Racing to the Top: Spektra Games' Viral Breakthrough

Spektra’s story begins in a small Turkish town where co-founders Kadir Danışman and Doğukan Şen first built games in an internet café. By 2020, they formalized Spektra Games, not as a grand startup vision, but simply to pay taxes on their early game revenues.

Their first car-parking game became a pandemic-era success, scaling to millions of downloads through App Store Optimization (ASO) alone. The formula was clear: great graphics, realistic physics, and a viral edge.

"We didn't have funds for marketing, so we leaned into ASO and organic growth. Racing was a natural fit because players were already searching for those types of games." - Kadir Danışman, co-founder and CEO of Spektra Games

A sequel introduced multiplayer, building a thriving Discord community, and attracting venture capital. With funding secured, Spektra became a more ‘professional’ studio with an ambitious mission: to become a category leader in mobile racing games. But that wasn’t the end of it…

Riding Virality, and Surviving the Crash

By early 2025, revenue from older titles had declined, forcing a hard reset. The team killed underperforming projects and put all resources into one game: Highway Racer Pro (HRP).

Inspired by Assetto Corsa’s traffic racing mode, HRP brought console-style graphics and physics to mobile while remaining accessible on low-end devices. To deliver on that ambition, Spektra chose Heroic Labs’ game tech, Nakama and Hiro, as the backbone for multiplayer, metagame features, and scalable infrastructure.

"We made the mistake of working on three games at once. With Highway Racer Pro, we put the entire studio's focus on one title." - Kadir Danışman, CEO of Spektra Games

With funds running low, Spektra took a calculated risk: skip traditional user acquisition and bet everything on TikTok. They recruited a young car enthusiast to post daily gameplay clips, showcasing HRP’s console-quality graphics and gameplay on mobile. A week later, one video exploded to a million views. From there, momentum snowballed: 10 million monthly views and 350,000 pre-registrations.

Highway Racer Pro shot to #1 in the US racing charts and dominated in 45 other countries when it launched, all before spending a single dollar on traditional marketing.

But the same virality that propelled HRP forward almost tore it apart. Falling into the “good problems to have” bucket, pre-registrations triggered a day-1 player surge far greater than expected. While Nakama’s infrastructure scaled horizontally to handle the concurrent user load, a cascading failure occurred when a third-party analytics service became overloaded, creating a dependency bottleneck that brought down critical game systems within minutes of launch.

"We expected launch day to be a party. Instead, we spent a few hours coding side by side with Heroic to stabilize everything" - Kadir Danışman recalled

Heroic Labs’ engineers swooped in immediately. Hopping on calls every 15 minutes, they diagnosed that a third-party integration was creating a massive CPU load. The issue? The remote config service was designed for client-side processing, but it was being called server-side. After implementing emergency caching solutions and addressing the root cause, Heroic’s hands-on support helped scale the game within hours.

What could have been a catastrophic launch instead became a success story of resilience.

The Road Ahead

Spektra’s sights are set on dominating underserved niches in racing by combining high-fidelity graphics, viral growth, and community-first design. Next steps include expanding their LiveOps capabilities, refining monetization, and exploring cross-platform opportunities to bring their vision to even more players.

"With limited resources, you learn how to prioritize. Heroic lets us focus on making the best racing experience possible, not firefighting." - Kadir Danışman

At Heroic Labs, we’re proud to have been in the driver’s seat with them, from multiplayer and data infrastructure to hands-on troubleshooting during HRP’s stampeding launch. Spektra’s story proves that small studios can not only compete with industry giants, but also win.

If there’s one lesson in Spektra’s story, it’s this: with clear focus and the right partner, even constraints can turn into a competitive edge.