As a kid growing up in the suburbs of India I have strong memories of the Arcade revolution which had once hit India. There were dingy streets full of PAC-Man, Space Invaders and other arcade classics with each game played for about Rs. 1. This is the 1980s and I remember spending hours in front of those machines trying to break the high-sore of someone called AXD.
Today most of those games and right so are found in a Museum… The American Classic Arcade Museum. But one thing which always used to strike me was why the hell can I not play cricket....

Fast forward to 2008 and I finally got a chance to fulfill my fantasy last year at India’s premier technology school IIT Mumbai. At IIT they organize an interesting business plan competition called Eureka termed as the biggest business plan competition in Asia. I was invited there as a judge. I accepted the responsibility half exciting to see nothing but more social network and mobile applications related business plans. And as I was swifting through the 100s of entries in the pre evaluation stage something caught my attention. A company at that point of time called 8 Point Systems. They had an interesting idea to build a very high end racing simulator. They had called the simulator Mad Rush and the concept was of a racing game connected to an elevated platform where the player can sit. As the player plays the game, the platform can move in X Y & Z axis giving the feeling of actually driving a car. They had employed the best of the technology to the platform and claimed that their machine will be 1/4 the cost of such machines especially from providers like Sega. The plan was extraordinary for many of the judges who were sick of evaluating ‘dot com ideas’ and ‘theoretical business plans’. I was not surprised at all when the 8 Point System Guys actually won the competition. Team consisted of Vaibhav and Puneet both 22 year old ‘geeks’ with no family background in business or themselves having any business experience.

All I could see was their immense passion to develop an extraordinary arcade game. I also soon realized that as in most business competition the VC’s and Investors who were attending were more there for the free food and bragging rights to their family that ‘I gave a speech at IIT’. None of the investors were actually serious in funding any of the business plans with excuses like ‘oh they are too early stage’ ‘out deal size starts at $5 million’ ‘this is not the sector we are focusing on’ the regular BS...

I could see that most of VC types who have probably never run a company, or for that matter never played a game could never fully understand the power of the idea which 8 Point had to offer. All they were interested in was extensive business plan excel sheets and fancy power points which question like what is your ‘peak cash flow deficit after amortization of all non-deductible and non-extraordinary items’. I did not want such a brilliant idea to go wasted and I jumped the opportunity and immediately announced that I am going to personally fund the company. So far so good.... it was all celebrations and joy... but the kids at 8 point systems had not realized that what they were getting into.

Soon we had our first meeting and they got the shock of their life...its when I told them that guys your plan was great it won the award... now its time to do business lets scrap that winning plan.. they were baffled and couldn’t believe what was going on. I then explained to them that the racing idea was good but in an environment where there are so many racing games where companies have spent millions in developing them it will be pointless to compete in that space. Best is to develop an Arcade Game where we are the kings and have a clear advantage over the others. Pop came the answer, it has to be cricket. For India which has a fan following of over 1 billion cricket lovers it was a no-brainer.

The team at 8 point was smart and got the idea and then started work on creating the World’s First Cricket Arcade Game. We spent months building and rebuilding the machine. Trying various design combinations. Took an existing Cricket game and almost had to hack it to work in the Arcade environment. The game play was modified to last for an average of 3 minutes as opposed to an average of an hour for the PC. A gamer plays as a batsman for the Indian team against a selected opponent, with two overs left to achieve the target score. Playing the last two overs capture the maximum excitement of a 20-20 match. After months of labour, sleepless nights and multiple field tests our Cricket Machine is finally ready. During the transition 8 point systems transformed into GaMa Entertainment.

As I speak we have created history, the world’s first Cricket Arcade Machine has been made. We hope it will be soon available across the hundreds of locations for you to go and hit a 6 at your favourite shopping mall....

you can check their website on http://www.gamaentertainment.com430726