Dean Hall, the man whose name is nearly synonymous with DayZ, shocked fans last month when he announced that he was moving on from the survival zombie game that he labored so hard to build. But if you hear his life story, the move isn't nearly as much of a surprise. Eurogamer has published an extensive interview with Hall that paints the New Zealander as a deeply intense game designer who's long struggled to manage the ideas whizzing through his head and the sky-high expectations he sets for himself. It's not the type of story you'd expect for a game developer: Hall went through a near-death experience during army survival training in Singapore, and in the middle of development on DayZ he punished himself with a last-minute trip to scale Mount Everest. It seems that Hall himself best captures his decision to leave the game: "I don't think I have the capacity to be happy in a traditional sense ... I wanted to be better." Read the full interview at Eurogamer.