KASARGOD: Zainuddeen Fahad, 27, was a celebrity speaker at the launch of a startup incubation centre here. But not many in the audience knew his Kasargod roots or his standing as a ‘game changer’.
For the past year, Fahad and his Hyderabad-based startup Ogre Head Studio have been hacking and slashing to glory with their PC-based combat game ‘Asura’.
Launched in 2017, Asura has already sold around 50,000 copies mostly in China, the US, and UK. It is priced at $10 abroad and `250 in India. Till date, Asura has bagged nine top honours, with the latest being the International Game Award at BitSummit, a premier festival of indie games in Kyoto, and Game Of The Year Award of Nasscom Gaming Forum Award, both last year.
What makes the feat impressive is that Asura was made by a two-member team, with Fahad being the 3D artist, game designer and business promoter, and his partner Neeraj Kumar taking care of the technology.Fahad says he “didn’t have much fun with education”. After school, he joined an undergraduate management course, “but dropped out in three months and took a course in advanced diploma in 3D art,” he said.
Soon after, at 19, he joined GameShastra, a video game making company in Hyderabad. “I was recruited for PlayStation 3, but ended up in mobile games. That was a deal-breaker for me. I was very passionate about products,” he said.In 2014, Fahad, Kumar and Aubhik Nath walked out of GameShastra to set up Ogre Head Studio. Nath left in six months.
“Ogre was born to bring in a change in the Indian gaming industry, which has happy churning out games based on Bollywood and cricket,” said Fahad.Asura is a hyper-fantasy combat game based on Indian mythology. “Growing up on games such as Diablo 2, Warcraft, Starcraft, Half-Life and Pokemon, we wanted to create something of global standard but inspired by Indian mythology and culture,” he said.
To stay true to the Indian theme, Ogre kept the voice over in Hindi, with subtitles appearing in English. “That clicked with the gamers,” he said.Now, Ogre has entered into a contract with Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony’s PlayStation to make the game on those platforms too.
Mythology’s child
Growing up in Mumbai’s West Andheri, Fahad took to Indian mythology right from his childhood, reading the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata. “But I found the Ramayana and the Mahabharata serials on Doordarshan drab. The technology was just not there. Amar Chitra Katha was way better,” he said. “Then”, Fahad said, “the Japanese guys came up with the Ramayana on CartoonNetwork. It was a two-hour toonami show. I thought this is how it should be,” he said.
But Fahad got “completely immersed” in the Ramayana when he read Asura: The Story of Ravana and His People by Anand Neelakantan. “It was written as an autobiography of Ravana. I realised it’s not as taught to us. Every character is multi-layered,” he said.In Asura, the gamers reincarnate as demons with ‘insane powers’ to take on the holy men of the ‘Deva Empire’ who killed them.He is now reading ‘Arthashastra’, an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy.
“When we started off, there weren’t many players in the indie gaming sector in India. We could count maybe 10 people. But I found even if they were indies, they were making casino games... trying to compete with Triple A (big) companies, and becoming just another startup,” he said.
In an industry where 200 games hit the market in a week, developers have to play it differently, he said. Ogre Head took the less-travelled road, and entered the PC space when everyone was competing for the mobile space. “And we made an Indian mythology based rogue game,” he said.
Three years after Ogre, several people have not starting making PC-based game, said Fahad. “That’s why I said changing the Indian way of doing business. Influencing other developers; proving that there was space not just for service, but for products as well in India,” he added.