A 18-year old boy named Ahmad Sadeghi, started to create a life simulation game named eJahan (Means Electronical World) by his own. His only co-worker was MohammadHossein Fakhraei, a professional server manager and Arshia Mojtahedi, was helping him by creating graphics assets for his game, in the age of 14.
eJahan was the first browser-based online game and until now, it is still the only successful international online MMORPG in their homeland, Iran.
eJahan was released worldwide on September 28th, 2009, after 88 days of closed alpha testing.
On April 1st, 2012, Ahmad officially stated in a virtual press release inside eJahan that he will stop the game very soon. According to the time of the article, many users believed the statement as a hoax for April Fools day, but it happened two days later.
eJahan was online for 919 days and got 400K+ users, translated in 14 languages and was measured as a successful project, but it was closed because it became out of control and a single person could not handle that anymore. Ahmad closed it to re-open with new teammates and new features, something that is not happened yet.
MohammadHossein founded a startup, registered Aidanaz Smart Business Ltd. and recruited Ahmad as his co-founder. They wanted to create something new, so they started to work on a football management project with code name My Football Team.
This game needed an engine to work, so Ahmad made an engine, inspired by Robocup 2000 football engine and named it Uz Engine (Uz, pronouced as Yooz means Cheetah in Persian, refering to Asiatic Cheetah).
My Football Team was in final development phase, and the engine was ready, too. So, they started to name it. From 18 suggested names from their own and their Facebook friends, they selected FCMine.
FCMine was officially released on October 11th, 2012 on fcmine.com.
Unlike eJahan, FCMine was totally a failure! Lack of marketing strategies and problems on main game scenario caused FCMine to last less than 6 months, the team closed FCMineand the corporation was dissolved few days after that.
After a year of absence and doing freelance work, guys started to think if they can do something new and big! So they gathered together and shared their ideas. They added their old friends, Ali Lotfi Nejad as graphics designer and Siavash Hafez as project advisor to their team.
Siavash left the team very soon, because he was very busy on his own business.
Their first ever meeting was planned on Aug. 12th, 2014, with 3 founders and 3 interns: Mahsa Jannaty Zadeh, Ghazaleh Ranjbaran and Shayesteh Kavoosi. They were selected as most talented students out of 150+ students in Ahmad's web development classes held in Karaj Islamic Azad University. The team got a 100-meters apartment for their work, gifted from Ahmad's father, who did not understand IT industry, but had faith on the team.
Weekly meetings was started on Aug. 30th, 2014 and the team started to meet each other 3 times during a week. This decision was made because of low financial resources. Their first project was a life simulation game with code name Parallel Civilizations (PCivil) which was planned to rise up from eJahan's ashes.
Touhid Arastu joined the team as one of the co-founders to handle front-end development and share his skills with developers. Total workers of the startup reached to 7 people, consisted of 4 co-founders and 3 interns (highest number of employees in the system until now).
After developers learned the recommended skills and finished their internship, Ahmad made a contract with them. To handle their salary, co-founders decided to create a new project and leave PCivil on developers. They wanted to create a project with lower amount of needed work, because PCivil was a huge project and they weren't expect it to finish less than a year later.
So many projects were started, e. g. 20c (A real-time chat application), Foto Montaj (A face effect and chromakey application), Banki, a bank information application and some other projects (At the time of the decision, apps like Telegram and Snapchat were not popular and these ideas were unique).
Almost all above projects were killed during development or design. At last, the team agreed to create a revamp of old FCMine, with platform, scenario and gameplay changes.
Tensions rose between Ahmad and MohammadHossein, and at last, Ahmad's oldest partner left the team.
Because of his departure, the remaining team could not continue under Aidanaz Smart Business trademark, because it was legally credited to MohammadHossein only.
Just few days later, Touhid and Ghazaleh left the team and went on their own paths, too.
Because of laws in Iran, every male person has to go for military service for almost two years, and Ahmad was not an exception, so he went for military service on April 21st, 2015.
