Abubakar Salim, Surgent Studios founder and Raised by Wolves star, gives us a guided tour of his PC: ‘My desktop is so bad that even my wife refuses to look at my screen’

Abubakar Salim, actor and founder of Surgent Studios, first got into PC gaming through the classic Windows pack-in games. “Pinball, Minesweeper, and bloody Solitaire,” he says. “My mum and dad taught me how to play Solitaire on the PC, and then we got some actual physical cards.”

Growing up, Salim was educated in PC gaming through an army of classic strategy game like Age of Empires, Civilization, Warcraft and Command & Conquer. “A lot of these were led by my dad buying the games,” he says. “The first ever game I saw to play on PC where I was like ‘I need to play this’ would probably have to be World of Warcraft.”

Salim initially became involved in the games industry as an actor, landing a leading role as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Since then, he’s starred in the Ridley Scott-produced drama Raised by Wolves, and founded Surgent Studios, developer of Tales of Kenzera Zau and Dead Take.

Surgent’s latest project is FixForce, a cooperative physics puzzler recently released into Steam early access, where robots embark on post-apocalyptic maintenance jobs by building platforms out of in-game objects. FixForce was inspired by a video of a Baldur’s Gate 3 player building a massive staircase out of crates. “It reminded me of Garry’s Mod, building crazy, weird shit and just laughing at the ridiculousness of it,” he says.

Together, we donned our hard-hats and dived into the guts of Salim’s PC. We inspected the foundations of PC gaming, kicked the tyres of some of its latest releases, and scheduled Salim’s desktop screen for destruction.

What game are you currently playing?

I am flicking between No Rest for the Wicked and Dave the Diver. I’ve got a weird, very eclectic [taste]. Ben Starr does this as well. Ben is very much like, we talk about how we can play Schedule I, and then we’ll move on to Clair Obscur.

But those are the two games I’m currently playing. I’m travelling a lot right now. I’m in Ghana at the moment, and I’m playing No Rest for the Wicked. I think there is something to enjoy about going into this world that you can explore and lose yourself in and build your character through the loop that you get. It’s a lovely loop that plays into it.

It’s different to Diablo, in the sense that there’s a lot more weight and punch to everything you do. It’s quite satisfying, which, funnily enough, is quite similar in my eyes to Dave the Diver. This idea of going out fishing, not knowing what you’re going to get, trying to go deeper into it, coming back and then bettering yourself as you go along. These loops where you push forward and strive forward. I think that’s where my head is at, of playing games that progressively grow and get better.

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

The previous game I played, and again, I go through all sorts, so I wouldn’t be doing you a service if I named just one—it was Mewgenics and Dispatch. Mewgenics is a game that I put, like, what, 15 hours in? And it’s still on my PC, or my Steam Deck. But Dispatch, I put in eight hours. I completed it essentially.

I like flipping between [games]. Dispatch was my TV series for that time to watch. You know, how it’s like some people watch The White Lotus or whatever. Mine was watching and playing Dispatch. It just made sense to then flip from something that was like that, to something that is quite strategic and tactical, and pulls on the mind a bit more as Mewgenics does.

I’m enjoying them. I think the reason why I’ve probably moved on from Mewgenics, and I’m going to probably come back to it later, is because I think I was looking for something that was a bit clearer in progression as a whole. I think I’m naturally quite like that. I like the idea of a level up system. I like the idea of progressively getting stronger. And I think that’s something that both Dave the Diver and No Rest for the Wicked gives to me.

Especially Dave the Diver. The whole loop is just a masterpiece and something to completely study. It’s one of those games as well where you didn’t know you wanted to run a sushi restaurant until you started.

What’s the oldest game by release date currently installed on your PC?

The oldest game at the moment is Warcraft 3. I was a bit disappointed. I thought it would be beaten by Command & Conquer, but no, it was Warcraft 3.

It was a very early memory of playing Warcraft 3. It wasn’t necessarily the story. The story had its effect on me. But it was playing [on] the servers, and playing, like, Risk with Warcraft 3, and playing online with other people. That’s the stuff that really stuck with me.

I remember a great mate of mine, Steve. Probably my first best mate. We played everything together. We played Final Fantasy together. We played World of Warcraft. We collected Yu Gi Oh! cards, played Duel Masters, Beyblades. He was my friend in the neighbourhood. This was back in the day when you didn’t have Twitter. We still communicated with people on forums and stuff. But Steve was the guy I played with a lot of the time with these games.

It made it really special. These experiences that were originally very solo, playing on a PC. Now I’m talking to a mate of mine and playing at the same time. It was incredible.

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

I’ve been trying to find that, because I know it’s Garry’s Mod. I know it for a fact. The reason why I know it is because, every time I’d finish school, the first thing I would do is go into Garry’s Mod with my mate from school, log into a server and just play roleplays on there. And that’s essentially what I would do. And I remember doing that for years, like actual years, every day, religiously doing this.

It’s between that and World of Warcraft. A friend of mine from back home has got this really funny recording of me as a kid. He would always try and get me out to play basketball. But I’d be like “Ah, sorry, I’m playing World of Warcraft with my guild.” And he has got a recording of me outside when we were playing, and I had a great time. And he was like “So how good? Did you have fun? Better than being in World of Warcraft?” And I was like “Yeah, better than being in World of Warcraft”. And he had that as his message tone for ages.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This might sound really boring, but it’s probably Solitaire. Can you uninstall it? I think you can.

It’s the game I always go to if I really, truly just want to switch off. There’s something quite nostalgic about it, and quite connected to my mum and dad, especially to my formative years of what a game means. It’s a weird sort of blanket for me, and that’s why I feel like I can’t, I could never—it’s one of those games I will always have. Even if everything left me, or I suddenly woke up tomorrow and was sick of games. I know for a fact I would never be sick of Solitaire.

What’s a non-gaming piece of software that you simply couldn’t live without?

It has to be Final Draft, the scriptwriting program. It’s one of those ones where, because I got into a lot of stuff, [like] my acting, everything starts with a story for me, or starts with a script. Even Zau, I’d write reams and reams of scripts for it.

It’s one of those apps where I’m like “Yep, gonna get this”. So then I know I’ve got something creative to dive into if I’ve got the spare time to do it. I’ve got old scripts of stuff that I’ve written when I was in secondary school. Yeah, Final Draft.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

My desktop is so bad that even my wife refuses to look at my screen. I’ve got the first ever concept art that I had commissioned to do, which was of Zau, of the baobab tree in the village. It’s a beautiful background, but it’s completely covered in small icons and stupid things. None that can be clicked, like, you can’t use it. It’s unusable.

It’s so bad. It’s so bad. I think it’s because whenever I’ve installed or downloaded something, and it’s like, there’s a tickbox of “Do you want a shortcut”? I’m like “Whatever”. I don’t even read it. So I just kind of pivot, but it just adds itself somewhere where it can exist.

The funny thing is, for a very long time I had a laptop, because I was constantly travelling and moving with my work as an actor. It was only [when] Covid hit I decided to build my own PC. And it was the first time I got a widescreen monitor. And already my laptop had all these icons, which was stupid. And obviously when you do the whole OneDrive shtick, it moves everything to the [PC].

To then see, on a widescreen, this mass mess. I was like “This is probably why people can’t stand my fucking mind.”