The Age of Bhaarat aims to be the Black Myth: Wukong moment for triple-A fans in India | exclusive interviews

India has big national ambitions when it comes to gaming, and the tip of the spear is Tara Gaming, which aims to create the “Black Myth: Wukong of India” by developing a triple-A game called The Age of Bhaarat.

That’s unusual for India, where mobile gaming rules, since Tara Gaming is focused on the PC and consoles. To pull it off, Tara Gaming has assembled a “dream team of gaming” in India, with a staff of more than 160 people. Tara’s founders include filmmaker and actor Amitabh Bachchan, who created over 200 films across five decades; Indian novelist Amish Tripathi, who has sold more than eight million books; and Nouredine Abboud, a former Ubisoft game executive who headed the Ghost Recon franchise.

Their ambition is to build a triple-A game, and in May, the cofounders unveiled the first trailer for The Age of Bhaarat, the brand’s flagship action-adventure game franchise on PC (on Steam and the Epic Games Store) and consoles. Just like Black Myth: Wukong’s setting in mythological ancient China, The Age of Bhaarat is set in an epic reimagining of ancient India. India has its eyes on China’s success in games, and it wants its own Black Myth: Wukong, which celebrated Chinese culture and sold more than 30 million copies.

The game fits well with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious plan, codified in law last year, to make India into a global gaming hub. The aim is also to promote India’s culture on the global stage through gaming.

Market researcher Niko Partners estimates that India surpassed 500 million gamers (out of a total population of nearly 1.5 billion) in 2025. And Indian player spending was forecast to exceed $1 billion in 2025. Also, Mixi Investment Global released a report today that estimates India’s gaming market will reach $2.4 billion in revenue by 2029.

But 95% of gamers in India play on mobile devices. To be successful, The Age of Bhaarat will need to capture the PC and console gamers in India, but it also has to be a hit on the global stage.

Tara Gaming noted that reports suggest that tier two and tier three cities in India will represent the core growth engine of games as they are growing 1.5 times faster than metro markets. Game venture capital firm Bitkraft estimated that India’s gaming and interactive media market will triple to $7.5 billion by 2030.

The Age of Bharat hits alpha in the summer. Source: Tara Gaming Tara Gaming’s executive chairman, Nicolas Granatino, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the alpha test for the Age of Bhaarat will be released at the end of the summer. I also interviewed Abboud and Tripathi.

“It’s based in the epic world of the Ramayana, but you don’t get to play the gods. You’re in their world,” Tripathi said.

Tripathi drew a parallel to the American movie Independence Day and Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds film. Independence Day is an epic film that depicts an alien invasion of Earth on a huge scale. But the War of the Worlds film focuses on the micro level, where a guy at the border fights for his community, village and family. The Ramayana is an epic Sanskrit series of tales, featuring the hero Rama in the world of Ramayan.

“A traditional epic Ramayana is at that macro level. The gods are fighting. Ours is at that micro level, where you’re a forest warden set up in the world Rama and fighting Rakshasas, the demons who were a part of the main demon’s army,” Tripathi said.

The micro narrative is more emotional and it can be simple enough to appeal to non-Indians, Tripathi said.

“But since world is based on the Ramayana, it is completely Indian as well, so we solve the issue of finding a balance between India and the West,” he said. “Every Indian recognizes the Ramayana‘s shadow.”

Tara Gaming is making a big financial bet.

Granatino said that a $150 million game in the West might cost only 40% of that in India. And so far, the company hasn’t used a lot of the money that is available to it.

I noted there have been a lot of layoffs in the West at game companies. Tripathi said, “It is the best of times and the worst of times.”

He noted that Grand Theft Auto VI could do wonders for the Western market, boosting the overall reception for games, including The Age of Bhaarat.

“We’re going to raise money, but we are also going to get some non-dilutive money,” said Granatino. “I know the industry is going through this difficult patch. But I also believe people are looking for new content for the market.”

“We are also working with Indian people, so we have a few Indian investors working with us,” Abboud said.

Since the team has had backing for four years, the risks have been reduced. The company will likely seek more funding, but it has made a lot of progress it can show off as it works toward its alpha test. The company hasn’t signed yet with a major publisher or platform holder.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/YZww_EQiHfg?feature=oembed The game itself is based on Indian mythology.

