Undisputed: how Ash Habib brought boxing games off the canvas

What if Tyson Fury fought Muhammad Ali? Now you can find out. (sort-of)

Enter Undisputed, the knockout boxing game bringing fantasy matchups to life with a roster that spans generations from Canelo Álvarez and Oleksandr Usyk to legends like Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Arturo Gatti. It’s the first proper boxing release since Fight Night Champion in 2011. The debut title sold over a million copies right out of the gate.

The project was spearheaded by Ash Habib, alongside his brothers, who dreamed of bringing boxing back into the digital space. A lifelong boxing fan who grew up in Sheffield watching fights on TV that he could never afford to attend. Boxing was a world that existed behind screens. Now he’s rebuilding the sport’s digital doppleganger. Habib left a stable corporate career and put his dream car on the line (1993 Dodge Viper) to make the game. Today, Undisputed isn’t just a game; it’s a fan’s love letter to the sport, crafted with obsessive attention to detail and a deep respect for the people within it. The result is a game as authentic as it is ambitious.

The game comes from Steel City Interactive, the independent studio Habib co-founded with his brothers. Instead of signing with a single governing body, they took a bold route: building direct relationships with fighters, coaches, commentators, and sanctioning bodies themselves, including the WBC. The result is a game as authentic as it is ambitious.

We sat down with Habib to talk greatness, gaming, and what it really took to bring boxing back to the digital world.

Square Mile: Where were you in your life when the idea for Undisputed first came to you?

Ash Habib: I was actually doing really well in my corporate career. I was the Head of Performance for a large multinational firm. I was based in Sheffield, working partly remotely, and I thought I’d retire there, honestly. Everything was going great. Then one evening, my brother came up with the idea as a side project. We’d spoken about before, like, God, why isn’t there a boxing game? We were lifelong gamers and boxing fans. We were big fans of Fight Night and couldn’t believe there wasn’t a modern boxing game. We literally googled ‘How to Make a Game.’ And it all started there.

SM: What was your family’s relationship to fighting? Did you ever try to fight yourself?

AH: We just purely watched. Growing up, I heard the name Muhammad Ali often in our household. We used to watch his interviews on the TV. Sheffield has a rich boxing heritage from the likes of Bomber Graham, Johnny Nelson, and Prince Naseem. I grew up watching those guys. That got me hooked, but what really turned me into a fight nerd was Arturo Gatti. That Gatti-Ward trilogy…I’d never seen anything like it. The commentators used to call him the human highlight reel. It hooked me right in.

SM: Have you digitised him yet?

AH: Yes. He was the first American we signed. If the game were just called Arturo Gatti Boxing Game and he was the only boxer I had in the game, I would've been happy.

SM: I’d love to hear a little more about why you love fighting. Did you ever go to any fights? Or was it just on the TV?

AH: Growing up, we didn’t have the money to go to a boxing match. For us, it was all digital growing up. It wasn't until I was an adult that I attended an actual boxing match.

SM: What was that first fight, and how old were you?

AH: I think it was Amir Khan in Sheffield. Deontay Wilder was on the undercard, actually. Or it may have been during a US road trip I took back in 2014. As a boxing fan, we googled all the famous gyms everywhere we went. We ended up stumbling into different gyms. Everything was a coincidence. The date we were in Vegas, it happened to be Bradley vs. Pacquiao II, so we watched that. We ended up driving up to San Francisco, and found Virgil Hunter’s secret gym. He was shocked to find out how we found it. The gym was so secret that he ended up giving us a tour because of all the effort we put into finding him. Now, signing the fighters, I’ve said to so many people, ‘Hey, we actually met way back in 2014 on this trip.” I took pictures with them as a fan, and now I’m doing business with them.

SM: You say there’s been coincidences. What other ones have there been?

AH: We’ve got a local fighter called Ryan Rhodes. His ultimate moment was when he fought Canelo. I remember running into him a week after the fight at a local takeaway. I didn’t know what to say. I asked such a stupid question. His face was looking pretty busted up, so I said, ‘Did Canelo hit hard?’ When I started the game, I knew no one. I had no contacts. The only person I knew was a mutual friend of Ryan Rhodes. I still have the Facebook message I pinged him to send to Ryan to explain the project. He ended up coming over to my house, he didn’t remember me, of course, and I showed him the early concept.

SM: What exactly was the pitch at that point when Ryan came over?

AH: Something that was important to me was that I didn’t want a PowerPoint presentation. I’d never done this before. For my own sanity, I wanted to ensure it was something I could actually do. When Ryan came around, I already had a concept built. I was waiting for him to say, ‘Why the hell are you wasting my time,’ or if he wanted to get involved. After he saw the vision, he was all in. He was a massive help in the beginning with making those connections - managers, promoters, and other fighters. It was a snowball effect. It started with Ryan and then ended up with Muhammad Ali, Tyson Fury, Canelo and all these guys.

