“At Gamescom, there are 250,000 to 300,000 attendees. I remember I came over in 2011 and 2012, and people when the doors opened, they would just flood in – and I mean run – straight past everything else just to come to our booth and get in the queue. It didn’t matter what we were doing, what we had to show, anything. They just wanted to be there.”

That feeling of making something that matters is something George carries with him and hopes to pour into Vela Games, which he co-founded with video game veterans and fellow Americans Lisa Newon George, his wife, and Brian Kaiser in 2018.

“That’s the number one thing we do at Vela,” he says. “We are here to make something great for players because look how much it can matter to them. When it does, all that business success can come from that. It’s a lesson from League of Legends that exists in Vela to this day.”

Last month, the 39-year-old’s ambition of recreating the success in Ireland received a welcome boost. Vela landed $17.3 (€14.5) million in Series A funding as it accelerates work on Project-V, its codenamed debut multiplayer online co-op game.

Combining that with the $6.9m raised in funding from earlier backers, including Dermot Desmond’s IIU, Vela has attracted more than $24m.

The latest funding round is being led by Novator, which Icelandic billionaire Thor Bjorgolfsson heads. The round also counts global gaming giant Ubisoft and London Venture Partners.

George says the new and existing investors help add a “wealth of wisdom and support” for Vela Games.

“From both the money and the partnership standpoint, I think we have landed a great round that we are all really excited about,” he says.

With the latest round of funding secured, George is now eager to get stuck into turning Vela into a global success story.

He says the funding will help Vela embark on an ambitious hiring plan at its Dublin office, doubling its presence to 55 people. It plans to attract the best talent both domestically and internationally. Vela will also expand testing as it gears up its Project-V game, the first title in its innovative Multiplayer Online Co-Operative gameplay genre .

“The vision for Vela is to inspire and unite gamers through play from around the world,” he says.

“To us, that means players aren’t just in a virtual world or in a game together; they’re there for deeper reasons. That’s where the cooperative play and teamwork aspect comes through – we want Vela to be the company that defines and owns that space.

“A lot of our first attempt to realise Vela’s vision is Project-V. We are taking the mastery of an e-sports game like League of Legends, and we’re changing the format into something like a dungeon run in World of Warcraft.

“It is new. There is nothing we can look at and say it is 90pc this and I’ll change 10pc here,” he adds. “We are really trying to re-imagine this from the ground up.”

The company recently started testing the game with a small group of players, focus groups and industry veterans. With the Series A funding, George hopes to expand the formula for the game and grow it out, though it is still some time away from launch.

“What we say now is we’re definitely making Project-V,” he says. “It will not shift genres or become a Fortnite clone. There is still a lot of exciting work to do in building that out and into the experience that players ultimately want and deserve.”

Growing up in Hutchinson, in the US state of Kansas, George says he has always had a passion for games, going back to early consoles from Nintendo.

Playing games inspired a love for technology in George, leading him to co-found an IT consulting business in Hutchinson called IdeaTek at the age of 17. The venture, which is still going strong, helped him press play on his tech career.

“I really wanted to work in technology, and I thought I’d help create this industry here in this town and bring technology here, so I don’t have to leave,” he says.

As the business flourished, George came to a realisation.

“I’m doing this job, it’s my company that I co-founded and I’m working on it with four of my best friends and I hate it, so I have to figure something else out,” he says. “I had the revelation that somebody has to get paid to make video games, so why not me.”

George didn’t mess about. Three months later, he enrolled in university and learned the skills to take the first steps into developing video games.

After university, a move to California beckoned where George landed his first job in the industry with Activision in 2002. He cut his teeth working on blockbuster console releases, including an X-Men game.

After nearly four years with Activision, George moved to Perpetual Entertainment. Inspired by the World of Warcraft game, he made the transition from console to online games.

The biggest lesson from Perpetual was still to come, though, as it was forced to shut down.

“One day, half the company is in a big meeting, and they said ‘we’re out of money, you have to go home.’ Because it’s the States, that’s what happened. I went home that day.”

While George was frustrated with the pause on his burgeoning game development career, the connections made at Perpetual eventually led him to land a crucial role.

George joined Riot Games in 2008, having rejected an earlier approach from the company. Brandon Beck, the CEO of Riot at the time, called George and talked him around.

He agreed to join for one year but stayed for nine.

During those years with Riot, George flourished. He worked his way up to become the product lead for League of Legends in 2011, leading the strategy and development teams for the game during the fastest period of growth in its history.

“We had become the biggest PC game in the world,” he says. “I learned a lot about how to help scale an organisation.”

After six years, George realised he needed a break from League of Legends but wanted to stay at Riot. So he landed the opportunity to move over to Dublin and build a development team in 2015, alongside his wife, Lisa Newon George.

Initially, George planned to stay in Ireland only for a couple of years. But that view changed during the completion of an MBA at Trinity College.

During that MBA in 2017, and following his departure from Riot, George asked Newon George and fellow co-founder Kaiser if it was the right time to launch their own venture – not in California but in Ireland. The three agreed, and the following year Vela was born.

During that Trinity MBA, George secured a win for his fledgling startup – the attention of financier Dermot Desmond and his son Brett. A colleague on the MBA introduced him to the Desmonds and their IIU fund as they wanted to learn more about e-sports, but it turned into a discussion about what George was doing and his vision for Vela.

“Just after a couple of meetings, it was clear that there was a real chemistry, and they were really eager to back us,” he says. “It was one of those things that was never planned, but it’s hard to think now how it could have worked out any better.”

After establishing and building a team, Vela Games set about making its presence felt in Ireland. George says he chose Ireland to build Vela because it was a great place to live, and he was able to attract talent from around the world far easier than he could in the US.

As Vela and its ambitions grew, so did its need for funding. George and his fellow co-founders raised €3.4m in a seed round in 2019, counting Desmond’s IIU as its first corporate backer. It raised a further $3.1m in funding the following year.

Fresh from this month’s Series A, George says he now has Vela at his “favourite phase” and is ready to push forward. He is setting about using the funding to build the best team possible, with no compromises.

With a team of 27, and each full-time employee receiving a stake in Vela, George is working through identifying the right talent that fits culturally.

George has the ambition to turn Project-V into a game that people will play for a decade or longer. Serving players best is a key focus.

“We joke with ourselves that at every opportunity, we tend to take the harder decision,” he says. “We think it’s ultimately the best thing for players and for Vela to have that accountability... We will take ownership ourselves."

Vela has big ambitions for Project-V, with George hoping to turn it into a top 10 game in the world.

“If there is something we can do to increase the chances of that happening, we will do it every time we can.”

With new members to the team now loading and the Series A funding level complete, George is getting excited. From that studio in the heart of Dublin, he feels ready to change the future of online gaming.

“So many people that join Vela are from other companies who are potentially bigger, where they have fancier titles, but they are here because they see the opportunity with us,” he says. “They are part of it and want to make a big impact that they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do somewhere else.

“What we always say is, ‘there are no guarantees but we have as good a chance as any to go change the way the industry works’,” he adds. “That is what we are here to do. I think if it’s anything less, then we are going to be a little disappointed.”