Two former students of the Indian Institute of Technology, in Bombay, India, are at the final stage of seeing their arcade gaming idea brought to life and the first of its end products sited in amusement locations.
The idea was initially submitted in a business plan competition - it won first place and investment from a jury panellist to turn the plan into a fully-fledged venture. Puneet Kumar and Vaibhav Goel have since set up GaMa Entertainment Systems and begun work on building a proprietary technology platform called ARCtic to convert any third-party computer game into arcade gaming format.
The company is due to launch its first product, a cricket arcade game based on the Twenty20 format adopted by the Indian Premier League. A gamer plays as a batsman for the Indian team against an opponent, with two overs to achieve the target score before the cricket match ends.
Players win redemption tickets based on the number of fours and sixers they score.
“One can play games on the PC for an hour, but an arcade game is typically one to three minutes and works on different stimulus,” said Kumar.
GaMa licenses the PC-game from the vendor, adapts it to arcade format and builds the hardware around it. The finished product is a gaming machine that it plans to sell for around Rs3 lakh to FECs with gaming zones.
The game is currently on test in two Mumbai malls, where GaMa saw an average of 50 plays per day. “Despite being a new game it is competing with more popular car and bike racing games at these centres,” said Kumar.
The manufacturer plans to approach more gaming zones after its formal launch at IAAPI, which was held in February.
