This article was originally published on February 27, 2026 - read the full issue

By Marie Dealessandri

Relooted, from South African studio Nyamakop, launched earlier this month after a nine-year development journey. The idea of a heist game reclaiming stolen African artefacts from western museums came from a family trip that Ben Myres – Nyamakop's CEO, creative director and co-founder – took to London. His mum was infuriated to see the Nereid Monument there, an ancient Lycian tomb from the south of Turkey that was dismantled and rebuilt brick-by-brick inside the British Museum. After pivoting to smaller-scale items, the idea for Relooted was born.

"I'd been interested in making African-themed and African-inspired games for a long time, but there was absolutely zero evidence that there was an audience or a market for it," Myres tells us. "When Aurion: Legacy Of The Kori-Odan came out from Cameroon, that got a little bit of buzz, but it still didn't do great.

"I had this idea in late 2017, and then in 2018 Black Panther came out and I sensed a shift in the waters, that maybe there was this interest. Because in pretty much every single medium except games, we have examples of [this] content doing really well, particularly in the west, from novels to music, to movies and TV."

A Nielsen study showed Myres that 73 per cent of African Americans play videogames so he formed an hypothesis: that the way to succeed making African-inspired games was not to make them for an audience on the continent ("like many of my very courageous African colleagues do," Myres says, pointing to the excellent work of Limpho Moeti and Hugo Obi, among many others) but rather for a western and/or African diasporic audience.

Canary in the coal mine

Myres says he considered Nyamakop to partly be a "canary in the coal mine" for Africa-based game makers, trying to understand why African-themed games hadn't reached mainstream success.

"Relooted gives us a good reference point for PC and console – it's a continuation and a response to previous attempts to make African-inspired games," he adds, saying his first theory was to test a concept that so inherently needed to be African that you couldn't remove the theme from it. "The second theory was that maybe the production value had never been good enough, and so that's why we spent so much time polishing [Relooted].

"And then the third one, we were on Chris Plante's podcast, Post Games, and he said something which really gave me chills, because that's how I've been thinking about it for close to a decade: 'There are a lot of fun games which aren't important. There's a lot of important games which aren't fun. There are very few games which are important and fun. Relooted is one of them.' The theme and the concept were so great, but we could have made that game in two years without it being fun, right? We spent an enormous amount of time making it fun. It is a weirdly experimental gameplay loop. Very few games require you to understand the entire layout of a level in order to play the level.

"So when I talk about being the canary in the coal mine, it's so that we can all learn from it because we want to be, as a broader African game development community, very efficient when we're trying to make these games, because otherwise all of our studios will cease to exist."

More work to be done

Perhaps unsurprisingly in 2026, speaking out against colonial exploitation has led to Relooted being review bombed at launch, and Nyamakop's staff being targeted by a hate campaign.

"Working on Relooted has made me – especially as a white person – come to terms at a more fundamental level with the fact that the games industry [has platforms that are] in some ways very deeply, systemically, racist and anti-progressive," Myres says. "Many people point out the horrific reviews and comments on Steam but what is somewhat more terrifying is what [we] report that Valve moderation marks as within the bounds of their terms of service. We're not talking about people in the games industry throwing around slurs – which does happen as well – but about, at a systems level, a disinterest in enforcing basic levels of [humanity]. Or, like, they're perfectly happy to allow this sort of stuff to fester as long as it makes money."

Releasing Relooted during Black History Month was very much intentional for Nyamakop but again Myres notes that this wasn't particularly facilitated by Valve's platform due to the high amount of other events happening on Steam in February.

"I know it's an American-specific thing, but it's still absurd. There's Steam Next Fest and then one of the big sales – there is almost no space for things like Black History Month to effectively exist and be prioritised on the major sales platforms. There's a lot more work that needs to be done. And I think, you know, regardless of if there's an audience for games like this, I think we deserve to be able to make flops without being called slurs – not that Relooted is a flop, but, you know, it's been a deeply troubling realisation."

In fact, Relooted's launch went "reasonably well," Myres says. Review bombing impacted the game's initial user score on Steam but things evened out since (though the damage is still painfully clear on Metacritic). The title has also found an audience via Game Pass. But beyond the sales and reviews, Relooted has attracted widespread attention and has had a real cultural impact.

"What's fascinating is the amount of mainstream press interest we get. We've spoken to BBC, Al Jazeera, The New York Times... Some of the biggest outlets in the world, talking about a videogame when usually people don't care about indie games! There's almost more interest outside of games than there is inside of games."

Half a dozen museums have also reached out to collaborate, with Nyamakop putting together a half-day programme at UCLA's Fowler Museum in March – a museum aware of its looted African artefacts.

"Even if the game sold millions of copies, it was always going to have a cultural impact which vastly exceeded its financial impact."

Championing African talent

Myres mentions that the talent pool for making games is still small in South Africa, so it was a real challenge finding staff on the continent to work on Relooted.

"At the time we started development, the South African games industry was 95 per cent white men in a country which is 90 per cent people of colour. It just didn't feel apt to do that for a game about African cultural heritage."

Nyamakop ended up gathering a team from across the continent, which took a long time ("I was literally on ArtStation searching by country and skillset, going through every single name on that list," Myres recalls). The team peaked at 30 full-time collaborators – some of them from adjacent industries, working on a game for the very first time.

"Having worked on a game of this scale and production value enables other studios to hire them and use that ability. It's been interesting to see how people have filtered into other companies or done their own thing. The goal, at least in South Africa, should always be Black-owned and Black-run studios, but it's very difficult to do if you've never made a game before, particularly in a country with the history South Africa has."

This article was originally published on February 27, 2026 - read the full issue