A New Video Game Allows You to Repatriate African Artifacts by Looting Western Museum

Have you ever imagined yourself, on a visit to a major museum, busting through a wall, arms full of ill-begotten African artifacts and ready to return them to their rightful homes? No? Well, you may soon have the chance, thanks to South African video game studio Nyamakop.

Earlier this month at the annual Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, Nyamakop unveiled its latest project, Relooted, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer—think early Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia games—where players join a crew of Robin Hood-esque thieves staging elaborate heists to take back stolen artifacts from Western museums, and repatriate them to the peoples from whom they were taken.

As Nyamakop lays out on the game’s listing on the online video game marketplace Epic Games, Relooted takes place in a near future where “the political powers that be brokered a Transatlantic Returns Treaty, promising the repatriation of African artifacts from museums.” But the hitch in the treaty is that it only applies to artifacts on “public display,” leading museums to circumvent the requirement by placing the pieces in highly guarded private collections. And that’s where players come in: scoping out a given facility, carefully constructing an exit route, and then, of course, stealing the artifact and escaping.

As Ben Myres, the creative director of the game, explained to Epic in a news post, all of the artifacts in Relooted are based on real-world pieces in Western museums. In crafting the various missions, the developer team spent two years of research narrowing done the list of which pieces, of the hundreds still held by Western museums, into something manageable.

“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” he said. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them.”

By way of explanation, Myres pointed to the Ngadji drum, a wooden drum made by the Pokomo people in Kenya to call for worship or celebrate the start of a king’s reign. It was confiscated by the British in 1902 and has since remained in the British Museum’s collections despite the efforts of Kenyan researchers to have the piece returned.

“The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s,” Myre said. “The person who saw the drum was a descendant of the king it was taken from originally. So these aren’t artifacts that were just found in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These were still active cultures.”

According to Myre, each artifact in the game was faithfully rendered into a 3D model based on available photos or scans, a challenge given that many of the artifacts are inaccessible and have long been in storage.

However, while the artifacts are based on real objects, the museums in the game are not.

While Nyamakop is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the developer team includes people from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Relooted is the studio’s second game; the first was Semblance, a 2018 game that became the first African-developed original IP to release on a Nintendo game console ever. It is one of the largest independent game developers in sub-Saharan Africa, according to its website.

“There are not a lot of opportunities for people here to professionally make video games,” Myres said. “So if you’re offering people here that opportunity, and it so happens that it’s an African-inspired thing—which you don’t get to see a lot of in games—people are pretty, pretty excited about doing that.

Relooted has yet to announce a release date, but a rendering of its game play is visible in the trailer that accompanied its announcement: