AN AUDIENCE WITH... HENRIQUE OLIFIERS

The Bossa boss on selling off hits, doubling down on co-op, and reinventing the ZX Spectrum

Henrique Olifiers is busy. The studio he co-founded, Bossa, has just announced its new project, a sweeping co-op action adventure he hopes will keeps his design team occupied for the next two decades. On the face of it, Lost Skies feels like a departure for Bossa in that it doesn’t seem to have much in common with the games that brought it most notice, including the Surgeon Simulator series, I Am Bread and I Am Fish. But that would be to ignore Worlds Adrift, the massively multiplayer sandbox game powered by SpatialOS that launched into Early Access in 2017 and ran aground two years later. Lost Skies exists in the same universe as Worlds Adrift, which comes as no surprise when you factor in the new game’s customisable airships, its grapple-based traversal, and the clusters of floating islands it invites you to discover and explore.

In preparing to make a big bet on Lost Skies, last year Bossa sold the rights to its most commercially successful works to American publisher TinyBuild in a deal that involved an upfront payment of $3m. Also keeping Olifiers occupied is the ZX Spectrum Next project, for which he’s been the public face since the original Kickstarter in 2017. There seems little point asking what he does in his spare time, since there can’t be much of it, so we start by trying to pare things down.

There are lots of things on your CV, including art, coding, editorial and management – what is the one thing you feel you do better than all of the others?