Irena PereiraFounder & CEO

The turning point occurred when I looked at my bookshelf, saw the favorite fantasy novels I had read as a teenager, and realized that if I was not building things that would make my 14-year-old self proud, I was wasting my time. In our early formative years, our deepest passions and core values are built. When you pursue those authentic values, you unlock a continuous loop of creative energy. I had spent decades on commercial blockbusters, but I realized that commercial game studios were caught in production cycles that prioritized corporate bureaucracy over the human capacity of games to bring people together.

My father was a technologist who built server farms, and my grandmother was a mathematician at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When I was in the sixth grade, I spent the summer with my father at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, right downstairs from NeXT Computers, where I met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. My father had me build my first computer at age eleven. When I discovered bulletin board systems and early online text games, I saw that technology could dissolve distance and connect human beings across space and time. It enabled people to be evaluated for their collaboration, skill, and character rather than superficial facades.

When I joined Blizzard Entertainment, they had never employed a female engineer. However, because I had grown up playing tabletop role-playing games and video games with guys in the backs of hobby shops, being the only woman on the engineering floor did not feel foreign to me. The engineers welcomed me as a peer because we were all facing the same digital dragons together. We worked grueling schedules, often sleeping under our desks in cots while builds compiled, but we were united by a player-first philosophy. We were given total creative latitude by executives like Mike Morhaime to build systems that prioritized fun and community above all else.

I worked at Detachment 12 out of Hanscom Air Force Base, known as Kessel Run, which was an experimental software factory tasked with evaluating military operational workflows and building rapid software to streamline them. We practiced an extreme agile methodology where documentation was replaced by sticky notes and whiteboards. Rank disappeared in planning rooms; an entry-level quality assurance technician had an equal voice to a senior commander because every proposal competed solely on its merits. We built a planning tool called Project Jigsaw in one week that saved the military 150 million USD a month in Middle Eastern fuel costs, reducing a 16-hour mission planning workflow down to minutes through human-centered design accelerated by AI.

When I joined Scopely, I held a massive retrospective with 65 developers on a digital mural board within my first 30 days, giving the entire team psychological safety to highlight operational bottlenecks. By empowering the people doing the hands-on work and removing administrative bottlenecks, we completely overhauled the core game loop, animation timing, audio design, and user journey. That revamped version transformed developer morale and directly drove the game to generate its first billion USD in seven months. However, traditional gaming executives often felt threatened when rigid top-down authority was challenged by transparent ground-up workflows, proving to me that I had to start an independent studio to protect that culture.

My former World of Warcraft teammate Travis Day had been candidly discussing his struggles with ADHD, mental health, and his desire to help young people before he tragically took his own life in 2022. At his memorial, several of us from the original Blizzard team reunited and recognized that modern society is suffering from a devastating loneliness epidemic. We are more digitally connected than ever, yet profoundly isolated. We realized that cooperative multiplayer games are the most potent engines for relationship formation ever invented. We founded Unleashed Games with the explicit mission to build joyful games where cooperation is the sole win condition.

Video games structure repetitive daily behavioral loops faster than any textbook, lecture, or social platform. Today, empty playgrounds and unsupervised screen time mean kids often memorize hundreds of military weapon specifications without learning the basic social skills required to make a neighborhood friend. If game mechanics reward shooting and dominating others, players internalize hostility. If you instead design mechanics where you cannot progress without healing an ally, communicating clearly, and solving group puzzles, you train neural pathways for empathy, collaboration, and trust.

Haven is designed from the foundation up as a pro-social friendship engine. Just as World of Warcraft succeeded because it was optimized to run smoothly on low-end hardware, we engineered Haven so that a player on a smartphone has the exact same feature-complete, real-time multiplayer experience as someone sitting at a high-end desktop gaming PC or console. By removing technological barriers and designing cooperative objectives that require interdependent player roles, the game turns random strangers into reliable companions within their first half-hour of play.

