Highlights
- Amish Tripathi, author of the Shiva Trilogy, is co-founder of Tara Gaming, which is building Age of Bhaarat, an AAA game set in the world of the Ramayana.
- Amitabh Bachchan is a co-founder and will voice a central NPC character who guides the player throughout the game.
- Tara Gaming has set up what it describes as India’s largest AAA video game studio in Pune.
Amish Tripathi built a career making people fall in love with Indian mythology through books. The Shiva Trilogy sold millions of copies and turned Mahadev into a mortal warrior from the Himalayas. It proved that ancient Indian epics could anchor commercial fiction that competed with anything the Western market was producing. Now, he is trying to do the same thing with a video game, and the scale of what he is attempting is significantly more complicated than writing a novel.
Tripathi is the co-founder of Tara Gaming, the largest AAA video game studio in India, located in Pune. Veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan is a co-founder. Western investors got there before Indian ones. And the writer who spent years building tightly controlled narratives is now grappling with a creative form that refuses to allow him the same control.
Outlook Respawn spoke to Tripathi about what making a game has taught him about storytelling, why players never get to be Rama, and what he hopes Age of Bhaarat does for Indian mythology on the global stage.
Giving Up the Wheel
The first thing Tripathi will tell you about game writing is that it broke something fundamental about how he understood narrative. He said, “Unlike books or movies where the author and the director decide the journey the reader or the viewer will take, in a game it really doesn’t work that way.”
He explained the creative process, stating, “We just create the universe, and the game player actually can go in any direction.” The studio has to make sure that the story works regardless of what path or journey the game player takes, and it follows the rules of the in-game universe.
For a novelist who has spent years constructing carefully architected mythological retellings, this loss of control is a new experience. The game is a city. Tripathi can build the city, set its rules, populate it with characters and consequences, but he cannot decide which streets the player walks down or in what order they discover what they find. He described it as “horrendously more complex” but “astonishingly more fun” when compared to writing a book.
Why can you Never Play as Rama in Age of Bhaarat?
Age of Bhaarat is set in the world of the Ramayana, but the player never takes on the role of its central figure. Instead, players are Forest Wardens in Dandakaranya, fighting Ravana’s rakshasas in the forests of the Deccan Peninsula while the larger events of the epic unfold in the background.
The creative decision behind this is partly practical and partly philosophical. Tripathi revealed, “There are some things that happen in gaming. There will be certain types of warfare and certain types of killings; you can’t have that happening at the hands of Lord Rama.” The violence inherent in an action game simply does not map onto what Lord Rama can be seen doing within a framework that treats the source material with respect.
Tara Gaming
What Tara Gaming built instead is a structure of nested narratives. Rama and Ravana exist at the meta-narrative level, the grand story everyone knows. The player operates at the micro-narrative level, as a forest warden who draws inspiration from Rama’s arrival in Dandakaranya and decides to fight the rakshasas oppressing their community. The rakshasas at this level are minor figures in Ravana’s army. For the forest wardens, they are existential threats. The scale shifts depending on where you stand inside the story.
Tripathi explained, “So if Lord Rama and Ravana are at the meta-narrative of the Ramayana, you are at the micro-narrative.” It is an elegant solution to a problem that has tripped up other adaptations of sacred texts. How do you give players agency inside a story where the major events are already fixed, and the protagonists are figures of reverence? That’s what we’ll have to wait and see.
Building in India, For A Global Audience
One of the more surprising details about Tara Gaming’s early trajectory is who believed in it first. When you imagine an Indian AAA game rooted in Indian mythology being funded and staffed, you might expect the enthusiasm to come primarily from within India. It did not.
Tripathi revealed his investment journey, stating, “Our first investors, our first senior gaming talent were actually Westerners who realise the value of Indian traditions and Indian epics as a huge paradigm of cultural memes which have not been explored in games.”
The same dynamic played out in Indian publishing a generation ago, where Western publishers were often quicker to recognize the commercial potential of English-language Indian fiction than domestic publishers were. The Indian money followed once the proof of concept was established. Tripathi expects the same pattern with gaming. He said, “I’m sure once 'Age of Bhaarat' does well, we’ll have Indian investors also coming in for our subsequent series.”
Tara Gaming
The studio in Pune is itself part of the argument Tara Gaming is making. Indian game development talent has historically been concentrated in outsourcing work for international studios, building other people’s worlds at middle-management level rather than leading the creative direction of their own. Tara Gaming is trying to change that dynamic by putting Indian developers in lead positions on an Indian IP from the beginning. “In a way, Tara Gaming is also building industry talent for the future,” Tripathi said, noting the excitement among developers who were finally working on a game rooted in their own culture rather than someone else’s franchise.
To navigate the balance between authentic Indian cultural detail and global accessibility, the studio runs what Tripathi describes as a multinational writing room with an India approval committee. The writing has to work for someone with no prior knowledge of the Ramayana and still hold up to scrutiny from people for whom these stories are part of their upbringing. He said, “What we are aiming for and what we have achieved so far is the ideal balance, true to India but can work globally as well.” He calls the creative process “Glocal,” which is the best of both global and local.
Amitabh Bachchan and the Wukong Ambition
The name that lends the project its most immediate cultural weight is Amitabh Bachchan, who is not merely a ceremonial attachment to the project. He is a co-founder, and he will voice a central NPC character who guides the player through the game. Tripathi said, “There is no one more credible than Amitabh Bachchan if you want to lend gravitas to a game. He is a living legend. And we are delighted that he is not just a voice to the trailer; he is a co-founder.”
The comparison Tripathi reaches for when describing what he hopes Age of Bhaarat can become is Black Myth: Wukong. The game, released in 2024 by Chinese studio Game Science, was the first major proof that a non-Western mythological IP could generate global commercial success at the AAA level. It sold tens of millions of copies and was celebrated by players with no prior connection to Journey to the West. The game demonstrated that the appetite for culturally specific mythological storytelling in games was not limited to the cultures of origin.
Tripathi said, “Most of the games that have come till now are on the Western ethos, the Western traditions, Greek mythology, Nordic mythology. A few non-Western themes are coming in now; Japan has come in, China made a huge entry with 'Black Myth: Wukong,' but there has been no path-breaking crossover Indian AAA game.”
He genuinely believes that if Age of Bhaarat does well, it will, in effect, end up creating a new genre in gaming. That is a large claim. It is also the same kind of claim Tripathi made about Indian mythological fiction before the Shiva Trilogy existed, and one that turned out to be correct. Whether the game market is ready to receive an Indian epic the way the book market eventually did is the question Age of Bhaarat will have to answer by shipping and succeeding. The studio believes it will. The people who invested early believe it will. We only have to wait until the end of the development journey to see if the bet pays off.
