Helana Santos: the video game creator who’s living the Modern Dream

'Games can elicit emotions that surprise players, provide ways for them to socialise and much more. They're extremely powerful'

In the third year of her university course studying computer systems, Helana Santos earned a placement at a tech company where she realised she had made a terrible mistake. "I immediately knew that I wanted to do something a lot more creative with my life," she says. So she adjusted her sights toward the video game industry, securing a graduate role at a small studio in Bath. Her first year in the industry was tough - her first few projects were cancelled. Then after she joined Blitz Games in Leamington Spa, a video game studio that employs more than 200 staff, she was offered the chance to work on a dream project: a Mickey Mouse game, designed in collaboration with Disney.

While Santos describes creating Epic Mickey 2 as an "amazing experience", in September 2013 she left the company to set up her own independent studio, co-founding Modern Dream with a colleague, Oliver Clarke. The team has worked fast and hard, launching a number of games to date. The Button Affair, for example, is a game in the style of 60s spy capers in which you play a glamorous thief out to steal a diamond of Koh-i-Noor proportions from a business tycoon. As well as its striking aesthetic, Santos and the team had a philanthropic vision for the game: The Button Affair was offered as a free download to everyone who donated a pound to the charity Special Effect, which specialises in making video games accessible to disabled players.