At its core, the brand’s vision is to empower Indian storytellers and bridge the gap between culturally rooted stories and cutting-edge game development. The newly unveiled trailer teases sweeping landscapes, mythical beasts, powerful warriors, and layered storytelling – all brought together with “cinematic finesse and technical brilliance.”

The game is an action role-playing game (ARPG), with a mix of exploration, combat and progression. You move around a map, fight enemies and unlock content. It’s a single-player story-driven game, with a two-player co-op component.

“It’s like Empire Strikes Back. It’s the moment where the bad guys are controlling the land, and you’re part of what is called the forest warden. Your people who are living in ancient Indian forests, and in the game you are going to rediscover the wisdom of the old of the sage, and you’re going to unlock new powers, new spells, new weapons, thanks to the wisdom of the old sage of your organization, and you will be fighting the demons,” Abboud said. “You will be going up the ledger and fighting against the more and more important bad guys. The game is based on Indian philosophy and karma.”

The Age of Bhaarat. Source: Tara Gaming You can bring Indian martial arts into combat and use Indian weapons.

“You play it alone, but you can invite a friend of yours and play and replay some of the areas of the game,” Abboud said. “With this game, we believe that our goal is to come with a very mainstream action adventure game that is basically making the most of Indian mythology, Indian philosophy, Indian progression, but that is also coming with a co-op element, which gives you the possibility to have also some social element inside the game.”

He said the young people fight back, much like in Star Wars, and there’s a Master Yoda who comes with the wisdom of the Force. For most players in the world, this will be fresh content, and it will be epic, he said. The Indian content could be viewed as exotic.

“It’s a mainstream story. It’s really at the core a human-based story,” he said.

The Age of Bhaarat has been in the works for four years already. Source: Tara Gaming Granatino believes the Indian market is untapped so far when it comes to the value of IP in the world. He said the subcontinent also has tremendous talent, where all the big studios from Rockstar to EA have teams working on India for games like Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia and more.

It also has 20% of the world’s population, and the population and the economy are still growing, unlike other parts of the world.

In the post-Black-Myth era, Granatino said, “No one wants to miss the next massive opportunity, which is in India.”

The founders believe The Age of Bhaarat is a landmark project that will propel India onto the global gaming map. While India is home to a treasure trove of legendary lore, its expression in global gaming has remained largely untapped. Tara Gaming seeks to change that by merging the country’s creative capital with triple-A game production capabilities, said Abboud.

Abboud noted to be successful in games, you have to plan for multiple generations of games and increase both the quality and the sales over time. Over the next 10 years, Abboud hopes to have strong growth in the market to buoy high-quality games.

Many have compared to the Indian market’s potential to China’s, which has seen stellar rise in the game industry. China’s GDP grew fast to support a middle class that could afford both consoles and PCs. It also had a tradition of PC gaming cafes for those who could not afford home machines.

China has a much larger GDP than India, and it has proven that its games and IP can spread across borders. Abboud points to similar success for Korean movies on Netflix. And now you see popular Korean games in the West like Crimson Desert, Abboud said.

Movement in The Age of Bhaarat. Source: Tara Gaming “You get the best of both worlds because you get the people in the West who didn’t hear the story before and it’s new for them, and you get the people in those countries who are happy because somebody is telling their story,” Abboud said.

Abboud said that a culturally rooted triple-A game has potential for a massive domestic audience hungry for Indian stories, especially as vernacular content and mythological themes dominate Bhaarat’s entertainment preferences. The market is large enough to support a premium title for the first time.

And the leaders noted that mythology‑driven, culturally specific games — if they are built at top-tier production quality. Granatino said The Age of Bhaarat is designed from day one for a global audience.

The company has pointed out that, in addition to Black Myth: Wukong, global hits like The Witcher, Ghost of Tsushima, and Stellar Blade prove that culturally specific narratives can achieve mass‑market global appeal when executed at triple-A quality.

In addition, India has cost advantages in engineering-heavy disciplines. It also has a huge domestic market and a strong base for training the next generation of creators. That makes it a great candidate to be a hub for gaming.

Tripathi said, “Look at our economy. We just crossed our former colonial master, the UK. We are now the fifth largest economy on earth. At the rate we are growing, we’ll cross Germany and Japan within a few years. We are the fastest growing large economy on earth within a few years. Our per capita income is where China’s was around 15 to 20 years ago today.”

Tripathi said that India’s economic reforms began about 15 years after China’s did, and now it has started growing at the same pace, though China had a 15-year head start.

He talked to a Netflix executive, who said that if “the quality is good, it travels, because people like authenticity, that’s why Shogun did so well.”

Nouredine Abboud is cofounder of Tara Gaming. Source: Tara Gaming Abboud has been making games for more than 20 years, and he has been playing role-playing games since he was 10.

Abboud said his father is Algerian and his mother is Hungarian, and he lives in France with an Australian wife. Yet he was born in the Czech Republic, back when it was part of Czechoslovakia. It’s only natural, then, that he sees an opportunity in a distant country with an increasingly international presence. He looks forward to the day when India’s Steam market share will be bigger than China’s.

Abboud is now a respected video game executive producer. Having honed his skills in digital media in the 1990s, and founded the independent gaming studio Interactive Revolution, he spent 15 years at Ubisoft, working on gaming IPs such as Driver, Brothers In Arms and Ghost Recon Wildlands. He is the CEO of Novaquark, a development studio with offices in Paris and Montreal, and he has worked with game developers around the world.

“I’m still the a dungeon master. I spend a lot of time creating stories, and when you do that, you are very often looking for inspiration, so you can play things inspired by Star Wars, you can do things inspired by Tolkien, and I remember when I was younger, we were playing quite a lot of basically heroic fantasy inspired by India,” Abboud said. “It’s quite rare to have people who make heroic fantasy inspired by Indian mythology, and at the same time it’s reasonably easy to understand.”

“I worked for 15 years at Ubisoft and I even made games in India with people in Pune.”

Abboud left Ubisoft five years ago to become the CEO of Novaquark, which was working on a metaverse dubbed Dual Universe. The metaverse hasn’t done well, and so Dual Universe didn’t really succeed when it came out in 2022. Then the firm contemplated the Indian project. They found a backer who has bankrolled the development for the past four years.

Amish Tripathi is India’s fastest-selling novelist. Source: Tara Gaming Abboud said he is excited about the founding team, which includes Amish Tripathi, whom many people consider the Tolkien of India.

“He’s very famous, very popular in India. He has seen on shows, etc. So he wrote a story for us where it’s a story that we fully own. So the story is inspired by the famous books, the famous stories of India,” he said.

He noted India has two classic stories, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And this story is inspired by those two big stories, but he wrote our own story, so basically the story is happening at the moment in the Indian mythology, where the bad guys, the Rakshasas, name of the demons, have taken control of the land.

“Amish is the most celebrated author in India at the moment, and the reason is he’s celebrated is taking the sacred Indian text to new heights in terms of book success,” Granatino said. “If you look at God of War, it’s actually based on Norse and Greek mythology, but nobody still worships Thor. Nobody worships Zeus.”

He added, “But people worship still some of the characters that our game is inspired from. I told Amish the only way I’m going to do this game is with you and Amitabh. And we’re speaking to all the all the big publishers in gaming. They are at the table with us. What’s really interesting is we’re already having conversation because the world has been built by Amish and the team. People actually already are talking about licensing the IP, which is very rare that you know even before you release the game.”

Tripathi is the fastest-selling author in Indian publishing history, having written 11 books since 2010 that have sold over eight million copies and been translated into 20 languages. Forbes India frequently ranks him among the top 100 most influential celebrities in the country.

In his diplomatic role, he served as Minister (Culture & Education) at the Indian High Commission to the UK and as Director of The Nehru Centre in London.

Tripathi said, “I’m an Indian writer. I’m deep in the Indian traditions, but let me quote Shakespeare. ‘There’s a tide in the affairs of men, which, when taken at its flood, leads on to fame and fortune. And what if at the time that the tide rides, you have a rocking fantastic ship ready just at that right time? That is a happy situation, I think.'”

Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan has worked on more than 200 films. Source: Tara Gaming Bachchan is a legendary actor, host, producer, and businessman, he is a cultural icon and has been a prominent voice across generations, representing India on the global stage, said Granatino.

Known for his contributions to the film industry, with a distinguished career spanning more than five decades and over 200 films, he now is moving into gaming with The Age of Bhaarat, bringing his own cultural insights.

Sharing his enthusiasm about joining Tara Gaming as cofounder, Bachchan said in a statement, “Joining Tara Gaming is an extension of my lifelong commitment to storytelling. When I heard Amish’s and Nouredine’s vision, I was instantly drawn to the potential of creating something truly monumental. India has always been a land of powerful stories, and through this game, we have an opportunity to share our epics, creativity, and imagination with the world. Gaming is where stories come alive for the next generation, and I’m excited to help shape that experience at Tara Gaming with a uniquely Indian lens.”

