To process his grief, actor Abubakar Salim became a game developer
Plus: Two of gaming's pioneers are returning to the genre they helped make great.
Abubakar Salim grew up playing video games. Later, he became famous in the gaming community for voicing the main character in the 2017 blockbuster Assassin’s Creed Origins.
But he’s an actor by trade, and didn’t expect to become a game developer, until he had an epiphany while grappling with the death of his father.
“I think for a while I've been trying to figure out how to process my grief and how to kind of get through it ” he recently told me at a Nintendo-hosted game showcase in San Francisco.
“I realized that, actually, the best way of doing it is not through a film or for a TV show. It is through a game.”
Tales of Kenzera: Zau, out April 23 for PC and console, is the side-scrolling adventure of a young shaman, who makes a deal with the god of death to put three spirits to rest in the hopes of bringing his father back from the dead. Players can switch Zau’s power set from a fiery sun mask to an enemy-crystalizing moon mask, in a game that draws inspiration for its setting from African myths. The game has been in development for four years at Salim’s start-up, Surgent Studios, with a team of 20 people that’s recently grown to about 30.
Tales is also a Metroidvania, the long-running action-exploration genre that’s been unusually abundant in 2024 (and covered here on Game File a lot). To recount its origin story, Salim recalls a moment several years ago when he was playing another Metroidvania, Moon Studios’ acclaimed Ori and the Blind Forest, on his Switch. He was in South Africa to film the HBO series Raised by Wolves when he became enchanted with the dark, dream-like game.
“I just fell in love with this world, And I was like, ‘There's something here, something quite authentic and mysterious about this, which, as I'm going on this journey and taking this time, this isolated feeling, that's what makes sense.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, cool, this is how I need to present the story that I've been wanting to tell for ages.”
Just one problem.
Salim may have been in an Assassin’s Creed, but he had no idea how to make a video game.
What followed, he said, was a lot of “sliding into so many people’s DMs, asking so many crazy questions.”
“All I knew was I had a passion for it and I wanted to do it,” he said. “I had a lot of people… say, ‘Don't do it. It's crazy. It's unforgiving.’
“But I think that's in every art form, right? I think even when it comes to film: Making a film is almost a thankless job. Really, truly, you make a film because you want to tell a story. You want to do it.”
Making a game has changed how Salim looks at the ones he plays.
“It's like when I learned that The Simpsons was political,” he said. There’s no going back.
“Now I know what makes a game and what you have to think about: the design of it, level design, locomotion and all that kind of jazz.”
Approaching Tales’ launch, Salim is hoping for a strong release, while fielding some surprises:
Some have been good, like how the game has already helped others who’ve played it process their grief.
Some haven’t been good, like the game’s inclusion on a player-made list on Steam of games to avoid, now subscribed to by more than 300,000 Steam users. The list recommends people don’t play games whose creators worked with the successful but small game narrative and consulting firm, Sweet Baby Inc, which is blamed for making games more “woke” through the inclusion of characters and themes from marginalized people (Drama around the list has amounted to a harassment-filled culture war, essentially a Gamergate 2.0; and its supporters’ depiction of Sweet Baby has flown in the face of reporting, including here, that diversity in game content is the result of decisions by internal teams, not outside writing firms).
Publishers whose games are on the list, including Sony and Warner Bros, have kept quiet about it publicly. Asked if he’s worried it’ll impact sales, Salim said, “Not really.”
“I have no control over what people think or feel,” he said. “What I can essentially do, though, what I feel like I have control over, is delivering an experience that is authentic and true.”
He added: “And I feel like there will always be someone or something out there that will mar it or see it in one way or another.”
As for what Tales of Kenzera will do for him, Salim isn’t expecting riches or even a full catharsis.
“I didn't want to make a game because the game industry has lots of money, or because I like playing games.
“I wanted it because I needed to tell the story of my father, and I needed to tell the story about my grief and represent it in a way that feels authentic and real, rather than necessarily the five stages, which everyone seems to think is the way through it.
“Even though it's ten years, I don't think I'll ever accept my father's passing,” he said.
“But I'll get used to it.
