Jordanian Studio Quirkat Releases Arcade Game Zonkt!
Chosen to give the impression of a
robotic metal sound, Zonkt! is the name of a new iPad game launched by
Amman-based videogame development studio Quirkat, which was
established in 2004. "The game belongs to the Arcade genre but
doesn't look like anything you would find on the app store," says
Mahmoud Khasawneh, CEO of Quirkat.
Zonkt! is a fast-action arcade game where the player has to save
gabloos, a group of magical space critters that landed on earth on
a quest to find life beyond their planet, which is named, well,
Gabloo. Having landed in the backyard on a robo-scientist called
Zonkt who locked them up in his "crate of cruelty," the player has
to save them before Zonkt uses his compressor to make jelly cubes
out of them and cook them.
In building the unique game, Quirkat tested out a new way to
develop the game concept. "We just went to one of our developers
and asked her to work on a game she would like to play, based on
her own interest and the artist's interest", says Khasawneh. The
story developed on the fly as the producer was wrote bits of the
story and developer built the platform. After three months of
development, it launched at the end of last week.
This is the first game produced by Quirkat that doesn't have an
Arabic version, "because it is not language intensive," says
Khasawneh. Yet he points out that the game is utterly local to the
region; all of Quirkat's production and development takes place in
Amman, supported by a small art team in Beirut, and a corporate
headquarters in the UAE. Zonkt! is Quirkat’s third iPad game,
following its classics Pegs by Quirkat and Quirkat game.
The game will be launched on other platforms within the coming two
weeks, and Quirkat is now working on a Playstation 3 title to be
released in six languages and launched by the end of the year,
along with three game applications, which follow its first
Playstation Game, MENA
Speed (Sur3a), which the studio released in November 2011.
"We don't worry about the platform anymore, but the concept
itself," says Khasawneh.