What Would a Black AAA Game Look Like?

Video games are my favorite form of entertainment and it's disappointing that I have to wait every once in a blue moon for a game with a character that looks like me. The industry has gotten better at this in the past couple years, but it's still pretty small in the grand scope of things.

We have video games starring black characters and telling a black narrative, but not so oddly, none of these characters were created by black people. Games like Mafia III, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Dandara, and the upcoming Beyond Good and Evil 2, all feature black characters but the titles were developed by white or Japanese developers. As mentioned in my Black Panther review it would be fantastic if we could get a AAA title on par with Black Panther. A high-budget game that embraces black culture and gets a colossal amount of black people supporting it. I love video games, but it's crazy how there are really no black people in the medium and no significant games developed by black people. The closest we ever got was Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan that was developed by a Cameroon team, but even the some of the most hardcore of gamers would be like "Oreo of who?" if you ask them about it. In every other medium we can name people such as Zhane or Octavia Butler in literature, Motown or Def Jam records for music and not forgetting a ton of musicians. And we have people like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Tyler Perry, Oprah, and Issa Rae for TV, but when it comes to video games, no one really and I say it's long overdue.

Mafia III's Lincoln Clay. One of the recent black characters created by a white Western studio.

It would be astounding if we could get a big budget game with black people in charge and seething of black culture. I thought it would be fun to theorize what a game like this would be like. Firstly, I have to ask what kind of game would this be?

While Black Panther was a celebration of where all black people can trace their roots, Africa, I want this game to be a celebration of black culture across the diaspora. I'm going with an action-adventure title. Something that provides a mix of genres and have more of a mainstream reach without it being too mainstream if that makes sense. You'll have the choice to play as a boy or a girl who gets swept in a magical journey that takes them from the UK to the US, Caribbean, South America. You can customize your character throughout the journey and there would tons of hair options far from the afros and cornrows with no hang time. There will be dozens of skin tone options and the brown ones will not make your character look like he or she was bathing in fish grease.

As far as the gameplay is concerned the cycle of gameplay would be something like this:

• Story cutscene
• Dungeon or city exploration with light platforming
• Combat
• Puzzle
• Boss Fight
• And a new gameplay section to switch things up like a racing or minigame segment, that can be placed before or after any of the above segments

It would also be one of the only games ever if not the first to include debates about the pronunciation of plantain and have Spades as a minigame.

Now a game of this magnitude needs a strong team and since this is my game I'm putting myself to lead the development, but I will need help so I'm also recruiting Momo Pixels to help me out. Momo Pixels released the "Don't Touch My Hair" game last year called Hair Nah. Hair Nah went viral leading to many black women to participate in some catharsis by swatting away the hands of white people and other non-white people (because Hair Nah did feature an Osaka location) treating them like a petting zoo. Momo Pixels designed the game, created the pixel art for it, and organized the team. She also works at an advertising agency as an art director so she has experience in that as well.

Speaking of art I want a very distinct art style for this game. Nothing particularly cartoony. I want realistic proportions in here. I know games of this magnitude will have multiple artists and animators, but for my choice of a distinct art style these are the people I would go to.

Free Mech

My first choice is freemechanism. I started following this Chicago artist on Deviantart years ago and now following him on instagram. He has a very distinct almost comic book like art style to me that I see a little bit of Saga in. I'm in love with both his sci-fi and grounded designs.

Mattahan

Another artist I would go with is Mattahan, real name Paul Davey. Now Mattahan already has experience in video games as he's been working on a runner called Earth Night which will release sometime this year. Mattahan was my favorite artist to watch at one point and I definitely wouldn't mind having him on my team.

Adrian Wilkins

He has experience working on games like Mattahan, but he also has has experience working on a AAA game as he was a concept artist for Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Now we need an art director to manage this team and while Momo Pixels is an art director she's not an art director of a video game studio but someone who is is Lisette Titre. She is the current Art Manager at Double Fine and was the art manager at Ubisoft before then. She has been on the cover of Black Enterprise 2011.

So someone's going to have to write the story for this game. This took me quite a while to think about. I don't read a lot of black authors who write science fiction and fantasy, but have been meaning to correct that and most of the ones I have read I didn't like their work. The ones I do like are Octavia Butler who's deceased, Nnedi Orkarafor, author of the Binti books, but I don't think she's a right fit for this, and Roxanne Gray who wrote the World of Wakanda comic and like Nnedi I don't see her with this. Looking into TV and film didn't give me better results, but then I came up with something. It might be weird, but I think Donald Glover could write a weird, but funny fantasy adventure given his writing skills in Atlanta.

We're going to need some voice acting on this project and this was even harder for me than the writer. There aren't many black voice actors in gaming and looking outside of gaming I'm just particularly unfamiliar with voice actors, but I do know that I want Cree Summer on my team. I'm just nostalgic for her because of A Different World and all the cartoon characters she did in the 90s, plus she's already done some game work as she was Tatjana in Arc the Lad Twilight of the Spirits and Dr. Young in Batman Arkham Asylum. Beyond her I really don't know who I would want.

Now this team will need a lot of programmers. I really don't know who to put for this. I recall seeing a black guy that programmed at Naughty Dog in the Uncharted 2 Behind the scenes video in the game and since he worked on something as big as Uncharted 2 he'd be a good fit. There's no one else I have in mind, but I don't think this one is as important to me.

I want this game to have a dope ass soundtrack too filled with a mix of Caribbean, afrobeat, and hip-hop sounds, but still sounding video gamey at the same time. I looked around and I didn't find much that I liked, but my two candidates are 2Mello who is currently making music for the upcoming fighter called Cerebrawl which has some of the best music I've ever heard in a video game and Rekcahdam, a user who does a lot of chiptune.

The ones I mentioned above are the ones in charge in specific parts of the game, but this is my team. For other parts of the game I didn't talk about like UI, marketing, sound design I'm not too picky on. There could be plenty of white people or non-black people working on these, after all Black Panther was not made 100% by black people. This is just something that I really want to see happen one day. Let me know what you think on the topic and I also made a video about this on YouTube which you can view below: