Twenty-two years ago, my parents and my uncle together got the first PC for the family. My uncle had to work on AutoCAD for his work as a civil engineer, and my mum was studying Fortran and BASIC to add to her teaching prowess at Sree Chitra Thirunal College of Engineering (SCTCE), Thiruvananthapuram. But the 14-year-old me, along with my brother, had a different idea.
We were exposed to computers at school. So there was no novelty around it. What we had was one of the first pieces of NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT in Kerala whirring through the “system”. And just like that, we were pushed into the world of gaming.
But gaming was expensive. We got the opportunity thanks to the minimum requirements of AutoCAD and Revit, and we used it to get into the skin of Tommy Vercetti, Max Payne, CJ, and Jill Valentine. Yet, we barely got our hands on the PC. We had to build our own. By 2006, a not-so-well-known company—at least in the southern tip of India—in the sea of Samsungs, IBMs, and Dells, would form something that would go on to define gaming in India for the next two decades. That revolution was called ‘Republic of Gamers’, or ROG.
For us, Asus was a motherboard maker. And ROG-marked accessories and Crosshair boards were the best because they took care of the gaming aspect, especially in telling us which retail SMPS they worked with that were readily available in the market. At a time when graphics cards and overclocked CPUS overloaded SMPS and burned down PC cabinets, this was an important aspect while building PCs.
By then, PC magazines had informed us that Asus released the ROG G70 gaming laptop on the other side of the globe. It came into a market dominated by Gateway, Vaio, and ThinkPad. In 2026, none of these brands was where they were. Other big computer giants adapted to it, making gaming laptop brands. One weathered it...
ROG celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, kicking off festivities at Computex 2026. From liquid-cooled bricks you could dent cars with to ultra-slim systems, dual-screen workstations, and modular designs, the Republic of Gamers has come a long way.
“Over the past 20 years, ROG has grown alongside the gaming community, from a brand created by gamers for gamers to a complete gaming ecosystem. We have seen the Indian gaming community become more passionate, more diverse and increasingly willing to explore high-performance gaming experiences. What makes this journey special is that the community has not just adopted ROG products, but has actively shaped the conversation around performance, innovation, esports and gaming culture,” Arnold Su, Vice President, Consumer and Gaming PC, ASUS India, told THE WEEK.
He revealed how ROG’s position in the Indian market grew with the sector itself—the gaming PC market grew from around 40,000 units in 2016 to approximately 1 million units in 2025, growing a staggering 25 times! ROG now holds more than 30 per cent of the gaming laptop segment in India.
“The growing adoption of the latest gaming technology is also evident in the strong uptake of the new RTX 5000 series gaming laptops, which now account for more than 25 per cent of current gaming laptop sales. This indicates that the Indian gaming audience is increasingly looking beyond just gaming performance and is showing a growing inclination for the latest technologies, graphics capabilities and high-performance experiences,” Asus India stated.
As ROG crosses two decades of service to the gaming industry, here is a list of recent milestones:
- 2015: Asus launches ROG GX700, the world’s first liquid-cooled gaming laptop, bringing desktop-class thermal engineering and overclocking to a mobile chassis.
- 2017: The ROG Zephyrus (GX501) is debuted as the world’s slimmest gaming laptop.
- 2020: ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 (GX550) is launched as the world’s first 15-inch dual-screen gaming laptop.
- 2023: Asus unveils the ROG Ally series, the brand’s first Windows-based handheld gaming PC—goes on the partner with Microsoft to make the ROG Xbox Ally series two years later.
- 2025: ROG Strix SCAR 18 (G835) is launched as the world’s first tool-less gaming laptop design, with a quick-release frame and Q-latch mechanism for memory and SSD upgrades.
- 2026: The brand releases ROG Zephyrus Duo (GX651), the world’s first 16-inch dual-screen gaming laptop, armed with twin 3K OLED touchscreens.
These are just some of the many firsts. But as a former PC builder and a teenage gamer in the latter half of the 2000s, my association with ROG is more about how it usurped every notion that gaming devices were stuck behind business laptops and server workstations in terms of development. Gaming pushed retail laptop and PC development to such an extreme that benchmarks are now measured in how good your machine works with Cyberpunk 2077 or RDR II on the highest setting.
Arnold Su of Asus India says that ROG’s philosophy of ‘For Those Who Dare’ remains unchanged, i.e., to challenge the status quo and create experiences that take gaming forward. If that is not a great way to encompass how every gamer worth their salt looks at gaming, I do not know what else is.
