In Africa, a new creative energy is seeing tech geeks give up their consoles and day jobs to take to full-time video game development. It’s not a level-playing field but they are engaging a growing hyper-connected audience.
THE YOUNGEST continent in the world has a new obsession – mobile gaming. What’s newer is local content created by Africans for Africa. Take 39-year-old Khumo Moerane, the developer of Kea’s World and founder of the Africa Space Programme Video Games Studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He is using a modern medium to tell old tales, celebrating and preserving African folklore among children and adults. Today, he solely designs and develops African video games. And has reached another level altogether. The scene was set in the late 1980s, in Ga-Rankuwa, a large settlement in the northwest of Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, when his parents bought him his first console, a third-generation 8-bit home video game called Sega Master System.
He was…