Relooted: The African Game Turning Artifact Repatriation Into a Bold Heist

In recent years, demands for the repatriation of looted African artifacts from Western countries have intensified, driven by growing global awareness of colonial-era injustices. Now, a new video game is offering players a chance to virtually engage with that struggle by staging digital heists to retrieve stolen treasures and return them to their rightful owners, in a scenario reminiscent of Erik Killmonger’s iconic museum scene in Black Panther.

African Game Studio Turns Artifact Repatriation Into a Bold Heist

Earlier this month, at the annual Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, South African game studio Nyamakop unveiled Relooted, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer inspired by classics like Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia. The game follows a team of modern-day Robin Hood-style thieves as they stage daring heists to retrieve stolen African artifacts from Western museums and repatriate them to their original owners.

As described on its listing on the Epic Games marketplace, Relooted is set in a near-future world where global powers have signed a “Transatlantic Returns Treaty,” mandating the return of African artifacts held in museums, but there’s a catch: the treaty only applies to items on public display. In response, museums shift many prized pieces into private, high-security collections, prompting players to step in, plan the perfect heist, and steal the artifacts back.

“All of the artifacts in Relooted are based on real-world pieces in Western museums,” explained Ben Myres, the game’s creative director, in a post on Epic Games. To bring authenticity to the missions, Nyamakop’s team spent two years researching and curating a manageable list from the hundreds of artifacts still held abroad.

“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.”

One such example is the Ngadji drum, created by the Pokomo people of Kenya. Used in spiritual ceremonies and to mark royal ascensions, it was seized by the British in 1902 and has remained in the British Museum ever since. Despite repeated efforts by Kenyan researchers to secure its return, the drum remains out of reach.

“The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s,” Myres 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.”

To preserve historical accuracy, each artifact in the game was carefully recreated in 3D based on photographs or scans, no easy feat, given the limited access to many of the objects, some of which have sat hidden in storage for decades. However, while the artifacts are modeled on real pieces, the museums featured in the game are fictional.

The Rise Of the African Game Industry

The African games industry is experiencing significant growth, particularly in the mobile gaming sector, with revenues projected to exceed $1 billion in 2024. This growth is driven by increasing internet penetration, access to affordable smartphones, and a wave of new studios developing culturally relevant content for African audiences. Relooted is a prime example of how African developers are leveraging this momentum, not only to tell powerful, locally grounded stories but to push the continent further onto the global gaming stage.

Nyamakop, headquartered in Johannesburg, is one of the largest independent game studios in sub-Saharan Africa. The Relooted development team is pan-African, with contributors from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. The studio previously developed Semblance in 2018, the first African-developed original IP to be released on a Nintendo console.

Relooted has not yet received a release date, but a glimpse of its stylized gameplay is available in the announcement trailer. With its blend of action, history, and justice, the game offers a bold reimagining of a global debate, giving players not just entertainment but a sense of cultural reclamation.