PHOTO: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

CYBER OLYMPIAD: Participants slug it out online at the Bangalore round of the World Cyber Games on Saturday.

Bangalore: Hundreds of young games freaks hunched over computer screens here on Saturday, sweaty hands manipulating joysticks, to ``strike'' as the action exploded in ``Half Life: Counter Strike 1.6,'' ``Warcraft III,'' ``Need for Speed'' or ``FIFA Soccer 2006.''

For those blissfully sleeping while the gaming fever overtook India's Young and Restless, these are some of the most popular video games — and the selected challenges in the World Cyber Games 2006, a global

event sponsored by Samsung and organised by Indiagames, the country's largest games developer.

The preliminary round here follows similar rounds in Chandigarh, Delhi and Hyderabad and precedes another in Pune. The national finals in Mumbai on September 26 and 27 will select the Indian entry for the international finals in Monza, Italy, between October 18 and 22.

Young Indians are inveterate gamers: witness the dedicated gamesdrome area in so many Satyam Infoway cybercafes — and the explosion in mobile phone-based games services: some 5 lakh games are downloaded on to phones every month. In July, Indiagames joined hands with the biggest mobile provider, Airtel, to launch Games on Demand — unlimited use of legal games for a monthly subscription of Rs. 199. Indiagames went on to create a set of six mini games playable on the mobile phone, for the U.S. television channel NBC, based on its popular series, ``The Office.'' Indiatimes, mobile2win and Yahoo are popular sources for avid Indian gamesters and downloads typically cost between Rs. 20 and Rs. 50.

Indians are not just hardcore games players — but makers as well. The web resource www.gamesdevmap.com, which charts most of the world's known games developing agencies, lists such Indian players in Gameloft, Playware and Mindfire (Greater Delhi), Microsoft and Jamdat (Hyderabad), Indiagames and Paradox (Mumbai), Red Octane (Chennai) and various chapters of International Game Developers' Association (IGDA).

The Chennai development centre of the U.S.-based Red Octane recently released a game based on India's first 3-D animated character Zampano, created by the Bangalore-based Celluloid Dreams. It also had a hand in the development of the company's flagship Guitar Hero game for the PlayStation platform. The year-old gaming division of Microsoft India has just placed a chess game that it created, at the msn.com site.

Of the four types of games: mobile, console, PC-based and online, NASSCOM predicts that mobile games will account for the major share of the business by 2009, that is, 68 per cent.

The FICCI- Pricewaterhousecoopers report on the Indian Entertainment and Media Industry 2006 estimates the present size of the mobile games market at Rs. 200 million.

That's a lot of bucks — in the business of creating visual bangs for the fist-loose and fancy-free gaming geeks of India.

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