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Editorials   PuzzleKings Interview
- By Dan Doll

For a puzzle game site like this one, a developer by the name of PuzzleKings is very interesting. To find out more, we went behind the scenes for the story on this UK developer. Here’s what we learned.

“PuzzleKings is a ‘virtual’ company, and to the best of my knowledge we are the only one of its kind around at the moment,” said Nalin Sharma, Senior Partner, PuzzleKings. “Our core focus is the invention of new kinds of games as that is what we feel we can do best.”

PuzzleKings, at its core, is a company made up of two people, Nalin Sharma and his wife Alpana. Alpana explains how the company came to be.

“Nalin was working in the city as a management consultant when he first came up with the idea for ZooCube nearly six years ago,” she said. “He managed to put together a PC version which won a competition in Edge magazine. This eventually led to a deal with Acclaim, which enabled Nalin to give up his day job to focus fully on ZooCube.”

PuzzleKings formed initially, for the sole purpose of developing ZooCube. Before ZooCube, Nalin’s last game was 15 years ago.

Alpana said, “Although Nalin was pursuing a high profile career in the city, he has been active in the computer games industry for over 20 years. He wrote his first commercial video game, at the age of 16, for the Vic 20 and Collapse for the Commodore 64. His last game was Super Sprint for the Atari ST in 1987, which he wrote with friends whilst at University.”


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From the Atari to the Gamecube, you might say the playing field has changed a bit. To help out, PuzzleKings hired development teams for ZooCube.

“After we finished the original game,” said Nalin, “We outsourced the GBA and GC development when we got the ZooCube contract. This has resulted in us recruiting one team of people to help with the GBA version and one team to help with the Gamecube version. A total of about 15 programmers and graphic artists were involved with both games. On a daily basis we manage these teams and liase with Acclaim for marketing and other purposes.”

“We also bring in various other experts,” said Nalin, “who work with us from time to time as and when we need the help.”

Before discussing future plans, Alpana described some key differences between the two versions of ZooCube.

”The main difference,” she said, “is that in the Gamecube version you get animal pieces, which do not appear in the GBA version (due to hardware constraints and screen limitations). The GBA version has seven gameplay modes and can cater for up to two players, whilst the GameCube version has 12 modes and can cater for up to four players.”

ZooCube is available in stores now, and it won’t be long before it’s time to move on. Since the company was formed primarily for ZooCube, we wondered if anything else was planned.

Alpana explained, “Nalin is really pleased about having the chance to pursue his real passion (games!), and we have several exciting prototypes in the pipeline.”

Ooh, “several.”

We’ll have more on ZooCube and PuzzleKings in the future. Our thanks to Nalin and Alpana Sharma for their help and consideration.

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