In the Game with

Vikas Gupta

by Robin Roberts

Vikas Gupta, president and CEO of TransGaming Inc., admits he’s not much of a game boy. Sure, he’ll try out the odd demo, like World of Goo, Puzzle Quest and Prince of Persia, to have an appreciation and understanding of the merchandise. He just doesn’t have the time to spend hours alone in a darkened room outrunning vast armies in the latest Settlers saga. He’d much rather jump out of bed at sunrise and outrun city traffic to oversee the software portability technology that enables players to access that game over multiple platforms (from PC to Mac and Linux).

“Electronic entertainment is on the bleeding edge of technology, so the evolution is dramatically different than anywhere else; things move very fast here,” says Gupta from TransGaming’s head office in Toronto. Prior to joining the public tech company (TSX-V: TNG) in 2001, Gupta was the founder and president of InterLogic Systems (subsequently acquired by Prima Telematic), a consulting and systems integration firm that assisted Fortune 500 companies with their high-end telecom needs. So he was no stranger to a high-tech environment. But when he logged on to the virtual world, it was a whole new ball game.

“Learning about the industry was a very dramatic and steep learning curve,” says Gupta. “It’s a lot of technology that’s very different from what I was used to. And from a political landscape perspective, [you have to learn] how business is conducted in the video games industry, who the key players are, how you grease the wheels. In many ways, this industry is not that much different from trying to break into Hollywood, where you spend a lot of time getting to know people, building credibility and just demonstrating that you have the ability to survive. And that takes time. It’s not just about picking up a book and reading [about it]. It’s traveling a lot and sitting down at a lot of intense meetings.”

One of the most important aspects Gupta learned about was his consumer demographic. Most of us would naturally presume the typical Nintendo nerd is a teenage boy. Not so. According to Gupta, the range is much broader, from 17 to 41 years old. And, in 10 years it will be 17 to 51, and 10 years after that 17 to 61. In other words, those who started gaming when the technology was born are gamers for life. And they don’t all possess the Y chromosome. Gupta says one of the hottest video games, called Dream Day Wedding, where players design the most romantic wedding day ever, sold more than a million units in its first year — and 85 per cent of the buyers were female.

And that 17-year-old newbie demo isn’t set in stone, either. Gupta says his daughter, at just three years old, was a master of SPORE’s Creature Creator. Pretty much self-explanatory, the game is all about creating your own universe of crazy creatures, from tide pool amoebas to intergalactic aliens on starships. “She grabbed the mouse and, in about a half hour, she started creating these amazing creatures that had flowers on their back and eyes on the top and bottom,” says Gupta with a chuckle. “Unlike adults, she has no biases about where heads and eyes and noses go. It was completely creative, out-of-the-box thinking.”

It’s a world away from his own childhood as a three year old in the industrial city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Although he remembers very little of his birthplace, having emigrated to Canada when he was just six, he does get back every few years and is committed to ensuring his two young daughters, Ariya and Anaya, are schooled in their own heritage. “I’m thinking of taking them to India next year so they can meet their extended family, get exposed to the culture,” says Gupta. “I speak with them in Hindi at home, they spend a lot of time with their grandparents who speak with them in Hindi. They were born in Canada so it’s that balancing act of ensuring they’ve got the right mix of cultural values. Between my wife Sangeeta and I and the grandparents, we’re ensuring they’ve got the right level of exposure.”

Gupta says his parents — Krishan, who’s in real estate, and his mother, Manju, who’s employed by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board — instilled some very strong, core, cultural values and one of them was education. And, as is typical of many Indian families, the elder Guptas looked forward to bragging to their friends about their son the doctor. So, the dutiful lad went off to the University of Waterloo, earned his biochemistry degree and set off down the path of medicine. “Then, in my second year of university, I realized I did not want to be a doctor,” says Gupta. “When I broke the news to my parents, while somewhat disappointed, they understood my passion was elsewhere and they encouraged it. I started moving into technology, and since Waterloo is a very technical school, I was able to start taking a lot of engineering and technology-based courses. I don’t know if my parents fully get the depths of what I do, simply because it’s so technical. But they are very proud of my accomplishments, and I think they would have been proud regardless of what I’d done. They understood that I had this entrepreneurial passion. They just said, ‘Work hard, be passionate, be true to yourself and that will materialize into results and success.’ And I take that to heart. In hindsight, I have no regrets [about not pursuing medicine]. I could never imagine myself wearing a lab coat and walking through hospitals all day.”

