As a 10-year-old, Dean Gichukie would play ‘Grand Theft Auto, ‘Scarface,’ and ‘FIFA’ for hours. He would then step outside and be struck at how totally different his physical world was from his video game world.
In college, his interest evolved into storytelling, specifically African stories, through video games. This led Dean to game design and eventually to founding Kunta Content, a production house behind the creation of ‘Hiru’, a Kenyan video game.
‘Hiru’ is a 3D action-adventure video game in which players play as Maasai warriors on consoles and PC. It gamifies the story of many young African men who, growing up in a fast-changing world, must balance tradition and modernity. Hiru is anticipated to reach global levels of games like ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘God of War’.
“I think games are the next storytelling medium. They’ve been primarily just simple gameplay, but now we are getting interesting stories being told. It’s interactive, powerful, a great way to tell an intensive story,” Dean explains.
‘Hiru’ is expected to retail at a one-time cost of $30 at launch. Its entry into the global video game market is poised to unlock a massive opportunity for African video game publishing.
A successful ‘Hiru’ would also provide proof of concept of international quality capability, which would greatly inspire and challenge Kenyan and African game publishers.
“In 2020 / 2021, the game was at 480p quality. The map was 100 m², a tiny map. In 2024, the video quality is 4K, slightly higher than 4K in some areas. The map is four kilometres by four kilometres. So that’s 40 times larger, super high quality,” is how Dean explains the continuous improvement on ‘Hiru’.
Dean’s presentation of the development and subsequent results elicited impressed gasps and cheers at a breakout session during Decode 3.0, the recently held Safaricom engineering summit.
The enthusiastic ovation Dean received at the end of his presentation was a stamp of approval of the game’s evolution and a marker of the standards the digitally savvy target audience expected.
Watch this video to learn more about ‘Hiru’ and how Safaricom aims to collaborate with artists this year to build a Kenyan video game.
