Undisputed has hit the gaming world hard like a right hook from Canelo Álvarez since its release on October 11th of this year. After only two weeks since its full release the game has already hit the benchmark of 1 million copies sold. Christopher Dring from GameIndustry reported comments made by CEO of Steel City Interactive, Ash Habib, on how they went from have no experience in the gaming industry, to now competing in a field dominated by EA and Take-Two.
I’ve obviously been a huge gamer my entire life, and I’m a boxing fan. My brother called me up one evening and said ‘why don’t we try a little side project?’ That’s how it started. We were making it in our living room. And I got hooked on game development. We started doing everything: code, learning animation, animation trees… doing everything from watching tutorials, googling how to do things… And it just snowballed.
Ash Habib also admits to the major sacrifices and risks he took to put all his effort into Steel City Interactive by saying:
I quit my job. I poured all my resources and everything into setting the company up. And it just grew legs from there.
Much of the interest in the making of a new boxing stemmed from their fandom and the fact that its been around 13 years since a boxing game with real fighters had been released (EA Sports Fight Night Champion [2011]). The fact that individual fighters needed to give permission for their likeness to be used also became a hurdle for the team to overcome.
On the other side, for some of the other fighters and people involved, there hasn’t been a boxing game for quite some time, all these other sports are getting basically free publicity for their sport… boxing is being left in the dark ages. We had to go through a whole period of explaining this to the people who run boxing, and try to get them to realize that they are kind of getting left behind in the digital age.
With the game only being out for two weeks thus far, it will be interesting to see how the team at Steel City Interactive will maintain and attempt to improve upon the high bar they set for themselves.