SM: Can you walk me through how you digitise these fighters?

AH: There’s two ways we do it. We either scan them or sculpt them. For scanning, we need the fighters to come to the scan studio. We partnered with a company called 1024. This is another one of the coincidences. There are only two scan companies in the country, and one of them was five minutes from my house.

I went to meet them. I told them what we were doing. I didn’t really have a budget. They had a little laugh; they get this every day. But they were boxing fans. When they saw the concept, they were interested. But I had no funding. So we made a little deal. My favourite car since I was a kid was a 1993 Dodge Viper. I saved up and bought that dream car. I told them I’ll release the game, and if they don’t make their money back, then they keep the car.

SM: You put your baby on the line?

AH: I am someone who is either nothing or 150%. In those early days, I couldn’t expect other people to believe in it unless I was willing to.

SM: Did you draw a contract for that?

AH: Yeah, we did. I still have it! And the car. Turned out to be a good deal. And then for fighters who’ve passed away, we can’t scan them, so we sculpt them digitally. We have an incredible sculptor called Francesco Primiceri. He created some early sculpts that blew us away. They were better than anything that had been created before.

SM: Who was the hardest to sculpt?

AH: Not the hardest, but the longest was certainly Muhammad Ali. We set such a high bar for the visuals. A scan is a perfect copy. I didn’t want people to know the difference between those who were scanned and those who were sculpted. It isn’t just the look of them. It’s capturing how they move in the ring. We had to do justice to his legacy.

SM: And I know you’ve created people outside of fighters, like coaches and characters that are in the fight world. How do you choose other people to bring into the game?

AH: When we were formulating the game, my view was that it had to be something that had never been done before. I had to surpass everything that had ever been done before. In a game, you choose a fighter and that’s that. But a fighter’s career is also who is around them. I wanted the managers, the trainers, the cutman. I wanted it to be as authentic as possible. It’s not just a fighter on their own that makes them a champion; it’s the team around them.

SM: Is there something you’d really like to do in the game that you haven’t done yet?

AH: There are a few. There are more mini-games I want to build. I want more aspects of fighting involved in the game, like weigh-ins and press conferences. I like all that atmosphere part of it. I want crossover sports with other genres. I have unfinished business.

SM: Are you considering VR or AI in future versions?

AH: VR was something we looked at. But it was important for me to focus on a true, authentic boxing game before it became something else. I found that it was just distracted me from the core model and why I wanted to do this in the first place. Nothing is off the table. But I want to focus on improving and updating the game as it is now for the fans and community.

SM: Who do you play as when you play the game?

AH: Always Arturo Gatti. I lose most of the time, but that’s irrelevant to me.

SM: If you started over right now, what would you have done differently?

AH: It’s a tough one. There were mistakes along the way. But if I didn’t make them, I wouldn’t have known what to do the next time around. The silliest thing I’d ever done was when we first conceived the concept; I thought we could complete the whole game in twelve months. I had ridiculous, unrealistic expectations. But as the game grew, it all developed in an organic nature.

I wanted this to be the ultimate digital boxing experience. That meant making no compromises. As a gamer, I’d ask questions, like why can’t we do this? But when I actually made the game, I realised why certain things were impossible. I had to be a bit more compromising. I could have dialled it back, while still remaining. But would I have done something differently? Nothing to be fair.

SM: What would your younger self say to you if they saw you today?

AH: I’d probably say this person's crazy; they’ve got a screw loose.

SM: Why do you say that?

AH: Because doing this has been absurd, when I told people what I was doing, they laughed. I had no budget, no coding experience, no team and yet I wanted to make the biggest boxing game in the world. The best visuals. It was one absurd thing after another. If I heard me or anyone else say that, I’d have thought they were nuts. In the first two years of development, people said it was a hoax. It can’t or won’t happen. That was the battle in the beginning.

SM: Who is your closest fight friend now?

AH: That’s a tough one. There’s many. Terence Crawford. Ryan Rhodes and I still stay in close contact. I try to watch everyone fight as much as I can, especially if they invite me. I keep in touch with everyone as best I can. It’s a very lucky place to be in. And Katie Taylor has been absolutely amazing. She had the Undisputed logo at the Amanda Serrano fight. Even when I’m with them, I’m still that fanboy wanting to take a picture with them.

SM: Who is the craziest person who’s ever told you plays Undisputed?

AH: Oh, Eminem. That was an insane moment. I met him at an event. I had a handheld gaming machine, and some of the fighters were playing. And Eminem was sitting at he table and he looked up and said ‘oh, is that the boxing game?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘oh, thats dope, I play that.’ That was my holy shit moment.

You can follow Ash Habib here, and find the latest verison of Undisputed here.