Latest news with #BenMyres
Hindustan Times
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Relooted: A new videogame invites players to steal back African artefacts
Finally, treasures from Kenya, Ethiopia, Benin and more, will be returned to their rightful homes… at least within the strategy game, Relooted. Players take on the role of Nomali, a parkour expert who works with a small crew, drawn from different African countries for their unique skills. Built by the South African gaming company Nyamakop, the videogame has been seven years in the making (and is now at the post-production stage). 'There is so much we don't know about the history of the African continent, and so much propaganda we've internalised, simply because these artefacts were no longer here — to prove what our civilisations had been or to serve as reminders of what Africa had been capable of,' says Ben Myres, 32, co-founder of Nyamakop and creative director of Relooted. The idea for the game came to him, he says, during a trip to the British Museum with his parents in 2017. 'My mother was horrified to see the Nereid Monument, a 4th-century-BCE sculpted tomb taken from Turkey in the 1800s, on display there,' he says. You should develop a game about this, to show the world just how much was taken by colonisers and never returned, she said. It wasn't only about what was taken, Myres adds. 'It is also about how that looting changed the story Africa tells, about itself.' As a white South African, he adds, it felt important to build this game in a way that represented the people reclaiming their culture. (Storytellers have been attempting to right this record for decades. One of the most evocative examples is a science-fiction tale that seeks to answer the question: What might Africa have been if it had never been colonised? The answer, of course, is Wakanda, a nation leagues ahead of the rest of the world, in the Black Panther comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.) Temples of doom It wasn't only about what was taken from Africa, says Ben Myres. 'It is also about how that looting changed the story Africa tells about itself.' Relooted is set a few decades in the future. A Transatlantic Returns Treaty has recently been signed, to ensure the return of African artefacts to their homelands. Museum administrators around the world, now at risk of losing some of their most prized artefacts, identify a loophole: they only need to return African artefacts from among those on public display. The role of the player, in Relooted, is to break into the museum vaults and return the rest anyway. Determined to get his details right, Myres roped in South African artefacts conservator James Sulter. Working with writer Mohale Mashigo, who is also narrative director of the game, they scoured museum catalogues and news articles, to settle on the 70 real-life artefacts that would feature in Relooted. On the final list is the Ngadji, a sacred drum of the Pokomo people of Kenya, which was taken during British rule in 1902, and believed to have been destroyed. It sits in the British Museum's storage vaults. In 2016, Baiba Mjidho, a Pokomo elder, made the journey to Britain to see it, touch it, and ask for it to be returned. (The British Museum has consistently resisted such demands, offering instead to loan artefacts to their home countries, for display.) Myres and Mohale Mashigo, a writer and narrative director of the game, scoured museum catalogues and news articles, to settle on the 70 artefacts that would feature in Relooted Also in the game is a 19th-century sacred silver buffalo, a talisman meant to protect the king of Benin, and now in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As the team conducted their research, they were particularly struck by the story of the Maqdala treasures. This haul included gold and silver processional crosses, chalices and weapons, as well as silk textiles and jewellery, taken by British troops from the fortress of the Ethiopian king Tewodros II (r. 1855-1868). Ninety of these objects are now housed at the British Museum. 'The sheer size of the loot was surprising to read about. About 15 elephants and 200 mules had to be used to carry it all down the mountain,' says Mashigo. 'We could probably develop six games based on the material we gathered during our research.' Rewriting the record The makers are keen to stress that the videogame isn't designed like a history lesson. The thrill of the heist is what drives it, Myres says. The player takes on the role of Nomali, a parkour expert who must work with a small crew, drawn from different African countries for their unique skills, to steal back the 70 treasures. Alarms go off, doors lock and security drones swoop in to prevent each heist. The game's narrative provides some context for each artefact. Players can choose to delve deeper and learn more about each item at their pace. The aesthetic is African futurist, drawing on real places, people and cultures. Players can expect to see iterations of real places in Johannesburg, with avatars representing the cultures of other African countries such as Angola, Congo, Cameroon, Kenya and Nigeria. 'Authenticity is a big part of the game,' Myres says. 'We wanted to ensure that Africans see these places, recognise them and feel represented in a fundamental way.' The sacred silver buffalo from Benin. ( As part of the effort to right the record, there are notes within the plot that explain what each artefact meant, and still means, to its people. 'I want to correct the notion that these items were 'lost' or 'rescued from obscurity',' Myres says. 'It's not as if there were some guys walking through the savannah who tripped over various artefacts and thought, 'Oh my God, I must take this treasure that the local people don't care about and preserve it back in Europe',' he adds. 'A lot of the time these were precious objects that were worshipped and in use. They were taken as part of a larger destruction of whole civilisations.'
