# Roby John

I make video games — and the company that makes them. The journey was fun. The company was better.

Places: Pune, Bengaluru, Singapore, San Francisco, Menlo Park

Numbers: 200M+ players · 100+ games · 16 years building a studio · 0→180 people

## The company before the path

There's a cartoon I keep coming back to. Big Panda asks Tiny Dragon which matters more — the journey or the destination. Tiny Dragon says: the company.

In Arabic there's an older version of the same thought — al-rafiq qabl al-tariq, the companion before the path. Sixteen years into building a games studio, that's the truest thing I know.

Most of what I'm proud of is the people who stayed through the hard stretches: launch nights when the servers hit rate limits, failed launches, shuttered games, running out of money — and the folks who still showed up to morning standup the next day.

## Three guys, a dog and a dream

SuperGaming started as 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.)

## The filing cabinet

Every few years, a bigger game. 100+ at last count. Open a drawer.

- **TapToLearn** — Educational games. Games-first, tablet-first learning, built in the San Francisco Bay Area out of Y Combinator W12 and ImagineK12. 50+ titles, 20M+ downloads, used in 18,000 schools. (https://roby.us/portfolio.html#education)
- **Trivia** — SuperQuiz ++. Quiz and party games — some of the earliest trivia hits on the App Store, now free in the browser at superquiz.com. (https://roby.us/portfolio.html#trivia)
- **Arcade** — Pick up, play, one more go. Short-session games tuned for the thumb — from June Software's combat racer to the bird the whole world knows. (https://roby.us/portfolio.html#arcade)
- **Worlds** — Building universes. Games as places: characters, lore and live seasons people come back to for years. Tower Conquest, Silly Royale, Indus — and Prime Rush, the same world rebuilt for Brazil and the Middle East. (https://roby.us/portfolio.html#worlds)
- **Multiplayer Shooters** — Real-time, on our own engine. Authoritative multiplayer that runs on the phones people actually own. MaskGun went to 110M+ installs; Indus reached three million installs in its first week. (https://roby.us/portfolio.html#shooters)

## Index cards

- **Made the hard thing ship** — Art, code, design, audio, economy, servers and live ops all have to land in the same week, or nothing ships. That coordinated complexity has been my career.
- **Three years in soft launch** — MaskGun took three years of monthly updates before it worked. Then 110M+ installs, mostly organic.
- **Built the team, three times** — Grew Indigo Architects from 5 to 70 as an early engineer, opened AmberPoint's India Center as employee #1, and grew SuperGaming to 180 people.
- **One world, three futurisms** — Indus: Indo-futurism. Rebuilt as Prime Rush for Brazil with LOUD (Latino-futurism) and for Saudi and Egypt (Arabic-futurism).
- **Kept the classics alive** — Have run PAC-MAN on mobile on our own engine since 2019, and now co-own and run the original Flappy Bird globally.
- **Taught for twelve years** — Taught at CDAC from 2000 to 2012. Watching someone struggle through a first level tells you more than any dashboard. Most recently, an AI class at Christ College in June 2026.