GCB Inside – with Ata Sergey Nowak

“Everything we do is meant to encourage people to question society and human existence,” says Ata, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Berlin indie studio Torpor Games.

There is also a deeply personal motivation behind the game: Ata and his co-founders are from Turkey and experienced political and social change there first-hand. Those experiences now feed into the world and stories of Suzerain.

Released in 2020, Suzerain has reached more than 1.8 million players worldwide. It is designed to be more than entertainment: the game aims to help players better understand the systems and structures we live in and to ask a fundamental question: why do these things happen, and how?

As the game has grown, so has the company behind it – and Torpor Games did not establish its roots in Berlin by chance.

Berlin is rich in art and culture and, compared with many other European cities, offers a strong public funding landscape for the creative industries. Here, Torpor Games benefits from important support through extensive public funding programmes.

In the new “GCB INSIDE”, Ata talks about the motivations behind founding Torpor Games, what makes working at the studio unique, and where the world of Suzerain comes closest to reality.

Everything that we make is to question society, question the human condition. So it’s a very exploratory company that uses the games medium.

My name is Ata. I’m the managing director and co-founder of Torpor Games. We create experiences that challenge and provoke. We built a political game called Suzerain. Our game Suzerain, launched in 2020, and ever since then, our company has grown and the game audience has grown. We have now more than 1.8 million people around the world that have played Suzerain.

Suzerain provides, like, a very realistic experience of what it’s like to lead a country. If you’ve ever been curious what it’s like to be the president of a new republic or the king of a monarchy and what kind of control you have and where you don’t have control and how your decisions have consequences.

Like, understanding, like, the systems and structures we live in and asking the question why and how do these things happen. Me and my co-founders, um, we were very curious people, and we had this curiosity about society. And coming from Turkey, we experienced transitions in the country.

So it was about, like, turning what happened to our experience into something that is relatable for, well, millions of people around the world. People at Torpor are extremely curious, extremely knowledgeable, really well-read on current events, understand what’s going on in the world, bring broad perspectives to the work, so I think that’s what makes, working here kind of unique.

So the impetus of the company was that, to explore this human condition, this political structure, why and how things happen. So that’s why Torpor Games came to be, to explore these questions. And in our case, we, had this very, strong partnership with our, investors or… since early on from the initial ones to the now current ones, where we retain, you know, creative independence, we decide on our operational behaviors, and we have a lot of flexibility. And indie really means that, like, you, by your own capacity, can really deliver and see your vision come true with as little outside influence as possible that you are not okay with.

We do deal with political subjects that are quite sensitive at times, and a lot of games actually never went into that space because there’s always this worry that, you know, things could be negative, et cetera. But we precisely want to have strong creative expression and maybe ask questions that are, like, gray and dark and difficult for humanity because we feel like that’s what art is supposed to do.

That’s… it’s to open these questions that are hard to talk about. It’s to experience them, to understand perspectives that you wouldn’t. And, picking a country and a place where we could do this was actually a big choice in the early part of our journey. Berlin came to mind because a lot of artists, a lot of culture is driven in Berlin. Berlin also has the highest, culture funding as a city among many European states.

So, like, the grants was a big reason of, Germany and Berlin, because Berlin has median board funding, which helps, like, projects a lot. It’s a very friendly economic help. And, knowing that the costs of such political works will be covered to a degree helps, us to, like, be like, “Okay, this is the place to be.”

Published 08.10.2026