pretty much founded on making cool co-op things. Games are there to be shared with people, I think.

Sometimes I play games to watch other people enjoy them. I'll play a game that I'm kind of into, just to watch my partner be really into it and enjoy it. Or I'll want to bring my friends to come play. I'm like "You ever played Halo co-op? Come play!" And I'll kind of sit back and maybe fight slow or something, to watch them and have them experience [it].

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I just finished Dying Light co-op. I'm now working on the second, slowly. Just started. I don't know if I like it yet. We'll see. But OG Dying Light, that was really interesting. I had a friend that really wanted to play it. I think I uninstalled it right when we finished. I was like "I'm good".

I wasn't really [into it]. I thought the story was all very silly, and a lot of it was cheesy. It was kind of fun to yell at the protagonist for being a dumbass. I definitely fall off games pretty quick if they're repetitive. If you're doing the same actions over and over, and that game is full of repetitive actions … but then again, I like Arc Raiders, and that's very repetitive. I think the players keep that [interesting]; it's different each time because of the interactions.

We started the new one, not the new one, but Dying Light 2 because we're continuing the series. We're like "OK, let's try the next one". And the smoother it's gotten, the more tutorialised and onboarded, the less I'm liking it.

Sometimes things need to have a bit of that jank to really click. I like seeing the mistakes. Not annoying mistakes and annoying bugs. But I like seeing the humans behind the thing, creating the thing. Like "Oh, this weird trash can here was placed by somebody. Why is this floating in the air? Well, because somebody moved this and forgot to fix this." And it's just funny. I like that. I like seeing the seams on stuff like that. It makes it feel more like a piece of art somebody made, and not a commodity, like a product you consume.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It's Warcraft 2. I was playing that well before I thought about games as something I could make. That was the first game that I was just obsessed with. The world of it. I liked all the units and the colours, which makes me sound like a very simple person … I guess I was a child. But the music and things and everything just came together really well.

When I think of gaming nostalgia, it's my go-to. That's the oldest thing that I am super-super obsessed with.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

There was a time when PUBG came out and … everyone was just playing it with their buddies, and the worst gamers that you know were all playing it. Everyone was just running around, trying to survive in this environment that was killing everybody. I was pretty good at it myself, and our art director, we used to play a lot. It's actually what we started playing when we first started working together and we really bonded over that. But we played the hell out of it and we got very good at it.

There was a time period, kind of toward [when] they added the snow map, and the game was like you were playing co-op against—it was real players—but it still had that kind of PvE feel where you're exploring this world, trying to duck into bushes and hide in buildings and loot stuff. I mean, it's literally why we have Arc Raiders. The battle royale genre directly led to the extraction genre.

I'm very fond of it. That's why I have over 1,000 hours. I have 1,160 hours. We had these great back-to-back sessions of that game.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Unfortunately, it's Warcraft 2 again. There's something about the things you played as a child, right? The nostalgia factor. Sometimes you just want to boot it up. I'll play one of the campaign levels or something really quick, or I'll just click around a bit. There's something about the noises and the sounds I think that are quite comforting. Sometimes you just boot them up to hear them again. Like playing an old song you like.

It's interesting because, before you emailed me, I had booted it up like a couple of days before, and I'm trying to remember why. I think I had been stressed with work. Maybe I was like "Oh, I just need this. I'm just gonna have this for myself." I don't know. Maybe it's like, instead of going to therapy, guys will just literally boot up Warcraft 2.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I was thinking about this. I never used Windows Snipping Tool, right? I use a program called ShareX. It does rectangles on the screen and it can record video and stuff too.

I've been using that for half a decade, more than half a decade, maybe 10 years. I've been using that as my way to quickly snip screen rectangles and send them to people. We do it a lot for work right? Game developers just use it a lot. We have to share a lot of visual information.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It's pretty tidy. I have two monitors, and I keep all my icons on the centre one, the main one. It sort of fills up with stuff, like I'll often put my downloads on my desktop, like icons and stuff I'm trying to use, different work things. And then they'll fill up, and I'll eventually put them in a folder where I probably never look at them again.

I don't have them in random positions on my screen. I can't stand that. It bothers me so much. I always sort all the icons. They're left-aligned and once they start taking up about half the screen, I'm like "OK, time to tidy up."