World of Warcraft did not invent the massively multiplayer concept; it refined it so that virtually anyone could participate. We had internal mottos like making it so intuitive your grandmother could play it. Accessibility meant that diverse players, including individuals with mobility disabilities or severe depression who could not leave their homes, found thriving social communities and romantic partners in Azeroth. Furthermore, group dungeons forced individuals with completely different political views, languages, and backgrounds to rely on one another to survive, shattering personal prejudices through shared accomplishment.

I was pitching Haven to Mitch Lasky at Benchmark, explaining that players in our virtual world would eventually step through portals into other licensed fictional universes like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Mitch stopped me and pointed out that negotiating traditional licensing deals and building custom assets for established intellectual properties takes years and carries immense financial friction. He told me to forget the standalone game and instead build the underlying enterprise infrastructure to automate IP world adaptations. He backed the concept with a one million USD pre-seed check, leading to the creation of Infinite Realms.

Infinite Realms is an enterprise AI infrastructure platform that ingests raw literary manuscripts or creative bibles and compiles them into a secure, walled-garden knowledge base. It does not feed author intellectual property into public frontier models. Instead, it creates a deterministic, highly accurate model that reflects the author's precise prose, narrative voice, and lore constraints. Entertainment studios can instantly extract creative bibles, character profiles, dialogue scripts, and asset breakdowns, turning static fiction into interactive transmedia franchises in days rather than years.

Unleashed Games is a consumer game development studio, while Infinite Realms is a business-to-business AI software infrastructure platform. Unleashed Games acts as a premier client for Infinite Realms by taking its generated narrative frameworks and translating them into interactive gaming experiences. For instance, we tested the engine by adapting Peter Pan for a charitable initiative with London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, generating contextually authentic character dialogue that can be directly deployed into modern game engines.

The commercial gaming sector is experiencing massive contractions because publishers rely on risk-averse commercial algorithms that only greenlight whatever made money yesterday, which almost always means violent competitive shooters. Studios invest 200 million USD chasing commercial trends, create games that lack emotional substance, and then fire thousands of developers when players migrate away. Furthermore, using generative AI merely to cut human staff and churn out manipulative monetization schemes is ethically bankrupt. Games must remain human-crafted works of art designed to enrich the human spirit.

Neurologically, the pathways you repeatedly fire in the brain become your default cognitive responses. When eight- and nine-year-old boys spend hours daily practicing digital murder simulations while lacking real-world communal outlets, their neurological wiring becomes primed for aggression and conflict. Law enforcement officers are increasingly reporting domestic crisis calls involving pre-teens attacking their mothers. When our culture glorifies violence and rewards conflict in entertainment, we erode the cooperative social fabric necessary for functional democratic societies.

Through the New England Institute of Technology, we launched a high school game design tournament across Rhode Island. Making a game is the ultimate multidisciplinary learning experience because it teaches programming, digital art, narrative writing, audio engineering, and project management simultaneously. Instead of designing violent shooters, the high school students created deeply moving games focused on overcoming mental health obstacles, cleaning up ecological disaster zones, and easing social isolation. When you give young people creative tools and mentorship, they naturally build systems that heal.

Generative AI belongs in the operational backend, not in the primary creative driver seat. If AI dictates the narrative, the experience lacks genuine human soul and lived empathy. However, AI is extraordinary at backend infrastructure: running automated quality assurance to detect bugs, optimizing live server deployment, monitoring community toxicity, and providing instantaneous natural language translation between players. An Arabic speaker in Riyadh and an English speaker in rural America can communicate seamlessly in real time, turning AI into a connective tissue rather than a replacement for human imagination.

Creators interested in enterprise AI adaptations can visit infiniterealms.com. Gamers and developers who want to follow Haven and join our upcoming public playtests can visit unleashedgames.com and add the title to their Steam wishlist. We also stream live development and host industry discussions regularly on our YouTube channel under the handle UnleashedGGG.