“And I think that's why we did a Metroidvania, because, in a Metroidvania, you're thrown into a world you have no idea about. You’re sort of lost as you go along, you have to figure it out as you go along, but you get used to it after some time.”
Correction - Tuesday, April 9, 12:30p: Fixed the spelling of Salim’s first name.
Item 2: A push for mid-size games
“We had been running 200- and 300-, 100- person studios,” veteran game designer Warren Spector recently told me. “Never wanted to do it again.”
Spector and Greg LoPiccolo, another long-time game developer, also met with me at Game Developers Conference last month and are also trying to drum up excitement for gaming projects that are less than gargantuan.
They run OtherSide Entertainment, a mid-sized studio where they’re developing two projects, one of them Thick as Thieves, an upcoming multiplayer take on the immersive sim genre they helped pioneer early in their careers through work on the likes of System Shock, Thief and Deus Ex. In the new game, which is about a year into development, each player is a lone thief trying to pull off a heist while hoping to not get stymied by the other players.
OtherSide was purchased last year by Aonic, a fairly new gaming and tech company. In January, Aonic announced a publishing label, Megabit, that is focused on working with mid-sized studios.
Some of Aonic’s founders have a background in corporate finance, others in games, which director of publishing Benjie Clarke told Game File is the company’s “secret sauce.”
Aonic bought OtherSide, as well as game studios nDreams and Tiny Roar, last year, and reported €87.5 million ($94 million) in revenue for 2023, more than half of that from its “tech” division which is focused on user acquisition services. (In its most recent financial report, the company says it has made a “strategic move to sacrifice short-term profitability in the Games segment” as it spends on games and “harvests” its tech investments.)
Spector and LoPiccolo were at GDC to promote Megabit moreso than their games. “We get genuinely good feedback from executives at Aonic,” Spector says of the notes he’s getting from Aonic bosses about OtherSide’s games. He praises the company for investing at a time when much of the industry is pulling back. “So far, so good,” he added. “You have no reason to believe me, but it's true. “
Item 3: In brief…
🎮 Xbox has “formed a new team dedicated to game preservation,” according to Xbox president Sarah Bond, in an email to staff first reported by Windows Central.
In 2021, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer told me that preservation of games was something he hoped the entire industry would improve on, potentially through broader adoption of emulators: “I think in the end, if we said, ‘Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry.”
Windows Central also reported more changes to the Xbox leadership team, with veteran executive Kareem Choudhry, who led a team focused on new gaming tech, exiting Microsoft after 26 years.
🇨🇺 Saviorless, released on PC and console last week, is one of the rarest kind of video games: a Cuban-made game that’s getting an international release. It might even be the first of its kind, the AFP reports.
🤔 Apple will allow gaming emulators in its App Store marketplace after years of policy to the contrary, The Verge reports.
Apple notes to emulator developers: “You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws.
🃏 Balatro, the single-player digital card game that some people (hi!) are obsessed with, just received its first major patch, which tweaks the rules around many of its powerful joker cards—and ensures players can buy a joker at the start of every game. VGC has the full patch notes.
Item 4: An Assassin’s stealthy return
Abubakar Salim loved voicing Assassin’s Creed Origins protagonist Bayek, and liked the franchise so much that he tried to find a way to be part of 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
He pulled it off, though not quite the way he planned.
“I wanted to play a random soldier,” Salim told me. “I thought it would be hilarious. You hear the voice of Bayek in Valhalla, and you're like: What's he doing here as a foot soldier?”
That idea had seemed more plausible than Salim returning in Valhalla as Bayek. Origins is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, circa 49 BC. Valhalla is largely set during the Viking invasions of England in the 9th century, long after Bayek’s death.
But—spoiler—Salim does reprise his famous role in Valhalla in a well-hidden moment.
While Valhalla was in development, Salim heard from writers on the game with whom he’s friendly: “The writing team was like, ‘Dude, we've got this really cool idea. We want to do this letter and want to make it really authentic.’”
The result: At the end of an extensive side quest in Valhalla, players find a letter written by Bayek, which is read out loud in-game by Salim.