If you thought gamers and game designing careers are a ‘millennial fad’, you are mistaken. Here is someone who taught himself gaming by playing through the slow ‘dial-up connection’, and studying game textbooks when MOOCs didn’t exist. From Mumbai to Munich, en route to Malaysia, his 15-year gaming career has really taken him places!
When Jitesh was 8, he was already glued to PC games, and by the age of 12, he was writing stories and designing simple board games. During college, he had won and organized multiple gaming tournaments and even wanted to drop out of engineering to pursue ‘Game Journalism’.
Graduating with a B.Tech (CS) from C.R.I.T Mumbai in 2004, Jitesh kickstarted his first job at the Mumbai office of Tencent-backed LevelUp!. Little did the young engineer realize that he would soon become one of India’s first gameplay experts.
After a short stint at LevelUp!, he was hired by Reliance Games (formerly, Paradox Studios) where he worked as a Game Designer for formula racing and role-playing games. Moving to Nazara Technologies, he donned on the hat of a Producer to work on JAVA 3D games and pitched ideas to the Bollywood star, Hrithik Roshan - an ardent gamer himself. One of the games that Jitesh designed remained No.1 on Google Playstore, attracted millions of downloads, and was declared the ‘Best Game of 2015’ by Google.
Following Nazara, he spent 7 years at the dream company- Ubisoft, where he was part of the team that launched India’s first in-house game title for the Nintendo DS, winning an international award. He got headhunted on Linkedin by a gaming company in Malaysia, and in 2016, he worked as a ‘Creative Director and Producer’ to design educational games for Grade-10 Biology and Chemistry students of the British Curriculum. Fascinated by Europe, he is currently based out of Munich, heading Aesir Interactive as the Sr. Game Design Director.
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