2008 to build and publish games on the app stores. Since the price
of most apps/games ended with USD 0.99, we decided to name
the company as 99Games. It’s based on the west coast of India, 60
kilometres south of Mangalore. Our first game was a chess game
that showed a lot of promise and we started working on other small
games for the platform.
You have been described as a developer of casual games. Does
this mean that you will not look at more ‘hard core’ game titles?
Initially, the iPhone was touted as the ‘smartphone’ on which one
could also play games. It was not a mainstream ‘gaming’ device
but one on which even a casual user could play games. And since
the App Store made it so easy to reach these consumers from
any part of the world, and since the Nintendo Wii had shown the
potential of casual gaming, we thought of focusing on this segment. We wanted to build games that we would personally enjoy
playing and none of us were big time core gamers then (or now).
You have developed games for Bollywood (Dhoom 3) and
now for Hollywood (Million Dollar Arm). What was the
experience like? Dhoom:3 was the first time we had worked
with a movie studio to build a game around an existing movie
related IP. But we were excited about the power of this IP and
the latent potential of Indian gaming. We thought that this was
our best opportunity to make it big in the Indian gaming space
and the Dhoom franchise lent itself very well to a Action (bike
racing) kind of game. Working with a professional and reputed
movie production house like YRF was a great experience and
we worked closely with them in putting together the game.
Towards the launch, Microsoft evinced interest in promoting
the games for their Windows Phone platform which helped
generate significant interest around the game before we did a
mainstream release on Android and iOS Working on Million
Dollar Arm was a new and different experience. And one that was
far more challenging for us. Discussions around licensing started a
few months before the movie release and we had very little time to
conceptualise and build the game. So we picked up to the baseball
pitching idea and matched it with an addictive gaming mechanic
that makes the player want to try the game again and again to reach
higher level on the leaderboard. It was massive fun working on both
these games.
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