This nostalgic Rubber Wrestling game gets a delicious Raya update

Malaysian game developer Linteractivity posted a festive update to reddit yesterday: new Raya erasers for his digital Lawan Pemadam (Rubber Wrestling) game.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ivtGGTPKOU[/embed]

Lawan Pemadam (literally "fighting erasers" or rubber wrestling) is a popular game amongst kids growing up not just in Malaysia, but around the region. Using sets of rectangular-shaped erasers with different designs (usually flags), players wage battle by flipping their erasers towards each other. The ultimate goal is to "pin down" your opponent's eraser - which means you just have to get your eraser on top of the other.

Linteractivity is a one-man-show in the form of Leon "Lint" Lim, an international marketer who taught himself to code online last year. Lim, 30, was inspired by a post on r/singapore featuring a collection of rubbers.

"I realised I hadn't thought about this game in possibly ages… the concept seemed simple enough so I gave it a shot, spent about a day on it and posted it online for people to play with," he told AsiaOne. Naturally, Lim has fond memories of playing lawan pemadam as a kid and recently added a tikam-tikam machine (random mystery prize machine) feature to the game.

Lawan Pemadam's game mechanics are a little tricky - understandable, as it's hard to bring that distinctive "flip" to life via an in-game physics engine. As for the future, Lim hopes to work on more content for Lawan Pemadam, pending public interest. Who knows, we might end up seeing digital versions of traditional regional games like five stones, hantam bola ("hit ball"), and capteh.

alexisong@asiaone.com