Nyamakop
Have you ever imagined, on a visit to a great museum, to burst a wall, with arms full of poorly acquired African artifacts and ready to return them to their legitimate homes? Well, you may soon have this opportunity, thanks to the South African video game studio Nyamakop.
Earlier this month, at the Summer Game Fest, in Los Angeles, the South African video game Nyamakop He presented his latest project:-A game that allows you to become western museum looter.
In this game, players join a team of robin-style thieves that organize elaborate robberies to recover artifacts stolen from museums and repatriate them to the peoples of whom they were removed.
RELOOTED in the near futurewhere “the political powers negotiated a Treaty of Transatlantic Returnspromising the repatriation of African artifacts of the museums. ”
But, says the lore of the game, The Treaty is complicatedbecause only artifacts apply to “public exposure”, leading the museums to circumvent the requirement by placing the pieces in highly watched private collections.
And that’s where players come in, explain: explore a certain installation of a museum, carefully plan an escape route and then, of course, steal the artifact and escape.
Detail: All the artifacts present in the Relooted world are based on real world pieces that are stored in western museums, explains to the creative director of the game, Ben Myres.
In creating the various missions, the development team spent two years of investigation to choose the list of pieces, still detained by western museums. “We have sought artifacts with great stories In terms of how they were looted, ”says Myres.
Myres gives the example of Esteema wooden drum made by the Pokomo people in Kenya to call to worship or celebrate the beginning of a king’s reign. He was confiscated by the British in 1902 and since then remains in the British museum collections, despite the efforts of Kenyan researchers to be returned.
According to Myre, each artifact in the game was faithfully rendered in a 3D model based on available photographs or digitizations – a huge challenge, as Many of the artifacts are inaccessible and kept for a long time.
However, although artifacts are based on real objects, museums in the game are not. Do not expect to find detailed plants and poorly guarded secrets of real -world museums.
Then we have to wait for the official release of the game to try the feeling of being western museum thieves – Something that seems acceptablein a post-GTA world where we got used to being normal to be car thieves and earn points by running over old ladies on the treadmills.
