Our Story

More than three decades ago, one of Kekule Games co-founders (Greg) came up with the idea of a board game. While the rules of this board game would be very simple, by its design, the board soon becomes too complex for humans to play against each other. Rather, the players of the game write python code that implements their game strategy such that each player’s code plays many games against other player’s code in matches. Success moves player’s code up the leaderboard while defeat moves them down. Prizes are paid to the leading positions at the top of league leaderboards. At the time (remember this was before widespread availability of the internet) the technology required to make this game possible, with several tens of thousands of potential participants, was not available. It was only when cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) became available that Greg’s concept could be realised. Fortuitously, along came James, a young but incredibly talented 15-year old school boy who had the skills to develop the platform required to instantiate the Kekule Games game of life. In establishing Kekule Games, Greg and James strive to make programming into a sport with players uploading their code, with continual competitions to find the champion of game strategy and python programming.

About the name

August Kekulé was a German organic chemist. His most famous work was on the chemical structure of benzene. In 1865 he explained that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail. Since our game is all about two pieces of python code attempting to eat each other, we decide to name the company Kekule Games Ltd.