Undisputed hit: An indie-made boxing game featuring real fighters has just sold 1m copies
Undisputed has sold one million units.
The boxing game is by Sheffield-based indie studio Steel City Interactive, a developer set-up by brothers Ash, Asif and Asad Habib, who had never worked in video games before.
The story of the studio is a rare one. Formed in 2020, the brothers taught themselves how to make a game and began speaking directly to the boxing industry in an effort to secure licenses.
"I've obviously been a huge gamer my entire life," begins Ash Habib, CEO of Steel City Interactive. "And I'm a boxing fan. My brother called me up one evening and said 'why don't we try a little side project?' That's how it started. We were making it in our living room. And I got hooked on game development. We started doing everything: code, learning animation, animation trees… doing everything from watching tutorials, googling how to do things… And it just snowballed.
"I quit my job. I poured all my resources and everything into setting the company up. And it just grew legs from there.
"We then got people from the boxing industry involved. And then people from the games industry… which was a lot harder, to be fair. Because here I was saying that we were going to make this huge boxing game, but I have zero experience, zero budget… it just sounds like a bit like a crazy pipedream."
Naturally, games investors and publishers were sceptical. The notion of a small independent outfit making an ambitious sports game – albeit based on a sport that had been absent from video games for over a decade –- is not something you'd usually see. These sort of ambitious moves tend to come from the likes of EA or 2K, not start-ups from three brothers with no video game experience.
But what venture capitalists and investors were presented with was more than just a pitch deck, and it won over the likes of London Venture Partners and Novator.
"We did things a little differently," Ash continues. "We didn't go to people with a presentation to say 'hey, there's a gap in the market here and we want to
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