Pakistan's first-ever gaming and animation conference

The country’s first-ever gaming and animation conference was held on Thursday at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture with the organisers miraculously managing to persuade the giants of the Pakistani industry to attend.

Pioneers such as Trango, TinTash, Mindstorm studios, Sharpimage and Folio3 showed up to assure the pleasantly surprised students that there was an indigenous gaming industry that would be more than happy to hire them when they graduated.

All of these companies have been successfully making games and designing animation for them in Pakistan for quite a while now. The oldest of these companies was established in 1994. Strangely, though, the students who were interested in taking art development and related work for electric gaming had absolutely no idea that they existed. The students had all planned to apply to international gaming houses where they would be able to design concept art, character and other details for games.

“Our sole purpose here is to corrupt a few young minds,” said the managing director of Pakistan Software Export Board, Zia Imran, who, along with Pakistan Software Houses Association’s Jehan Ara, was responsible for the event taking place. The idea for the conference came to Imran mere weeks ago, when he was meeting a faculty member at Indus Valley. He was optimistic about finally being able to put the game developers and future animators of Pakistan in one room. “If you want to change the world, we are throwing a party. That party starts today,” he said.