Dhruva Interactive was an Indian

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large ...

based in

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

. Rajesh Rao founded the company in March 1997 out of the multimedia company he had established two years earlier.

Starbreeze Studios Starbreeze Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer and Video game publisher, publisher based in Stockholm. The studios's notable games developed include ''The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay'', ''Payday 2'' and ''Brothers: ...

acquired a majority holding in Dhruva Interactive in 2017, which it sold to

Rockstar Games Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, using the assets Take-Two had previously acquired from BMG Interactive. Foun ...

in May 2019. With the latter sale, Dhruva Interactive was merged into Rockstar India, Rockstar Games' studio in Bangalore.

History

Dhruva Interactive was founded by programmer Rajesh Rao. While he was an engineering student, he created a multimedia engine for the final assignment in his multimedia course, which he intended to use to establish a multimedia company. Having previously lived and worked in Europe, he decided to form his company in his native India. Using

seed money Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...

from his father, Rao obtained a bank loan to purchase a computer and a 14.4 kbps

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

, and founded his company in

on 15 March 1995 as a one-person operation. By 1997, the company had grown to five people. In February of that year,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

approached Rao's company to develop a rendering engine for the manufacturer's new

Pentium II The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...

chip. Rao described the signing of their contract in March 1997 as the end of "Dhruva 1.0" and the start of "Dhruva 2.0", the company's transition to a video game company. He formally founded Dhruva Interactive on 15 March 1997, making it the first in India. "Dhruva" is the

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

word for the

North Star Polaris is a star in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Minor. It is designated α Ursae Minoris ( Latinized to ''Alpha Ursae Minoris'') and is commonly called the North Star or Pole Star. With an apparent magnitude that ...

, "the star that shows the way", according to Rao. The company signed its first game development contract with

Infogrames Atari SA (formerly Infogrames Entertainment SA) is a French video game holding company headquartered in Paris. Its subsidiaries include Atari Interactive and Atari, Inc. It is the current owner of the Atari brand through Atari Interactive. Bec ...

on 28 November 1998. Despite what Rao described as a "great job", the game was never released. Afterwards, Rao found that fully developing games as Dhruva Interactive's sole operation was not sustainable. The company transitioned to an

outsourcing Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and ...

company. the end of "Dhruva 2.0" and the start of "Dhruva 3.0". In the search for clients in the United States and Europe, Dhruva Interactive released the

game demo A game demo is a trial version of a video game that is limited to a certain time limit or a point in progress, which leads to the player buying the game if they liked it. A game demo comes in forms such as shareware, demo disc, downloadable sof ...

''Saloon'' in March 2001. The company intentionally used a

Wild West The American frontier, also known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial ...

setting to appeal to the target Western audience. As the team had never seen a saloon before, they sought references via the emerging

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, a technique they would continue to employ to understand certain parts of Western culture. In December 2016, the Swedish video game company

announced that it had acquired a 90.5% stake in Dhruva for in cash and of its

stock In finance, stock (also capital stock) consists of all the shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided.Longman Business English Dictionary: "stock - ''especially AmE'' one of the shares into which ownership of a company ...

, with an

earn-out Earnout or earn-out refers to a pricing structure in mergers and acquisitions where the sellers must "earn" part of the purchase price based on the performance of the business following the acquisition. Description Earnouts are often employed when ...

agreement of . At the time, Dhruva had 320 employees in three studios: two in Bangalore and one in

Dehradun Dehradun () is the capital and the most populous city of the Indian state of Uttarakhand. It is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous district and is governed by the Dehradun Municipal Corporation, with the Uttarakhand Legislative As ...

. The completion of the acquisition was delayed into 2017 due to regulatory issues in India and complete on 28 August. In May 2019, a financially stricken Starbreeze agreed to sell its stake in Dhruva Interactive, now at 91.82%, to the American publisher

for . Once the deal would close, which was expected to happen in early 2019, the studio's 300 employees would join Rockstar India, Rockstar Games's existing studio in Bangalore. The sale was completed on 22 May.

References

{{Take-Two Interactive 1997 establishments in Karnataka Companies based in Bangalore Defunct video game companies of India Indian companies disestablished in 2019 Indian companies established in 1997 Indian subsidiaries of foreign companies Rockstar Games subsidiaries Take-Two Interactive divisions and subsidiaries Video game companies disestablished in 2019 Video game companies established in 1997 Video game development companies