Cosplay is where fandom comes to life. Through costume, craft and performance, fans embody the characters they love – transforming digital designs into real-world identities. It’s a form of play, expression and community, showing how game worlds can live on in conventions, photoshoots and everyday creativity.
Sameer Bundela, also known as Sameer Tikka Masala, is a professional cosplayer and the first person to represent India at the Cosplay World Crown Championship in the US. When he began over 13 years ago, geek culture in India was still developing. Today, it’s part of a billion-dollar global industry.
In 2023, Bundela was commissioned by Blizzard Entertainment to create a cosplay of Inarius, the rogue archangel from Diablo IV, for BlizzCon. The costume was one of his most technically demanding builds. He remade it several times to capture the illusion of flowing, metallic fabric.
Video game characters aren’t designed for real-world physics or proportions, which makes translating them into wearable forms both an artistic and engineering challenge.
Bundela draws on his background as a film propmaker, crafting armour from lightweight EVA foam instead of heavy 3D prints. Every element is hand-carved and painted to resemble beaten, weathered metal – a process that took hundreds of hours.
Curator Notes
Sameer Bundela specialises in armour cosplays. It’s a niche that highlights his expertise in foam carving and crafting – but there’s a deeper reason too.
As an artist, Bundela prides himself on realism and capturing an accurate likeness. Due to the lack of diversity in videogame characters, Bundela exclusively cosplayed masked characters in the first ten years of his career.
“Ten years ago, the push for diversity was not there,” says Bundela. “If you saw an Indian character on TV, it would be for comic relief.”
In 2024, Bundela was commissioned by Blizzard Entertainment to appear at Blizzcon, cosplaying the character Rahier from Diablo IV: Vessel for Hatred. Raheir is a stalwart blacksmith and mercenary-for-hire, and the first canonically South Asian videogame character he had ever cosplayed. It marked the first time Bundela had cosplayed without a mask – though far from the last.
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