Miami Herald
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
New heist video game lets players reclaim 70 real African artifacts from museums
An independent video game studio from South Africa plans to release a game that allows players to take back 'real African artifacts from Western museums.' Nyamakop, the developers of 'Relooted,' call it an 'Africanfuturist heist game,' according to a June 7 news release from Mooncat Games. Set at the end of the 21st century, the game's plot involves the fictional 'Transatlantic Returns Treaty,' designed to facilitate the return of African artifacts from museums to their rightful owners. The treaty gets amended and museums are only obligated to return artifacts on public display, giving them a loophole to exploit, according to a press release from Nyamakop. The game features 70 artifacts that need to be repatriated, 'all of which exist in real-life and are of huge cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the people they were taken from,' the studio said in the release. All the Western museums in the game, however, are fictional. One of the artifacts players must reclaim is a drum from Kenya. The people of Kenya believed the drum, which held great spiritual significance, had been destroyed, when it reality, it has been in storage at the British Museum for the last century, Ben Myres, the creative director of 'Relooted,' told Epic Games. The first Kenyan person to lay eyes on the drum in 2010 was a descendant of the king from whom it was stolen in 1870, Myres told the outlet. 'We want to give people information about how important these artifacts were to the people they were taken from,' he told the outlet. 'And then people can make their own decisions if they think the artifacts should stay in the museums or not.' Game experience Planning an escape route is just as important as the heist itself, according to the studio. The side scroller-style game allows players to recruit a team with skills that will complement the mission and time to 'case' the museums to plan their route, a process that involves a series of puzzles, creators said. When the artifact is removed, a countdown timer starts, triggering what 'should feel like you're in the fun, montage part of a heist movie,' the studio said. 'Relooted' does not yet have a release date. Nyamakop's first game, Semblance, launched in 2018. It was 'the first African developed IP to launch on any Nintendo console ever' and is ranked as one of Metacritic's top 100 best PC games of 2018, according to the studio.
CNET
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Relooted Is a Heist Game About Returning African Artifacts to Their Home Countries
One of last year's biggest games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, revived a hero from a bygone era -- known for retrieving precious artifacts and delivering them to Western museums. At Summer Game Fest, I got to try a game that flips this script. Relooted is all about a team of African specialists liberating artifacts from museums to bring them back to their home countries. Relooted is a 2D puzzle-platformer which tasks players to pull off increasingly complex heists. There's a basic loop of planning -- entering a museum after hours to prepare an escape route and then picking up the artifact -- which triggers a mad dash to the exit (in my demo, a van waiting to spirit my character away). "The vision was making a really fun heist game that is also an invitation to learn about African culture, history, ethnicities and countries, as well as learn about these real-life artifacts that exist in Western museums," said Ben Myres, creative director on Relooted and co-founder of Nyamakop, a game studio in Johannesburg, South Africa. Returning art and artifacts back to their countries of origin has been a huge conversation in Africa for a long time, Myres noted. He first came up with the idea for Relooted during a family trip to London in late 2017, when his mother spent a day at the British Museum and was shocked to find the Nereid Monument -- a fourth-century BCE structure taken from modern-day Turkey in the 1800s. Furious, she told Myres to make a game out of returning something like the Nereid Monument -- and though extracting entire buildings proved difficult to adapt, Nyamakop dialed the scope down to repatriating artifacts and art pieces. Relooted isn't exactly anti-Tomb Raider or anti-Indiana Jones, Myres clarified, since those heroes often take artifacts from long-lost cultures. In contrast, Relooted includes artifacts taken from living civilizations -- including ones with royal lineages that still exist today. Nyamakop uses real African artifacts, many of which are present in Western museums, in the game as a cool way for players to play out the fantasy of returning them. "There are artifacts in this game that you can