Through centuries, Africa’s Masai tribesmen have struggled against marauding predators.
Now a virtual version of that struggle may be happening on an iPhone near you. “Defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!” explains a summary of the game “iWarrior” in Apple’s App Store. Threats include “thundering elephants,” “mighty rhinos,” “swift cheetahs” and “crafty hyenas.”
The game has won praise for its graphics, music and concept. And it illustrates the global influence of Silicon Valley. Technologies like the Internet and companies like Apple are often credited with “flattening” the world economy, giving anyone, anywhere with the requisite skills the opportunity to, say, build a game for the iPhone or create an app on Facebook.
“IWarrior” is “a feed ’em up game, not a shoot ’em up,” as co-creator Eyram Tawia put it. But what may be most remarkable is that “iWarrior” indeed comes out of Africa, the hinterlands of computer innovation. Tawia, a Ghanan, and Wesley Kirinya, a Kenyan, overcame considerable obstacles to develop the first product of their startup, Leti Games.
The game has been described as Africa’s first commercial contribution to the multibillion-dollar computer gaming industry — certainly the first from “true Africa,” as Kirinya put it, smiling. By that he meant the broad swath of Africa south of the Sahara and north of South Africa, with its
Advertisementextended legacy of colonialism and apartheid. Every element of “iWarrior” — the mechanics, the graphics, the music — was created by Leti, which means star in the Ewe language, or outsourced to techies in East Africa or West Africa, Kirinya said.
In Silicon Valley, the collaborations that produced Apple, Yahoo, Google and other companies seem like the natural order of things. For the Leti guys, both 26 years old, the journey has been more of an Odyssey — one that recently led them to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where they hobnobbed with engineers from Electronic Arts (EA.) and hot startups like Playdom.
Leti has been nurtured by the philanthropic arm of SanFrancisco-based Meltwater Group, an Internet business services company, which in 2008 founded the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. Leti is one of two startups in MEST’s fledgling incubator; the other, Streamio, makes music streaming technology for mobile devices.
“We believe talent is everywhere,” said Meltwater founder and CEO Jorn Lyseggen, a Palo Alto resident whose own biography is a tale of globalization. Korean by ancestry and place of birth, Lyseggen was adopted as a small child and was raised by Norwegian parents on a dairy farm. His own talent in math, computing and business led to success in Europe before he decided to move Meltwater’s headquarters to Silicon Valley to compete in the massive American market.
Africa’s talent, Lyseggen said, represents an untapped resource that has lacked the opportunity MEST was established to provide. Tawia was selected for MEST’s first class of 17 fellows from hundreds of applicants, Lysegger said.
The son of an art professor, Tawia created fanciful comic books called “Sword of Sygos” in junior high and later learned to program on a clunky computer while reading Russ Walters’ “Secret Guide to Computers.” At age 17, partnering with two friends, Tawia helped create a distance-learning program for Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which he would later attend. They were paid $700 and promptly bought a better computer.
While his friends pursued studies in medicine — the socially favored course for bright young Africans — Tawia stuck to computers. He developed software for the radio industry and turned “Sword of Sygos” into a 3-D game for his senior thesis.
Later, he was stunned when the local newspaper reported — wrongly, thought Tawia — that Africa’s first 3-D computer game, called “Adventures of Nyangi,” had been created 2,600 miles to the east by a Nairobi University student named Wesley Kirinya.
A Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, commented on Kirinya’s achievement to Cox Newspapers at the time: “People will say, ‘Kenyans, computer games? No, we don’t make computer games.’ He has shown that computer games are not a preserve of the Western world.”
Through a tech blogger, Tawia contacted Kirinya and discovered a kindred spirit.
Kirinya, as a teen, was steeped in console games like “Super Mario,” “Streetfighter” and “Lara Croft,” and augmented his formal education with computer books and manuals. “I knew I wanted to make games,” a pursuit many people considered frivolous, he said. “I felt all alone. There was a lot of alone time.”
A demo of “Nyangi” — which Tawia describes as “Lara Croft in Africa” — may not impress consumers of EA. titles, but techies would recognize it is an impressive achievement for a single programmer, Lysegger said.
Tawia and Kirinya would correspond by e-mail for 18 months before meeting in person. Not only did MEST pay for the ticket to bring Kirinya to Ghana, it later awarded Leti $100,000 in seed financing.
The “iWarrior” game, the Leti guys say, is only a start.
Contact Scott Duke Harris at sdharris@mercurynews.com or 408-920-2704.
5 Things about Leti Games
1. The startup was founded last year by Eyram Tawia of Ghana and Wesley Kirinyaof Kenya.
2. Tawia and Kirinya, both 26, were unaware of each other’s existence when each was credited with being the first African to create 3-D computer games.
3. Its “iWarrior” game is available on the iPhone. Another game, “KiJiJi,” has been developed for Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices.
4. The non-profit foundation of Meltwater Group, a San Francisco-based Internet services company for businesses, has supported it through the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, which it established in Ghana in 2008.
5. “Leti means a Star” “” in the Ewe language “” “and that’s what we hope to be in the world’s mobile games arena,” says its Web site.
Source: Mercury News reporting and the Leti Games Web site.
I so much love this development, wished I had an iPhone in order to get a feel of the app 😦 but notwithstanding… this is lovely! Africans! We’re getting there!
Chronicles of Ademola Morebise 