Cameroonian Designer Olivier Madiba battled adversity to pursue his passion for developing African stories through video games. Let's see how his superheroes are inspiring dreams.
01:03And living in insecurity and you can imagine the pressure of your, my girlfriend at this time, the family, etc.
01:10So, I was about to give up on entrepreneurship totally and just try to find a regular job.
01:18His whole life goes dark. Depression holds him captive. His dream of giving people happiness through video games seems to have been shattered for four long years.
01:32Then, he comes to the attention of the government.
01:37One week later, we were in the office of the Ministry of Culture explaining our project.
01:41And she said to like, okay, we cannot fund your studio, but we can sponsor two conferences where you will come with investors and explain your project.
01:53And that's what we have done. We have done the conference, but we didn't get any investors because like I said, it was regular investors.
02:02But this was like, it helped you for the next step, even if you failed what you wanted to do.
02:06Olivier faces up to his depression and sees the fight against it as a mission to develop a game that can do more than just make people happy.
02:17The game should touch them and draw on African wisdom.
02:22This is the birth of Orion, legacy of the choreo done. His first game.
02:30Working on Orion was the thing that kept me mentally sane. Some of my co-founders on this first venture had to take side jobs or let's say main jobs in government that gave them safety while I was staying entrepreneur full time.
02:47Olivier's quest to bite a slice of the $300 billion industry is a struggle common to many game developers in the continent.
02:57A 2020 analysis by the Association of Computing Machinery found that only 2% of executives in the gaming industry were black.
03:07This affects policy and diversity in the industry. Has this disparity affected Olivier?
03:16So I started to work on the campaign in October, in fact, and I wanted to post it on November.
03:22And a lot of my plans were based on it. So when I post, I wanted to go on the Kickstarter, open the account.
03:29They ask you, what is your country? You say, Cameroon, you evolve until the moment you say, I want to launch a campaign.
03:36And there you have this little message. Your country is not allowed to do that.
03:41And that's what's like a huge punch in my face. Like you are Cameroonian. Nothing is you don't have the right.
03:49What began as a huge failure has become the African fantasy game par excellence.
03:55The story involves a prince named Enzo Coriordan, the ruler of Zama, whose wedding to Irene Evo gets interrupted by a coup d'etat.
04:06The two get exiled and go on a quest to retake their throne.
04:10You play as Enzo, but throughout the battles, you can call upon Irene, who can aid you and deal devastating attacks.
04:20The hero's power comes from collective energy of his ancestors, a force known as the Orion.
04:29Is the game a success?
04:32So when we released the game, first we were like, oh my God, it's on.
04:37We had a bad translation partner.
04:40So American players were complaining about bad translations problem.
04:45And also we had a publisher that was making a lot of mistakes.
04:50They were also learning.
04:52But also when we started to get the first good reviews, the seven, the eight, the nine, on some points, it was really, really proud.
05:01After Orion, everything suddenly happened very quickly.
05:06Not only investors came, but also the team, a whole 15 of them, with 25 others available on contractual basis.
05:17They now publish on Steam, Xbox, Play Store, and iOS, and for the graphic novels, Amazon.
05:28His next game imitates daily life in a virtual country, the elites of Mbowa.
05:35It's a social parody game where you are a member of a government.
05:39And it's also a huge tool for education because in the game we will all be part of a government and we'll have consequences together.
05:48So if we steal all the money of electricity projects in our town, we will go power cuts.
05:55The idea is to make people in charge and teach them the consequences of bad leadership when they are in charge, not just victims.
06:04And this is where we hope to change the generation mindset about leadership and corruption.
06:09Two decades after his unsuccessful start, the company of the father of two is valued at $1.3 billion.
06:18And Olivier wants to give something back to the community that has given him so much.
06:24He is in the process of creating a blueprint of how African creative businesses can go global and still stay true to their own art and culture.
