'TOM YUM GOONG' GAME FEVER

Story by DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Game No Limit's Pongsuk Hiranpruek did not win with `Tom Yum Goong', but hopes to with `Khan Kluay' next year.

Tom Yum Goong fever was back in full in Macau, SAR, this time with an Animated Tony Jaa courtesy of Game No Limit's entry to Apicta.

Pongsuk Hiranpruek, Game No Limit's managing director explained how last year "Tom Yum Goong" got the ThaiWare award for best game and how his demo version was the most downloaded game with over 130,000 downloads.

The 3D action game is based on the movie blockbuster and uses the very cheap DarkBASIC game engine, which is more often used for studying game development rather than actually making games. On top of this, his team had to build an entire map editor system and the nine maps that start from the elephant being stolen and progresses throughout the movie.

Licensing? If I had to buy the license from Sahamongkol Film, this would not have happened, he explained. Instead Pongsuk turned the tables and went to the studio and asked them for 20 million baht to develop the game for them. In the end he got 10 million baht.

He also got Tony Jaa himself to act out the moves on camera. Since they could not afford a motion capture device, they simply had Jaa move around a room and people took notes and measurements. He also acted out the attacks physically on the gaming staff so they would understand how much pain to write into the characters faces from first person experience.

The game sold 23,000 copies in Thailand, but only a few thousand overseas, as nobody thought it would be a success. Then the pirates moved in and sales plummeted. Still, he said that his company and Sahamongkol film are both happy with the outcome. For the studio it was money well spent in building up the buzz around the movie.

Ironically, the pirated version sells for 300 baht and the genuine version for 299 baht, but people were used to pirated things being cheaper and did not realise. Worse, when the movie was released, Tom Yum Goong turned out to be a much bigger hit than anyone expected and all the official versions were sold out, leaving no choice but to go to the pirates. All valuable lessons learned.

The development took 18 months, which was far too long considering that he had to pay developers' salaries for 18 months. For his next project, Pongsuk has set a target of five months, by starting with a more expensive gaming engine. When I write a letter, I should use a word processor and write the letter, not develop a word processor from scratch, he joked.

"Khan Kluay: The Adventure", is now 90 percent ready.


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Thank you, Nong anurak krub, for the news.
I feel good to hear this news about Tony, though I can't play that computer game from TYG.