Good thing for TransGaming, because they snagged themselves a fearless leader whose greatest quality is the ability to recognize the contributions of those around him. “Vikas is the outside man: he travels, he’s the face of the organization, he’s the marketing side, the deal-making side,” says Dennis Ensing, the company’s CFO. “I’m the inside guy: I take care of the details, mind the fort, take care of all the financial reporting and ask some of the tougher questions. One of the core values we share is integrity. We never have an issue about what we should do, because what we ought to do is what we do. We’ve learned, over time, to trust each other, both as friends and colleagues. I’ve worked with people before who see black when I see white, and vice-versa. We may be looking at the same thing but we don’t appreciate that we share a different perspective of it. Other CEOs and founders don’t get that; it’s their way or the highway. Vikas is not like that. And he’s that way with everybody; he’s very respectful of other people’s opinions. He’s able to listen, but make his case and stick with it if he feels strongly about it. That’s a special thing about entrepreneurs: they have to be strong-headed enough to pull everybody kicking and screaming into the vision. The ones who don’t do well are the ones who aren’t willing to hear other people’s opinions.”

When he’s not negotiating the ins and outs of video gaming all day, Gupta, recipient of the Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2008, is navigating his way through the streets of some of North America’s biggest cities, either during his frequent business trips or just time out with friends. “He’s a good planner,” says his pal Michael Joshua, who met Gupta 10 years ago when he went to school with his wife Sangeeta. “When we travel together, he’s always been able to plan out our days and evenings. He’s managed to get us into places where we never thought we’d be able to get in. I remember in Los Angeles we wanted to get into an [exclusive], well-known club for the evening and somehow he got us in. The strings he’s able to pull… He knows people, he knows places.”

He also knows style. Joshua describes the extravagant wedding eight years ago when Gupta married Sangeeta. In keeping with the tradition of his Indian heritage, the groom greeted his 600 guests high atop a white horse. “Nobody carries on those sorts of traditions anymore when they live in Canada,” says Joshua. “If they’re inconvenient or awkward, people don’t bother. Not Vikas. His wedding was quite a show and when he puts on a show, it’s great. It was really neat to see.”

From Gupta’s vantage point, however, his grand entrance didn’t go exactly as planned. His fine white steed got spooked and started bucking and kicking. Thankfully, he hung on tighter than a gaming console to be able to dismount with a modicum of dignity.

But just as he runs his company, so Gupta ran his nuptials. He and his bride created management teams, with Sangeeta’s sister Kavita and Gupta’s friend Karim heading the teams of family and friends who reported to them. Needless to say, “everything went smoothly,” says Gupta, also an avid flyer who’s well on his way to obtaining his private pilot’s license this summer.

Joshua recounts the day of his own wedding, with Gupta as emcee. Because it was an authentic Chinese wedding, in honour of the bride, the feast consisted of 12 courses. “Vikas kept everybody entertained in between the 12 courses,” recalls Joshua. “He would have either games or speeches going. He kept it all organized. We didn’t get dancing until about quarter to 12, so he kept everybody entertained from about 7:30 to about quarter to 12, laughing and enjoying themselves.”

Joshua says he’s only known his friend socially, and can’t imagine him in the intense environs of the $60 billion video gaming world. “He must be whatever he needs to be,” says Joshua. “But I’ve just known him as a fun guy, the life of the party. He doesn’t take himself seriously in the setting I know him in.”

He is, however, serious about expanding TransGaming’s divisions and revenues. The company already works with some of the biggest names in the biz, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision and Oberon Media on some of the biggest game franchises, such as The Sims 3, Shaun White Snowboarding and Kung Fu Panda. This year, TransGaming, with additional offices in Ottawa and Atlanta, was recognized as a TSX Venture 50 (a ranking of strong performers). It also recently launched its own studio, from which it will develop original work. And, last September saw investment from Intel Capital, a U.S.-based global investment firm. Bigger still is the debut of GameTreeTv in the fall, also in collaboration with Intel, which will enable players to download and play games on-demand.

“I’m a big believer that everybody is a gamer, you may just not know it yet,” says Gupta. “I really do believe that gaming is going to be the biggest revenue source from an entertainment perspective. It already is, in fact. It’s far bigger than the Hollywood box office. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, for example, reached the $1 billion revenue number in just a matter of weeks. And there’s a lot of talk about 3D gaming, on the heels of movies like Avatar, etc. Building 3D into a game is just additional technology. The tools are all there, the capability is there, it’s simply a question of the device or the platform you’re playing the video game on. Is it powerful enough to give you a really good 3D experience from a visual perspective? It’s still very expensive, so I don’t think it’s going to become mainstream for about three years or so. But I’ve already seen some 3D games and they’re not bad.”

And when we all (and, as Gupta says, we’re all potential gamers) eventually step into that 3D world, we may find it so much better than our real world, we may never want to re-emerge. “I think that gaming is getting to the point where it’s going to become part of everybody’s lifestyle in such a way that it doesn’t matter what the device is, or where the screen is, you’re going to be able to interact with it in a way that gives you great value. And the storytelling has gotten so rich that it almost invokes emotion. A great movie, one that brings tears to your eyes or makes you laugh, used to be done through actors and actresses. But movies are linear entertainment; video games are interactive. You can create and build relationships with characters, and establish an emotional attachment to those characters. And I think the depth and connection is going to become a pretty deep one.”

So, hang on: some day your Prince of Persia will come… 