All at a young age, got Mats to hear that he was not older than twenty years. A serious illness in his muscles, he was dependent on his wheelchair. Mats was not much outside, but was rather secluded in the basement. Nice undisturbed play computer games. World of Warcraft, a game where you with a self-made character through a huge fantasy world runs, and other players can meet up, which for many years was his favorite game. the
His parents, Robert and Trude understood nothing of World of Warcraft and knew that Mats in the meantime a huge circle of friends at the build-up. “In retrospect, I think that we are interested should have been in the game industry, where he has that much time spent,” says the 56-year-old Robert in a candid interview with the BBC. “By not doing so, robbed us of a chance which we did not know we had.”
Mats had in the last years of his life hardly the cellar under the house of his family to leave. It was for his parents than also strange that there are many people at the funeral came they never had seen. Even stranger: Mats had these people also never personally met. Lisette Roovers from Breda was one of the attendees, and counts himself as one of the best gamevrienden of Mats.
“I knew Mats for many years. It was a shock when he died. It has made me,” says Breda against BBC. Lisette, now 28, was only fifteen years old when she was the 16-year-old Mats in the world of World of Warcraft met. She remembers it as the day of yesterday. “It's not a pretty place, but then it was Goldshire a pleasant small village, where you new, interesting characters could meet. I was looking for someone to play with and around a campfire was the one that I later learned to know as Ibelin.”