About
Roby John
I make video games, and the companies that make them. Pune, Bengaluru and Singapore; before that, San Francisco and Menlo Park.
The journey
I've spent my career on the coordinated complexity of making video games — art, code, design, audio, economy, servers and live ops all having to land in the same week, or nothing ships. Before that I taught at university for twelve years, which is where I learned that watching someone struggle through a first level tells you more than any dashboard.
SuperGaming started as three guys, a dog and a dream, and was the second team out of India to do YC (after HackerRank) — W2012, as TapToLearn, an edtech company, before we chose real-time multiplayer games as our life quest. Since then we built MaskGun, which spent three years in soft launch before it worked and went on to 110M+ installs. We were in a16z Speedrun's first cohort. We grew the company to 180 people and built Indus, an Indo-futuristic battle royale, which became Prime Rush — the same world rebuilt for Brazil with LOUD and for Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Most recently we shipped Showdown and Prime Heroes on Roblox.
We kept building games — 100+ at last count — and grew, mostly organically, to 200M+ players. Along the way we've run PAC-MAN on mobile since 2019, and now co-own and run the original Flappy Bird globally.
The company
The journey was fun. The company was better. Most of what I'm proud of is the people who stayed through the hard stretches of actually launching a game while constantly running out of money — the crunch of launch nights when the servers hit rate limits, failed launches and shuttered games, and the folks who still showed up to morning standup the next day.
I'm grateful to my co-founders, who have been on this journey with me for twenty years and more.
Three guys, a dog and a dream
Before there was a studio there was a spare bedroom in Pune, where we started our first company in 2004. In 2005 my father put his retirement savings into a nice bungalow that became our office. Our dog Charlie lived there, and the house took his name: Charlie's House. My parents planted a tree in the middle of it the day we moved in. It's still there, and so are we.
In 2012 the three of us — Avinash, Sreejit and me — went through Y Combinator (W12) as TapToLearn, an edtech company: the second team out of India to do YC (after HackerRank), and the first startup to do YC and ImagineK12 at the same time. Paul Graham wrote our Demo Day script on a whiteboard — it's here, with the deck and the video. Then we came home and chose real-time multiplayer games as our life quest.
Some of my co-founders have been on this journey with me for more than twenty years. That's the dream part. And the dog? Charlie was our Labrador — and a founder. He sat at the door every morning, just happy you showed up. (Watch the video.)
What I'm exploring
The two biggest leaks in games are at the edges: most games that get started never ship, and roughly a third of new players quit before the tutorial ends.
I'm building on the second — a light model trained on a decade of player data that treats Day 0 and Day 1 as a routing problem, not a rulebook (SuperTuned). Alongside it: OpenPush, free push for every app, and OpenPing, monitoring for apps and agents. I'd love to prove all of it outside games too. I'm doing this from South Park Commons in Bengaluru.
Where I can help
Anything games — production, live ops, economies, monetisation, Roblox, shipping mobile at scale, and launching in India, LatAm and MENA.
Also happy to trade notes on running a studio for more than a decade, on YC, and on putting AI into a real production pipeline without hollowing out the craft.
Outside work
Books — I've read most of the Boss Fight Books series and will argue about which one is best.
And I make Roblox games with my son, which is the most honest (and brutal) playtesting I've ever had.
Work experience
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Built from three founders and a dog to 180 people. Series B studio backed by a16z, Bandai Namco, Skycatcher and Steadview. Indus / Prime Rush, MaskGun, Tower Conquest, Silly Royale, Battle Stars, Showdown, PAC-MAN mobile, Flappy Bird. Three Google Play Best of awards.
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SuperTuned — a light model that treats Day 0/1 as a routing problem. OpenPush — free push for every app. OpenPing — monitoring for apps and agents. Member, South Park Commons Bengaluru.
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Built our free-to-play engine and the games on it: MaskGun, Tower Conquest, Road Riot, Puzzle Island. 150M+ installs by 2019. Ported the official PAC-MAN to our engine in 2019.
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Games-first learning. 50+ titles, 20M+ downloads, 18,000 schools. Y Combinator W12 and ImagineK12; seed from Khosla, Shasta, Eniac, Start Fund.
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First iOS apps in 2008. Also on BMC Software's incubator team (2009–10): early cloud and iPhone apps on the Salesforce API.
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First employee of AmberPoint India — set up the India Center, hiring and infrastructure. Coined and drove the SOA Validation System.
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Our first company, in a spare bedroom: security products for Windows — Purple Patch, Enforce-IT.
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Grew the company 5→70. Director of Engineering for OneTravel.com — 25 offshore + 15 onsite engineers. Built a 20-person support centre serving 7,000+ businesses.
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Leading 6–10 person projects within six months; ~20 developers for Robert Half. Trainer of the Year 2000. Resigned on 1 February 2001 to build something of our own.
Education & programs
Skills
Speaking
Supercell Games First, Helsinki · Google Playtime, Singapore · Apple, Pune · IGDC · WAVES · GamingCon Bharat · Chiratae × Google Consumer AI · Roblox Developer Conference · GDC and devcom studio talks.
Teaching
Taught at CDAC for twelve years (2000–2012) — more than a thousand students — and most recently an AI class at Christ College (June 2026). Judge and mentor for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup; two teams I mentored received their prizes from Bill Gates (2000, 2004).
Languages
A frame for every year scroll →