Before his departure, according to hope for team's future and his military service, which was expected to end in 2017, he arranged a conversation with Ali, the only co-founder left, and finally they decided to dissolve the startup and expelled the developers, but they promised to each other to continue development of FCMine in their free time and pospone the development of PCivil to a later time.
The Sadeghi-Lotfi duo continued their work on Aidanaz's old apartment whenever Ahmad was free on military vacations. Ali was responsible for UI/UX development and Ahmad was creating the game's core.
Ahmad's father passed away suddenly because of a brain attack on December 9th, 2015. This was a great disaster for the duo, because they lost their spiritual father and by the way, they had to sell the apartment to handle his funeral expenses and they had no place to work anymore. Everything was against the team and they were very close to complete failure.
Ahmad used an immunity law in military because of his father's passing and his military service lasted exactly 9 months.
They got a small 40-meters suit from Ahmad's mother to continue their work there. They tried to get their old developers back, but all of them were working in other corporations.
At last, FCMine was ready to release and the development was finished.
They released FCMine for local markets as BETA release on Feb. 10th, 2016, based on Uz Engine v2.
The duo continued to work on FCMine. After its 3rd release, they lost their keystore file and they were unable to post updates on the game. Fortunately, the game didn't receive much audience at that time, so they released a new application with different package name.
FCMine v2.0.9 was released, with new design and new features. The engine was upgraded to Uz Engine v3.
The duo completed the legal requirements to submit a new corporation. So, AVA Parsian Smart Business Ltd. was born at Oct. 10th, 2016.
Ahmad created Uz Engine v4 from the scratch (all changes on the engine were applied to first version created at 2012 and it was fairly old) and they released FCMine v2.1.32 with the new engine.
They contacted Karaj Islamic Azad University Startup Institute and moved there.
AVA PSB was present in 1st Alborz Elecomp fair and introduced FCMine to 1000+ audiences for 3 days.
Uz Engine v4.1 was released to fix the last version's bugs and problems. It made a great improve in gameplay's behaviour.
After more than a year passed of FCMine's initial release, the duo decided to refactor the front-end and use Unity Engine instead of Cordova. They were looking for a Unity developer, but they didn't find anybody to suit them, bacause the required skill was not so popular at the time and they didn't have enough funds to pay for those who were interested. So, Ahmad asked his cousin, Vahid Sadeghi, who had a brief experience in programming, to join AVA. Vahid joined AVA and started to learn development in Unity Engine. His skill improvement was magnificent and he learned to develop very fast.
Everything was going fine, but suddenly, the headquarters of KIAU Startup Institute decided to expel the team out of their department with no reason. The team struggled to stay, but they had no luck. This story has more details that is not related to this story's purposes.
At last, the team had to move out of institute on January 6th, 2018, and they moved to their old suit they were before.
On last day of August 2018, the development of new version was finished and FCMine v3.0.9i was released. Also, it was the end of FCMine's long beta period and the game was officially released in Google Play Store.
FCMine v3.1.9 was released. The new version contained a new feature - get free money by watching ads - and the performance of the game was slightly increased. The team planned a new project based on FCMine but with completely different scenario with code name Micro Football. The game mainly focused on street soccer and unlike FCMine, it contained no tournaments.
A sudden problem on Iran's internet infrastructure cut the access of Iranian users to servers outside of the country, including FCMine server (which were located in Germany). The issue was country-wide and lasted for 10 days. Even developers in AVA could not access the server for 3 days but managed to fix that for themselves. This problem cut the continuity of users' gaming experience and hurt the game a lot. In fact, the issue was unexpected and the team had no backup plan for such a problem. After this incident and some other infrastructurial problems that occured in the following 3 months, FCMine slowly lost its user base and was converted to a dead-game.
Due to the incident described above and also the outcome of global lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team had to shut down FCMine and pause the plans for "Micro Football" because it could not cover its expenses.
With Vahid temporarily leaving the team, the Sadeghi-Lotfi duo was back again! They started to create a platform for trading Steam items. The project is still under development.
Ahmad moved to Istanbul, and after almost two years of absence, the duo decided to continue their games plans (Although, they were still developing the trading platform project). They started Project Phoenix and they started to recruit new developers to continue from were they left.