Maschinen-Mensch is an independent game studio from Berlin founded in 2014 by Johannes Kristmann and Riad Djemili. We love creating games using a mix of carefully hand-crafted elements and procedural gameplay to create unique experiences for players. Our games include the Curious Expedition series and our latest release, Mother Machine, which have collectively reached hundreds of thousands of players worldwide.
As a studio we aim to offer opportunities to local artists and creators and strive to be a part of the vivid, wonderful Berlin indie scene through collaborations, events and our shared office space and collective, Saftladen.
Check out the press kit for pictures, logos and more information.
The Team
Riad Djemili (CEO)
As a kid, Riad’s favorite book was a board game manual. So, designing games was just the next logical step for him. After studying computer science in Berlin he worked in AAA development for over 7 years on titles such as Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Island 2. He co-founded Maschinen-Mensch with Johannes to create games that explore social dynamics of the real world. Riad loves to play chess, ride his bike around town and photography.
CURIOUS FACT: One of things that fascinates Riad the most is data visualization and he is constantly designing systems, rules and tools that help him manage his life.
Johannes Kristmann (Game Director)
Jo has been working in games for over 10 years before co-founding Maschinen-Mensch with Riad. When not thinking of new weird creatures, costumes and characters and being a vocal and important part of the Berlin game dev scene, Johannes spends as much time as he can with his family. He is an outdoor guy through and through and loves gardening, hiking and strolling through the forest.
CURIOUS FACT: Jo has a surprising talent for painting nails and loves to wear his designs around the office.
Alva Arnaez (Marketing Manager)
Alva has always loved telling stories, whether through video, music, or conversations with friends. As a Marketing Manager, she handles the team’s audiovisual production and contributes ideas in brainstorming sessions for campaigns. Outside of work, she enjoys cozy games and shooters, cycles obsessively through different music genres, and has an undeniable obsession with bunnies.
CURIOUS FACT: Video games have been part of her life since childhood, growing up with Nintendo and PlayStation. Her favorite is Final Fantasy IX, but she also has a special connection to Crash Team Racing, a game that—according to her—once saved her life. She’s such a gamer that she even figured out how to edit videos using a PS4 controller.
Amaury Butaux (Game Designer)
Amaury started making games in 6th grade with a very good friend and knew that he wanted to work in games ever since. He has a strong interest for both technical and creative fields. Indeed, he briefly started his career as a programmer but switched over to game design quickly. Amaury is always eager to find out about new things!
CURIOUS FACT: Amaury has a nice collection of dungarees he loves to wear.
Carolina Romano (3D Artist)
Before joining Maschinen-Mensch, Carolina worked for several years as a freelance 3D artist, mainly in the video game industry. More recently she's also been working as a lecturer and has been organising the Berlin Blender meetup, trying to create a more diverse community around it. She spends the rest of her time studying anthropology.
CURIOUS FACT: When she was a kid Carolina used to make games with her sister, using Deluxe Paint Animator frames as levels.
Christoph Plewe (Business Operations Manager)
Christoph first came into contact with the game dev scene while writing his MA thesis on newsgames. He never thought about creating games himself, but was led by curiosity and a love of creating entertaining educational content. After a really successful first game-jam project (incidentally made with his now-colleagues Felix and Daniel from Codecks) he was completely hooked. Before joining Maschinen-Mensch, he worked for the game association and created the gamecampus and the StartUP! Guide to help people break into the games industry.
CURIOUS FACT: Christoph has a degree in archaeology and is fascinated by ancient musical instruments.
Felix Szczesny (Game Designer)
Felix started making games in 6th grade with a very good friend and knew that he wanted to work in games ever since. He grew up in the south of France and came to Berlin after finishing high school. He immediately fell in love with Berlin's game dev scene, where he already met many of Maschinen-Mensch's members. Before joining Maschinen-Mensch as a Game Designer, he studied Game Design at HTW Berlin. Felix is also working on his own game: Yeogi Jeogi, a rhythmic puzzler.
CURIOUS FACT: Before studying Game Design he worked for a caterer and once made dinner Angela Merkel.
Isaac Ashdown (Technical Director)
Isaac specializes in gameplay programming and loves to turn design into realities that people can actually play. After working on Dead Island 2 for several years, Isaac co-founded his own studio, inbetweengames, and created All Walls Must Fall, a turn-based love letter to time travelling, techno and Berlin’s club scene. Free time is for walking through forests with his husband and his dog.
CURIOUS FACT: Asking Isaac for curious facts about himself gives him a real sense of Existential Dread. Don’t do that!
Jira Duguid (Technical Artist)
Jira grew up in sector 5 of Midgar before finding her way by train to Berlin. Jira initially was an animator but wanted to make her animations more interactive so began working with game engines and fell in love with it. She has worked in video game art collectives for many years and is now also working with two collaborators in game/art label Fantasia Malware.
