History repeats itself for gaming firms

Next time you want your children to learn about the exploits of Tipu Sultan, The Big Bang Theory or the Apollo 11, introduce them to online games.

Take, for instance, Mumbai-based Games2Win’s Apollo 11: Mission to the Moon, which recreates the first manned mission to the moon with four critical stages that made Apollo 11 a successful operation.

“Kids enjoy electronic media, especially games. We want to use games to introduce them to history and involve them in the event, which is better than passively reading about what happened,” says Alok Kejriwal, chief executive of Games2Win.

Zapak Digital, the gaming arm of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group’s Big Entertainment, too, has launched a historical game — The Tiger of Mysore, which is set in the year 1766 and revolves around Tipu Sultan’s frontier fortress. The mission of the protagonist is to safeguard the last-standing fortress in Mysore from the British invasion.

Kejriwal feels that though historical games do not have a market share within the online games space, which is currently worth $10 billion globally and growing at 50 per cent annually, this new genre is expected to account for 10 per cent of the market, and the Indian market may touch Rs 2 crore in the next three years.

A week after the Phase-I of the $9-billion Big Bang experiment — conducted by the European Centre of Nuclear Research — Hyderabad-based game development company 7Seas Technologies created a game called Operation Big Bang.

“The idea is to accurately depict actual events. We also have historical games on Rani Rudramma, a powerful queen of Andhra Pradesh and the Kurukshetra on onlinerealgames.com. We are lining up seven more games based on historical themes by this year- end,” says L Maruti Sanker, managing director of 7Seas.