Aurion: The mission to create African video-game heroes

A Cameroonian developer hopes to ignite Africa’s burgeoning game scene with a rich and fantastical Kickstarter-funded release.

When Madiba Guillaume Olivier was a boy in the bustling city of Douala, Cameroon, he was the envy of all his friends.

His father owned a video rental shop, and that gave him access not only to the latest movies, but also to video games; when a new title came in, he would rush around the neighbourhood and invite all his mates over to play.

“I had the classic Final Fantasy 7 on PC, and I had a Nintendo, PS1, PS2 and Sega Mega Drive,” he lists over a Skype call. “I played a lot of Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect and Sim City. I think my all time favourite was Total War 2 ... but I only had one controller so we all had to be very patient.”

There was one thing he noticed about the games he played, however: “There weren’t a lot that depicted African heroes”. He’s right of course.

Search around and you’ll find Elena, a warrior princess from Street Fighter III, the ruthless Ugandan arms dealer Drebin 893 in Metal Gear Solid 4, the reincarnated warrior Zasalamel from Soul Calibur … it’s not a huge or varied roster.

When Africa itself has been depicted in mainstream games (beyond the many safari and wildlife hunting sims), it is often through the lens of war and horror: Far Cry 2 depicted gangland battles in a Malaria ravaged wasteland, while Resident Evil 5 provoked controversy for seemingly portraying a colonialist view of the continent as a place of threatening savagery. None of these really explore African mythology, anime or music.

“There are not a lot of African creators,” says Olivier. “It seems like creators focus on white heroes because they are white. They create heroes like them”.

But Olivier wanted to change that, he wanted to rewrite the possibilities of the games industry in Central Africa. In 2003, he and a group of friends who all studied software development together at the University of Yaoundé 1 got together to start making games.

While working as website developers, they taught themselves game design, mostly by becoming active in the French online role-playing game community, Oniro.

In their spare time, they started work on their dream project, Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, an epic role-playing adventure involving two young monarchs, hero Enzo Kori-Odan and his wife, Erine Evou, who find themselves usurped by his evil brother-in-law and must fight to reclaim their kingdom.

The game takes its basic story from African myth and tradition but fuses it with science fiction. The world of world of Auriona exists 10,000 years in the future on a place far from Earth, where they speak an ancient ancestral language. In Madiba’s own words, the concept is simple: “We’re creating our own African fantasy.”

There were many power cuts while we were making the game ... We’ve had to become masters of hitting ctrl and s.

Madiba and his team are not the first African developers to represent the continent in their games. Nigerian studio Maliyo specialises in casual smartphone titles with African themes, while Kenyan team Leti Arts, has titles like Africa’s Legends which adorn simple puzzlers with local myths and narratives.

It’s mobile games, rather than console or computer titles that have really taken off here as phones are cheap, portable and ubiquitous: estimates suggest the continent has around 600m mobile subscribers. However, South Africa has a burgeoning PC-based indie scene, celebrated recently by a Johannesburg spin-off of Berlin’s AMAZE festival – this year it saw a modest hit in the form of pixel art shooter BroForce by Cape Town-based studio Free Lives.

It is Aurion, though, that’s really captured the attention of the wider industry. In 2011, the team started work on the game fulltime, forming their studio, Kiro’o Games. In early February of this year, they put the game into Greenlight, the section of major PC games distribution site Steam where new titles look for votes to get into the main store.

Within weeks it succeeded. Then in September the company launched a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter, looking for €40,000 euros to continue development – it made almost €50,000. Now, the game looks set to be released across the globe next year.

Considering Aurion started as an amateur project with artwork bootlegged from other games, it is now an extraordinarily beautiful 2D adventure, combining combat, exploration and role-playing elements. In this respect, Aurion is a reflection of the games that Olivier grew up playing. The difference is that these games have now been reinterpreted through an African gaze.

Although the fantasy world is tinged with Japanese details, the identity is distinctly African. The mesmerising visuals are bright and rich (Madiba employed local comic book artists and landscape painters) while the soundtrack is a mix of local Bikutsi – a traditional intense dance music genre developed by Yaoundé locals – and modern compositions. “The link with our ancestors is really present,” says Madiba. “We have a great sense of family in Africa, so that’s something we put in the game.”

The team also wanted include local tribal techniques in the fighting sequences – though that proved tricky. “Africa doesn’t have a history of recording its martial arts, like the Shaolin in China, or Bushido in Japan,” explains Madiba.

“So we created our own feline move-set for the hero, based on our anime culture. We really wanted to bring an ‘instinct’ style to the moves.”

Kiro’o Games is now a team of 20, working hard toward the game’s spring 2016 launch date.

In a country where internet bandwidth is severely restricted and electricity supplies can be intermittent, they’ve had to overcame logistical difficulties alien to most Western studios. “There were a lot of power cuts while we were making the game, which is just a way of life here,” explains Madiba. “When I was younger, it was my African mother telling me to stop playing that resulted in many unfinished games. Now it’s the energy problems ... We’ve had to become masters of hitting ctrl and s.”

Due to these restrictions there’s a chance that, although the game is set for a release across European and US markets, a game celebrating Africa may not be playable by Africans. Madiba hopes this is not the case. “If there’s good recognition ,we will have money from across the continent,” he says. “Then we may attract partners interested in local distribution. We are the first people to do what we’re doing, so our aim is to make good games above anything else.”

He’s right – for a culture with such a rich history of oral narratives, it’s strange to consider that Aurion is one of the first homegrown games to really explore it. The project represents an interesting part of Africa’s technological revolution, which for the most part is creating solutions to local problems.

Other recent projects – like GiftedMom, an increasingly popular local app that sends healthcare to pregnant women, or Cardio Pad, a touch-screen medical tablet that enables heart examinations such as the electrocardiogram (ECG) to be performed at remote locations – are more obvious in their social purpose. But Kiro’o, and the ascendent African game industry as a whole, is an important part of a blooming tech startup culture, driven by young people, and increasingly funded by angel investors, large corporations and government enterprise schemes.

So could Enzo Kori-Odan be a hero in more ways than one, helping to herald a new dawn of African game development? There is staggering potential here, considering that Africa has the biggest youth population in the world, with approx 200 million people aged between 15 and 24.

Olivier certainly hopes to encourage a younger generation be part of the technological revolution, urging them to get inside the games they love. “My dream is to become publisher in Africa,” he says. “We want to see Africans playing games designed by Africans, and to create universal stories with universal wisdom. This is just the beginning.”