Latest news with #Myres
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.
Engadget
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Rescue African artifacts from colonizers' museums in the heist game Relooted
Relooted is a heist game about reclaiming African artifacts from the Western countries that stole them, developed by independent South African studio Nyamakop. Relooted is set in a future timeline where Western nations have signed a treaty to return plundered items to their African regions of origin, but things aren't going to plan. Western leaders are instead hiding the artifacts away in private collections, so it's up to a ragtag crew based in Johannesburg, South Africa, to strategize and steal them back. Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation is key. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. In the Day of the Devs reveal video for Relooted , producer Sithe Ncube cites a wild statistic from a pivotal 2018 report on African cultural heritage, saying, "90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human remains, that aren't in their rightful place." The locations in Relooted are fictional, but the 70 artifacts you have to steal back are real, and they're all currently in Western and private collections, far from their original homes and owners. Nyamakop is one of the largest independent games studios in sub-Saharan Africa, with about 30 developers working on Relooted right now. Its previous game, the globular platformer Semblance , was the first African-developed IP to ever come to a Nintendo console, hitting the Switch in 2018. In order to get Semblance on the Switch, Nyamakop co-founder Ben Myres had to bootstrap his way around the world, buying one-way tickets and finding new partners on the fly in a daisy chain of game festival appearances. Here's how Myres explained it to Engadget at E3 2018: "The entry curve into being an indie game developer in South Africa is like a cliff face. Because you don't have the contacts, the platform holders like Xbox, Sony. You don't have reps that live in your country. The press that matter are all here. There isn't a big enough market locally to sell to, so you have to make works to sell to the West, which means you have to go to Western shows and you have to meet Western press. So basically, if you're not traveling a ton, you're not going to be able to make it." Nyamakop has grown significantly since 2018, and Relooted is an unabashedly African game built by a majority-POC team, Myres and Ncube said in 2024. "There is the thing about making games for Africans — we say that a lot," Ncube told . "We say that should be a thing, we should make games for Africans because we're playing games that were made in the West. But will people even play those games, if you make them? And then if you make games targeting people ... even if you were to make one that's really good, there's no guarantee that you'll have a lot of people playing it. So I think there's some level of confusion, I can say, in terms of unexplored aspects of the African games market." Relooted is in development for Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X/S, and while it doesn't yet have a firm release date, it's available to wishlist.
