31/05/2026

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Malaysian Paper

theSunday Special II ON SUNDAY MAY 31, 2026

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Ted Sun with the Saidina board game. – ALL PICS BY AMIRUL SYAFIQ/THESUN

How Sahibba and Saidina became Malaysian board game icons o Company managing and creative director speaks to theSun about how flagship products survived five decades amid onslaught of digital options

L before smartphones, tablets and online multiplayer games became part of childhood, a teacher noticed a problem that would eventually inspire one of Malaysia’s most enduring board game companies. Founded in 1976, Syarikat Permainan Malaysia (SPM) began with a simple but ambitious idea – creating local board games that reflected the Malaysian language, culture and learning environment. For its founder Ting Sie Bing, that observation became what his son Ted Sun, who is now the managing and creative director, describes as a “light bulb moment”. Nearly five decades later, the company behind iconic titles such as Sahibba and Saidina has become deeply woven into Malaysian childhood memories. Yet beyond nostalgia, the company’s survival tells a bigger story about adaptation, reinvention and the continued relevance of physical play in an increasingly digital society, as revealed during an interview with theSun . 0 From invention to a national household brand According to Ted Sun, the company’s journey did not begin as a large-scale commercial ambition, but as an inventive response to a local need. At the time, imported Western games dominated the market, while there were very few locally-developed educational games in Bahasa Melayu. “My father realised there was no proper game that truly worked for Bahasa Melayu. “The company’s first major product eventually became Sahibba, now widely recognised as Malaysia’s local equivalent of a word-building board game. Ű BY QIRANA NABILLA MOHD RASHIDI newsdesk@thesundaily.com ONG

“But

the

path

was

not

straightforward.” Ted Sun revealed that the company initially faced legal objections because its earliest game title resembled “Scrabble”, raising intellectual property concerns related to “passing off”. The game later adopted the name “Sahibba”, combining the words “sahib” (Lord) and “bahasa” (language). “That was how the name came about,” he said. Following the success of Sahibba, the company introduced Saidina, a locally inspired property trading game influenced by Monopoly-style gameplay but infused with regional identity and themes. Ted Sun described the company as a “tiny inventive giant”, small in operational scale, but backed by brands that remain deeply familiar to Malaysians across generations. 0 Teaching Malaysians how to play One of the company’s biggest challenges in the early years was not manufacturing the games, but convincing Malaysians to play them. In the late 1970s and 1980s, locally-developed board games were still relatively unfamiliar territory for many consumers.

A production line worker stacking board game money to assemble the Saidina set.