India has a vast talent pool, a lot of deep narratives built around Indian mythology, set in the world of the Ramayana, Abboud said.

The Age of Bhaarat does not have a ship date yet. Source: Tara Gaming Abboud is still CEO of Novaquark and he has a creative and production role at Tara Gaming. He has been a longtime heroic fantasy fan for the past 40 years.

“When we were working on concepts, this concept we had about India generated traction on the creative side,” Abboud said. “It was also appealing on the business side. We have created a company registered in London, Tara Gaming, that owns the assets. Novaquark is assisting as a partner with production.”

The team has 160 people. They started work two years ago, with teams in Paris, Montreal and Pune, India. There are also team members in Mumbai and Bengaluru. By the end of the year, the team could hit 200 people. Now it’s not so hard to find game makers with 10 or 20 years of experience.

“Nobody has done yet what we are trying to do, which is to make an international heroic fantasy game about India, and I think that’s an opportunity to create a new franchise,” Abboud said.

The team is using the Unreal Engine 5 and it is expected to ship the game on the PC, Xbox Series X/S and the PlayStation 5. The challenge is that India is mostly a mobile gaming market, as many in the country are still poor and it’s a mobile-first culture. But the hardware makers have high hopes for accelerating the shipment of PCs and consoles in India.

“Our goal is to release a game that is going to be successful in India, and we think we can sell a few million copies in India, and succeed on the global level as well,” he said. “We hope we will soon have high penetration of those platforms in India.”

“We are not only targeting India because nobody has done what we are doing, which is Indian heroic fantasy. We believe that our game can be also very successful in the West, where there is a very strong Indian diaspora,” Abboud said. “And we are not closing the door to partnerships. We might have partnerships on mobile in India.”

The Age of Bhaarat is an action RPG. Source: Tara Gaming I asked Granatino what made him confident that India’s gaming market is ready for this moment.

“We saw an early hint when we came to India with Nouredine,” he said.

It was a lot like when Tencent’s executives sat down with the leaders at Game Science, which made Black Myth: Wukong. They predicted the market would move to PC and console games, after starting in mobile, Granatino said.

“The gaming community was massive in China, and the purchasing power of the Chinese was there a decade ago,” he said. “That’s when those people made that bet.”

Granatino said the game will be more affordable affordable than the Chinese game, and yet it will be a triple-A title. India also has cost-effect talent and it is making use of AI, positioning the country as a significant player in the future of global gaming.

The Indian team could make use of AI, and that is something that goes over better in places like India than it does in the West, where both game players and game developers are resisting AI because of a concern that it will kill jobs. But Indian devs are clear that AI can provide tools that improve efficiency for game makers, Granatino said.

The Age of Bhaarat has an original story from Amish Tripathi. Source: Tara Gaming India banned Chinese games as part of a political fight between the governments. At a recent conference that Tripathi attended, Modi said that the government is extremely enthusiastic about the potential of gaming and its influence on youth. He said that India needed a triple-A game of its own because gaming is the new El Dorado.

“Right now, we’re the only ones with a proper triple-A game,” he said. “What we are doing is the first triple year game that India has ever seen. Our ship couldn’t be better, and we are the only ones who are ready at this stage. Most others are just talking.”

Tripathi noted that writing a story that appeals to both Indians and non-Indians is critical, and he noted his books sell to both audiences.

“This is our culture, but it is easy enough for most Westerners to get it, right down to the levels of the names we pick,” Tripathi said.

It’s a lot like Western games like Tomb Raider, where Lara Croft often goes on adventures and treasure hunts in places like India.

The founders believe that it’s India’s turn for games, and it could be India’s turn to finance games, just as the Saudis, the Chinese and other countries that came before it.

Now that the Indian government has banned gambling and the adjacent $5 billion industry, the capital has to go somewhere, and Tripathi wants it to go into a “clean industry” like gaming, which is good for the society in the long term. The Mixi Investment Global report noted that the 2025’s gambling ban has set the non-gambling gaming sector for “spectacular growth.”

“We’re not doing any gaming. The government is shutting down the addictions which are bad long-term for the society, but it ends up being good for clean companies like us,” Granatino said.



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