CURIOUS FACT: Every summer Jira collects moss in the hopes of starting a moss garden and by every autumn she has committed accidental moss manslaughter :(
Leonie Wolf (3D Technical Animator)
Leonie has been working as a 3D Technical Animator since 2018. She's been involved in the release of 20+ games for which she produced 3D graphics and animations and is continuously working on several game projects as an employee and freelancer. Aside from her day job, Leonie is working as a mentor, event speaker & organiser, focussing on bringing women and marginalized groups of developers closer to the game industry. She loves sneakers, fitness and squirrels.
CURIOUS FACT: In her retail days, Leonie once sold a pair of 'New Balance M1500BK Black Made In England' to Macklemore.
Margaret Dax (Backend Programmer)
Margaret took her first steps into the game industry building online services for Borderlands 2 at Gearbox Software, and has been unable to escape games ever since. After many years in Chicago working as a gameplay programmer, she learned German during the pandemic and came to Berlin. Margaret cares deeply for user experience, player and developer alike, and is excited to bring her skills and experience to Maschinen-Mensch!
CURIOUS FACT: Margaret first learned to program in her youth, building devices with Expression 2 to torment players of a Gary's Mod RP server she co-admin'd..
Marie Vilain (Producer)
Growing up, Marie could never pick between studying tech and art, so games turned out to be the perfect intersection. After high school she went straight into game-making education with a bachelor in game design and programming and a masters in games production. She’s been a part of lots of different game projects and tought project management to game design students. Her favourite part of the job is being a cheerleader and witnessing all the wonderful things the team creates, while taming the chaos a little bit. She’s been told she has way too many crafts, hobbies and interests, but somehow persists on collecting more of those, as well as colorful tattoos and fox-themed items.
CURIOUS FACT: Marie is in fact not a real redhead, but after 15years of wearing that color and burning in the sun like a real one, it feels like she earned it (?)
Maryse Heilig (Concept Artist)
Having never played a computer game to that day, Maryse miraculously landed a spot at Game Design HTW which then led her on the thrilling path of becoming a concept artist. Fast forward a few years and she's worked as a freelancer on all kinds of projects - from designing a VR escape game to making time traveling musician player characters and teaching the next generation. All she needs in life is a cozy blanket, nice people to bring her snacks from time to time and a good internet connection.
CURIOUS FACT: Maryse once spent six months watching HTTYD every.single.day.
Nate Laurin (3D Environment Artist)
Nate has always been fascinated with how deeply our man-made surroundings can affect how we feel. A small obsession with the works of Frank Lloyd Wright seemed to be pushing Nate towards a career in architecture... until sometime in high-school, after playing a few ambitious PS3 titles, they became fascinated with game development and the logic that goes into designing games. Fast-forward a few years and Nate’s an architect of sorts, an environment artist at Macshinen-Mensch, building assets and worlds for players to experience and explore.
CURIOUS FACT:Nate loves sports, but often finds it's more fun to sift through stats than watch the athletes actually play.
Philip Feller (Animator)
After getting his BA in technical journalism, Philip decided to try his hands on game development. Joining up with his best friend and learning everything from scratch they released the weird and spooky games Penko Park & Wunderdoktor. 7 years later he was looking for a change of scenery, and figured that Maschinen-Mensch would be the perfect fit for his expertise.
CURIOUS FACT: Philip used to play Call of Duty 1 and 2 on a professional level and was known as one of the deadliest rifle players at the time.
Talita Rhein (Producer)
Talita has been into games for quite some time. In 2016 her passion became more serious when she started writing articles and reviews for the Brazilian blog Jogazera, which lead to working on game projects as a marketing manager and then to production roles. In 2018 she participated to the monthly Berlin Mini Game jam where she created the first prototype for Dogo Dash, a card game that after further development was successfully funded on Kickstarter. You should get a copy, it's really good!
CURIOUS FACT: Talita does not enjoy eating fruits, she finds their texture weird. She drinks lots of juices instead.
Curious Corner
- Our company name Maschinen-Mensch means “machine-human”. The first name that we landed on was “HIC SVNT LEONES”. We prepared all the company foundation papers with that name and then got second thoughts at the last moment and had to come up with a new name within half an hour. If you’ve ever started a company or project then you know that coming up with a name is probably the hardest part of it all.
- Before Curious Expedition was released, back in 2014 Riad and Jo created a small game for the Ludum Dare 29 game jam titled Planet Corp. — you can play it here (but don't tell anyone).
Website Credits
This website was designed by our former Executive Producer Lorenzo Pilia. Daniel Berndt coded it. Dennis Kogel wrote the first draft of the texts and helped collect curious facts for the various Curious Corners.
Special Thanks
The creation of this website was supported by Kreativ-Transfer with funds by the representatives of culture and media of the German government. Let us say that again in German: Gefördert durch Kreativ-Transfer, aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.
