György Droste pictured in the audience, clapping at the conclusion of Gundolf S. Freyermuth’s closing keynote, “Playing the Future – in War and Peace,” at the Transformations Conference, Cologne Game Lab, 25.09.2025. Credits: Guido Löhrer.
As another contribution to the Prisms of Gundolf, today we share the impact of the Cologne Game Lab’s co-founder on the life of the game designer and teacher György Droste, colloquially known as “George.” He was a student in the very first Bachelor’s cohort at CGL, co-founded by Prof. Em. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth and Prof. Björn Bartholdy in 2014, forming a living connection from the institution’s origins to its growth in the present day. He co-founded a company called Ludopium together with other CGL students, with whom he created a cool game called Vectronom. Both his BA and MA theses in CGL were supervised by Gundolf S. Freyermuth, who tirelessly encouraged György Droste in all his endeavors.
Check out his contribution below:
Right Person Right Time
I was extraordinarily lucky to study at the Cologne Game Lab at the time when I did. After finishing high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, make video games. However, I didn’t have a real plan for how to go about starting out. My mother knew Gundolf a few years before I did, she is a filmmaker and met him at the founding of the European Cross Media Academy in 2012. Luckily for me, they kept in touch, so when I started to apply to universities, she happened to see on Facebook about the CGL starting a new bachelor’s course in game development. In this way, Gundolf’s influence on my life was already present before I ever met him and would continue to stay as a strong presence through the institution he helped shape.
Studying at CGL was a dream come true for me, in many ways, it was exactly the kind of university I needed. At the time, I wanted to go to a university that took video games seriously as an art form, something that felt painfully obvious to me but was still an esoteric concept to most people. I thought I would have two options: either go to an art school and specialize in something like intermedia or transmedia, or go study computer science and hopefully find a games specialization there. While both these paths were intriguing to me, I was frustrated with the detours I would have to take to get closer to what I really wanted to study. I am incredibly grateful to Gundolf that he took on the task of creating a place where games are taken seriously. It’s so often that I see institutions that constantly try to justify why creating and studying video games is a valid endeavor. It was immediately obvious to me after talking to Björn and Gundolf in my application interview that at CGL the value of video games was self-evident, confirming to me that I made the right choice to study here.
Over the course of my studies, I found out about the immense curiosity and patience Gundolf possessed when it came to discussing ideas. I knew that when I discussed something with him, he would not hesitate to push me to go deeper or call me out on the flaws in my thinking, all while never making me feel attacked or talked down to. As game designers know, pushing someone without breaking their trust is a hard balance and can only be done when there are pure intentions behind it. It is due to this trust that I had in Gundolf’s judgment that I sought him out to be my supervisor for my thesis. Something I benefited from immensely in my academic development. Growing up, I struggled with dyslexia and always felt immense anxiety when anyone would read anything I wrote. I knew that when I gave my work to Gundolf, he would see past my strange, meandering sentences and messy writing style and actually engage with the ideas that I am trying to talk about. Just as CGL was the perfect place for me to study, Gundolf turned out to be the perfect mentor for me to grow with academically, allowing me to develop skills that might have gone dormant otherwise.
I remember that when I first started teaching at the Hungarian Film School SZFE, Gundolf was delighted to hear of the ways I incorporated and evolved the ideas behind the curriculum at CGL. While the course I taught at that school is now gone, along with the board of the school, which was illegally ousted by the Fidesz government in 2020, I do wonder about the ripple effect on the students I had there. I do hope that I will do half as good a job at inspiring and helping students as Gundolf did with us all those years ago when CGL was just starting out.
György Droste