Anarkade is an evil indie game development organization located in Barcelona, Badajoz, Osaka, Mars and Phobos secret hideouts. Crafters of upcoming punk arcade titles as Rawal Rumble or Ancient Laie: Illegal Sellers, our award-winning team members have over 50 years of combined working experience in leading game companies such as Ubisoft or Digital Chocolate.

Back in 2012 the Digital Chocolate Barcelona members Paco, Elias and Alex started to work on different prototypes during their free time. One of them became really popular: Rawal Rumble, a cyberpunk beat’em up inspired by a mock-up drawn by Alex, who created this post apocalyptic Universe when he was a child, inspired by contemporary games, movies, comics, anime and his hometown.

Rawal Rumble original mock-up

After winning multiple awards with games played by dozens of millons of players, or that even appeared in a gaming history book written by prestigious English journalists, their game studio became Ubisoft Barcelona Mobile and Elias left the company to cofound Omnidrone. Meanwhile they slowly turned the Rawal Rumble prototype in their free time into almost a vertical slice demo.

Some time later, Alex leaves Ubisoft and became an indie to work full time at Anarkade to turn personal projects such as Ancient Laie: Illegal Sellers or Rawal Rumble into commercial games, with the idea to cover arcade related unserved niches with small titles born from the collaboration of local artists (most of them from Barcelona) with very different backgrounds: from experienced gamedevs to non game-related musicians, illustrators, animators, video artists, graffitists, graphical designers, portrait painters, poets and more.

Gabriel Garrido joined us in Summer 2017 as sound composer and sound designer to create some Rawal Rumble tracks and sound effects during vacations, taking a break from his work at Etherborn, the 4 Headed Monkey Band or directing the Master in Music Composition and Sound Design for Videogames at Microfusa.

Pro-tip: Afterworks beers are great for team building and to kickstart great ideas

Currently, we’re tweaking and polishing the Rawal Rumble concept demo according to the feedback collected at events as Barcelona Games World, Retrobadajoz, Valencia Indie Summit or RetrogamingBCN while also developing a couple of additional stages. Alex is also focused on stablishing the company and building a long term roadmap planning, prototyping and making market research for future projects, in addition to search potential partnerships that would help improve our projects while also supporting the local gamedev as lecturer at local gamedev related Universities or events.

One of them is Ancient Laie: Illegal Sellers, an action arcade set in Barcelona 21XX years ago, where an illegal inmigrant who works as beer, roses and clothes street seller to save his family fights to be accepted by the local indigenous Iberian tribes and ends trapped in an epic adventure fiilled with Iberian and Catalan mithology.

Both games and others projects that we have in early concept stages share a few common traits which are both local and universal: arcade games, currently unsaturated niches, Barcelona and its culturally diverse, peaceful and joyful culture nature, different diversity related topics and humour.