go see in the Met Museum in New York," Myres said -- including the Dahome silver buffalo. Nyamakop One artifact in the game highlights the injustice Myres and Nyamakop want players to help set right. The Pokomo people of Kenya once used a massive, sacred drum -- the Ngadji -- to gather the community and celebrate the enthronement of a new king. Believed to have been destroyed in 1910, the drum was actually taken years earlier by the British and now sits locked in a storeroom at the British Museum (presumably this item), according to Open Restitution Africa. The first Kenyan person to see it in a hundred years was the Pokomo prince in 2016, but there's no indication it will be returned to its people. Relooted's rescues focus on artifacts that likewise are locked away in museums and private collections, which aren't even presented publicly for their people to visit. Nyamakop is a diverse studio, and the Relooted team is entirely African -- with a dozen members from countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana and others. Myres, who hails from South Africa, acknowledged the complexity of being a white man working on a game about rescuing African artifacts -- which itself reflects the rich historical complications that Relooted is designed to help players understand. At Summer Game Fest, Nyamakop creative director Ben Myres demoed Relooted to attendees. David Lumb/CNET "In terms of being a white guy working on this, it wasn't Black people who stole artifacts at the end of the day. If you make it a Black person problem, you sort of wash your hands of essentially what Europe and the US and your ancestors did in terms of the repatriation of these artifacts," Myres said. "So these artifacts are cool and important and interesting, and I also think it's our shared responsibility to repatriate them to where they belong." Myres presented the game solo at Summer Games Fest, after another Relooted team member was denied a visa over immigration concerns, as Aftermath reported. Nyamakop I'm putting a team together: Art heists in Relooted The game's creators set out to create a team of specialists that each have a role in Relooted's heists. Every member is from a different country, region and ethnicity based on heist archetypes, Myres said, and players will acquire new members based on specific needs for the next job. But making a heist game was a challenge to design. "There's not a lot of great gameplay reference for non-violent heist games in the vein of films like Ocean's 11," Myres said. "The really great heist films aren't always that violent. There's these plans that go off without a hitch, and so trying to figure out how to do that gameplay was really, really tricky." Few games resembled what Nyamakop aimed to create, though the team drew inspiration from sources as far afield as the parkour movement in Mirror's Edge and the TV show Leverage -- one of the few heist stories that isn't just about stealing money. They found inspiration in Teardown, a 2022 physics-based destruction game where players have unlimited time to plan, but once the action begins, a countdown starts -- a gameplay loop they saw as a perfect fit for their own project. "Specifically we wanted to make it feel like you're in a heist montage for a movie of your own plan," Myres said. Put simply, every level is made up of five to 15 simple puzzles that you have to pre-plan solutions for to escape. You're essentially removing resistance, Myres said. The game places as much importance on planning a route as it does executing it in a parkour-heavy rush to escape. "Every level is like a broken Rube Goldberg machine that you have to solve so you can flow through it," Myres said. Nyamakop Some of those solutions involve gadgets from the near-future, and I asked if that would qualify the game as being Afrofuturist, a science fiction subgenre encompassing works from Sun Ra to Octavia Butler to Marvel's Black Panther. But as Myres pointed out, Afrofuturism is a collage of African cultural references in a made-up place or invented country (like Wakanda). Instead, Relooted is African Futurism, which deals in real people, places and cultures set in the future. The between-missions hideout lies in a Johannesburg 80 years in the future, and other countries in Africa are realistically represented. In a twist on the Western habit of using monolithic stand-ins for Asia and Africa, in Relooted you can visit parodies of Europe and America, called the Old World and the Shiny Place, respectively. "Often when Africa is represented, you see it either in the past as very tribal, or as three mud huts and someone that needs to be saved," Myres said. "Africans don't get to see themselves set in the future. They don't get to dream and imagine a utopia. So this is one of the few examples of real places in Africa imagined in the future."
