More gaming startups need to work together. Malaysia’s 1337 Accelerator is why.

People in Asia’s gaming industry don’t work together. It could be that because the industry is so small, everyone’s afraid of losing out to the competition. There simply isn’t enough of the pie for everyone to grab a bite. Doors remain closed even within the gaming startup communities. While competition is great, and keeps people hungry for more, does that benefit really outweigh what you get from sharing, and learning, from others?

Bikesh Lakhmichand, co-founder of Malaysia’s 1337 Accelerator, the first ever in the country, doesn’t think so.

Lakhmichand in the 1337 Hub!

The 1337 Accelerator grew out of iTrain, a company he set up with co-founder Eric Ku that provides training in all sorts of verticals to folk from all sorts of companies. Following two intense years of running mobile app development training, Lakhmichand realized that his team hadn’t just acquired domain expertise in every single vertical it had trained in. Having worked so closely with companies big and small, iTrain was also well-placed to mentor and advise industry newcomers anywhere.

The idea was to give back, give these [newbies] the connections and know-hows of overcoming the brick walls we used to go up against, and help them accelerate.

While the 1337 Accelerator is not a game-specific one, its first batch of graduates all produced gaming properties. This was the result of a pilot program Lakhmichand pitched to the Malaysian government over a year ago. iTrain had always been looking at the gaming sector when it came to getting people trained for that specific skillset, since coding native apps for Android and iOS was too slow.

(See: Games in Asia x 1337 Accelerator meetup Malaysia: Kurechii Studio’s journey)

When an opportunity to work with Unity came up, Lakhmichand proposed his program: get participants to go through an intense five-day crash course, and have them build a prototype in 30 days, all while being mentored by industry veterans. It was approved.

Snapshot of the 1337 Hub at Pantai Hill Park. It moved here from Cyberjaya.

A call was put out to developers and designers to pitch their ideas. Approximately 20 participants were paired up, designer to developer, and they were taught to build games from scratch. The Malaysian government loved the end result, and even gave the participating teams seed funding. Lakhmichand and his team, on the other hand, saw a vertical that they had both the right skillsets and mentors for, and the first batch of 1337 Accelerator participants was born.

No games actually finished their development process while in the accelerator. “You can’t accelerate games in three months,” Lakhmichand said, “but you can come up with something.”