On a school day in January 2011 in Texas, Mark Skaggs stood talking to a classroom full of students in their early teens. Reportedly, one of the reasons why they had tuned in so attentively to this talk that touched on maths and programming was because Skaggs was introduced early as the man behind a chart-topping game called FarmVille.
For anyone with an access to a smartphone or the internet, it would really be hard not to have heard about Skaggs’ monumental body of work. If you’ve ever harvested crops on a virtual farm in FarmVille on Facebook or created your own township in CityVille, you’ve come across Skaggs’ games. If you’ve ever led the Fellowship of the Ring in a game called Battle for Middle-Earth, which is based on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ringsbooks and Peter Jackson’s films, you’ve played one of Skaggs’ games.
As a veteran in the gaming industry, Skaggs has worked with some of the best names, including Westwood Studios, Electronic Arts and Zynga. So in 2015, when news of Texas-based Skaggs leaving Zynga after nearly seven years made the rounds, “every large game company wanted to woo him,” recalls Tanay Tayal, co-founder of Bengaluru-based Moonfrog Labs.
It came as a surprise to many when Skaggs ducked the giants and instead chose to hop on a flight to India to join Moonfrog, a company founded in 2013. The untapped gaming market in India, felt Skaggs, offered a stimulating challenge.
One of Skaggs’ earliest personal introductions to India came as such things usually do: out of the blue and in full force. In the early days of Zynga’s FarmVille, Skaggs would often wake up in the middle of the night to check on how the game was doing. It was during one of these times when he saw game forums and the Indian and international media talking about how India’s virtual farmers (those who played FarmVille), felt that Zynga had “insulted” India.
FarmVille had introduced a feature where players could mark territories using national flags, and it turned out India’s flag had been left out. Close to 20,300 “farmers” had gathered online to get the Indian Tricolour included in the game. Soon enough, many more flags were rolled out, including the Tricolour. (“Leaving out India wasn’t intentional at all,” says Skagg.)
On his very first outing with Moonfrog, Skaggs worked on a game with Alia Bhatt, the Bollywood actor. This was followed by Baahubali: The Game, a massive multiplayer strategy game based on film director’s S S Rajamouli’s Baahubali series. With over a million downloads, Baahubali is among the top grossers in gaming on Google Play.
Some of the homework for these games included Skaggs diving headfirst into Indian cinema, starting with Bhatt’s Student of the Year and Baahubali (in Tamil and English).
While talking about how he liked Dear Zindagi and the performances of the lead actor, he momentarily forgets Shah Rukh Khan’s name. “Alia and....”. This is the moment that one realises that unlike most, Skaggs hasn’t grown up on a steady fodder of Indian films, something he’s aiming to fix as soon as possible.
“In the past one year, he’s seen much more Indian cinema than I have. From Hindi films to Rajinikanth’s movies, he’s seeing it all. He’s probably seen Baahubali more times than anyone else,” says Tayal.
One of the perks of working with a company that makes games is to spend hours “testing” a competitor’s latest launch. A few months ago, when Moonfrog’s employees were playing a fresh-in-the-market international release, Skaggs stood behind, watching. “Oh, I don’t like this game,” they said. “Your actions tell me differently,” he told them.
“The way they interacted with the game told Mark whether they liked it or not,” says Tayal. Months later, Moonfrog’s employees are still playing that game.
Besides the experience he brings, these “interesting insights” are just some of the contributions that Skaggs makes to the team. “Mark specifically approaches a game from a user’s perspective,” shares Tayal.
Skaggs has learnt this approach the hard way. In a game called Gridders, which received lukewarm response, Skaggs had a protagonist called Zach who had to save himself by avoiding the larger-than-life 3D cubes that came charging towards him. “I was inspired by something I had seen on a hoarding somewhere, I thought it was good. But it’s no one’s fantasy to be running from gigantic cubes,” he says, laughing.
The true success of a game, he notes, lies in whether it helps you to live your fantasy. Having Bhatt as a your everyday-life mentor, or forming alliances to take down the evil Kalakeya’s forces in Baahubali: The Game are such fantasies. “This is the eternal struggle between the artist and the craftsman. An artist makes 3D giant cubes, a craftsman gives them what they want,” he says. “We need them both.”
Skaggs’ introduction with the founding team of Moonfrog Labs happened around 2009 when Zynga needed somebody to watch the FarmVille servers in India when the US team went to bed. Tayal was on this team, along with a handful of other former-Zynga employees.
Inside Moonfrog’s office space is someone whose association with Skaggs dates back much longer: one of his first bosses, John Ahlquist, an engineer.
“Engineering is difficult, which is why it takes so many of us to do something,” says Ahlquist, laughing. “But from an engineering standpoint, Mark understands what needs to be done, and he does it correctly, as opposed to the hard way or the easy way.”
Ahlquist is the one who’d ask Skaggs to put on his “flame-retardant suit before he went to do battle with an unrighteous studio executive”. After having worked with Skaggs on games such as The Battle for Middle-Earth and the Command & Conquer series, Ahlquist, now, like Skaggs, splits his time between the United States and India.
In the restaurants around their Bengaluru office, while Skaggs hopes his fried rice comes with minimal Indian masalas, Ahlquist orders for a plate of paneer butter masala, and one of palak paneer; he says he doesn’t need rotis or rice with the gravies.
Skaggs has seen his share of “fan moments”. Once when in Korea to test the popular Red Alert 2, a game in the Command & Conquer series featuring the Soviet and the Allied forces, Skaggs was inundated with requests for autographs. “I thought, wow, I am a celebrity in Korea,” says Skaggs.
After everyone had cleared out, Skaggs found a piece of paper on the floor, with his autograph on it. “Everyone told me how someone must have accidentally dropped it, but it was a good wake-up call.”
A bulk of game designing and making, says Skaggs, is much like a plane flying overhead and constantly making course corrections at every step. This is serious business, and not just because of the untapped mobile phone market.
When Red Alert 2 was all set for launch, the packaging featured two tall buildings on the cover. There was a plane flying in the direction of the two buildings. Then the attack on the World Trade Center happened (9/11). The launch was put off, of course.
When one talks about gaming, the image that is often conjured is of a person focussed on a console, battling demons, or minions sent by a super-villain in a fantasy adventure. But Skaggs talks about another significant category, the “ultra-casual” player, who doesn’t realise that even Solitaire or Minesweeper is another form of gaming.
During his days at Zynga, when they interviewed a woman and asked her how long she had been a gamer, “I am not a gamer,” she replied. “But she played FarmVille every day. A kid sitting in front of a console machine is still the stereotype of gaming,” he says.
Around the time Skaggs first started out, game tapes hung from ziploc bags in stores. “There was no packaging involved back then, there was someone sitting in his house somewhere who’d make it all. It was pretty quaint,” says Skaggs.
The chance of seeing it all over again, this time with enough tech around, is what compels Skaggs to explore the sights and sounds of Bengaluru in search of what the Indian gamer wants.
Farmville co-creatorMark Skaggs is now looking at india
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