Yoddha the warrior game

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The second half again saw the Warriors start on a strong note. The Warriors raced ahead through their raider Nabibakhsh who came for a do-or-die raid in the 23rd minute but ended up going back with a super raid earning 4 vital points. Minutes later UP Yoddha was inflicted with an All-Out and found themselves trailing at the 26th minute. However, the Yoddha's made a strong comeback through some successful raids and very effective tackles but couldn't make up the point deficit as the match came to a nail-biting finish in favour of Bengal Warriors.

Sign in Create a Rediffmail account. December 23, IST. Gadgets picked the brains of Vishal Gondal and Ninad Chhaya - the founders of Indiagames - to understand how Yoddha came to be.

From Kargil to Yoddha You played Yoddha, which loosely translates as warrior, as an Indian soldier shooting down terrorists. The game was set in the backdrop of the Kargil War. It got a lot of eyeballs, lot of traction, and we realised that yes, if the content is Indian and people can relate to it it would work. At the end, it was a shooting engine, there was nothing new that we did.

We just put an Indian skin to it. Yoddha's Bollywood connection Yoddha actually started as a shooter based on the Bollywood classic, Sholay. However, the lack of money for licensing, and the success of Indiagames' browser game Kargil War, made it change tack a little.

Action and shooting. Why not something like that? Our first thought was Sholay," Chhaya says. We had no idea about licensing.

We made a game, a prototype rather and went to the film's owners and they asked for licensing fees which we didn't have. So we went back to the drawing board. Yoddha was to be a foray into hardcore gaming, with the intent on capitalising on the wave of patriotism at the time. We rebranded the game to Yoddha," Chhaya explains. They liked the quality and it was built in A4 [engine] which at the time was the coolest engine for us," he adds. At the time it was still a small firm, and Indiagames knew it couldn't complete Yoddha with its own funds alone and had to look for an external partner to help push the game across the finish line.

Enter Pepsi. The only thing was that they wanted the health pack to be their logo," Chhaya explains. Every time you did that the jingle ' yeh dil maange more ' rang in the background.

A tie-in with a cola company might seem like an obvious thing these days, but back then it was unheard of. Fortunately, it was the time of the dot-com boom, when established companies routinely partnered with tech startups. It was the youth connect that helped Pepsi," Gondal says. It was before the dot-com bust so it was fashionable for brands to associate themselves with tech companies.

MTV - then still about music, not reality shows - was a part of the marketing plan to reach to the youth, through a music video for the game. They were excited and said they'd do this.