A candid chat about video games and hate campaigns with Abukabar Salim

Let's talk about hate

Surgent Studios

“We're a cocked gun. As soon as we get that funding, man, we've got it.” 

Abubakar Salim made his game development debut earlier this year with Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, a critically acclaimed metroidvania inspired by Bantu tales and Salim’s own journey with grief after losing his father. 

Three months later, his company Surgent Studios announced a wave of layoffs due to the game’s unfortunate commercial performance. Salim hopes to pull his staff back if the studio can find another publishing partner for its next game – an Afro-gothic RPG that combines technology and spiritualism, where you are both the player and dungeon master. 

Where Zau was inspired by death, Project Uso sprang from life. 

“This idea came from the birth of my daughter,” Salim explains. “I had this reality check of like, Oh s**t, I'm a dad.”

“Yeah, my first thought when I had a kid was of the abyss,” I reply. 

Salim laughs and gives me the look of someone also familiar with the void. 

Surgent Studios

“Uso” in Swahili means “face”. The game sees you building two separate characters – two faces – who inhabit the same body but don’t always share the same goals, like your parental instincts kicking in and overriding your self-preservation. In Project Uso, you don’t just roll for outcomes – you roll against yourself. 

Salim has spent the last few months rolling against himself, too. On top of battling the busted economics and indie visibility challenges of modern game development, he and his team have been subject to an enduring harassment campaign. 

Just recently, he shared a video to his Twitter where YouTubers assassinated his character, accused him of faking his heritage, and even suggested that he should rename the studio from Surgent Studios to “Spear Chuckers” – it’s the kind of racism that hits you right in the chest and knocks the wind out of you, as if the last few decades never happened. 

Salim grew up in the United Kingdom so it’s not like this is the first time he’s experienced racism, but the online campaign against him and his studio has been incessant and sustained, designed to inflict maximum damage and undermine his motivations for being in video games in the first place. Watching Salim’s passion drain out of his face over the past year has been one of the most depressing stories in the video game industry. 

After all, he doesn’t need to be here. He wants to be here. 

Before he started his studio, Salim was best known as an actor. You might know him as Bayek from Assassin’s Creed Origins, but most of his work has been in television, where he’s played major parts in shows such as Raised by Wolves, Jamestown, and House of the Dragon. He just loved video games and wanted to make cool things. Despite it all, he still does. 

Surgent Studios

“[My wife is like], ‘What are you doing? Why are you fighting this battle for little reward?’”, Salim says when I ask how his partner feels. “But it's not really about that. There's an enjoyment. There's a love for it. She only sees the turmoil and the struggle. But there is real love and passion that I still feel. It is still strong within the studio.” 

Despite the naysayers claiming Salim was handed the keys to the industry, he’s still hustling each day for funding to bring his team back together and make Project Uso. 

The fact Surgent Studios made anything at all while building a studio – the culture, the pipelines and processes – under the strain of the current business turmoils, is a miracle in itself. No one gets that handed to them. More experienced teams have tried and failed. It takes hard graft. Anyone saying otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about. 

“I'd say the first three years are figuring out who you are as a studio, and then that final year is like, all right, let’s make this game,” Salim explains. “We're united by this idea and the vision of the game, but we are still trying to figure out how we work. And so that first game is essentially building the team. The second game is flexing the muscles.” 

That’d be a lot for any developer. Now imagine doing it when the world is against you. The online vitriol would be enough to alienate most people, and anyone in this industry for the wrong reasons wouldn’t stick around for long. It’d be too much to take. 

Surgent Studios

“I think there is a lot of fear on this idea of what forced diversity is – there's the fear of the unknown, which is what's triggered a lot of these conversations,” Salim says. “And again, just to make it clear, that is a very different conversation to the racism that kicks out. It's very different. I think the thing that also surprises me is like, how can you be so openly racist on a platform like YouTube? How can you feel confident enough to be able to say those things in public?” 

A lot of these conversations are perpetuated by grifters who mobilize an army of loners lost to the rabbit hole of the angerithms, spoonfed hate by the algorithm from people who act in the same way they accuse Salim of acting. They say Salim is forcing politics into games, yet these people rarely talk about video games or things they enjoy. They talk exclusively about politics. They say Salim is just grifting, but his studio made a great video game, which is more than you can say for the people riling up the masses, who create nothing. 

“It's important to highlight that,” Salim agrees. “Buddy, you're literally just talking about politics all the time. You want an escape, but everything you talk about is political. So how can you escape from politics? It's insane. So we’re juggling with that while also wrestling with the idea of where the industry is at the moment. It does feel like pushing water up a hill.” 

• Related: Tales of Kenzera: Zau review - good grief

On the other side, Salim has well-meaning people telling him he should keep quiet, not give them ammunition, and pretend it’s not happening, all while his notifications are ablaze with dozens of tweets telling him he shouldn’t exist, mocking the way he dressed at award shows, denying his heritage, laughing at his grief and claiming he’s acting. 

“It is a loud minority, but they're very loud,” he says. “When you're on the other end, it feels surgical. And when it comes to the racist factor, you are attacking or criticizing something that I cannot change about myself. It gets muddied up because there were a lot of people saying, like, ‘Oh, but if we criticize the game, you just call us racist’. And I'm like, ‘No, I don't mind criticism about the game’. The issue with keeping quiet and just ignoring is you never talk about this. What a privilege to be able to shut that off. It's loud, man. And they control the narrative.” 

Yeah, Salim knows the abyss alright. We work in it. 

Even writing this piece, I know it’s going to trigger the usual suspects and make me their next victim of the week, but it’s important to shine a light on it – who knows, maybe we’ll save a few misdirected youths who, for some reason, see these grifters as their saviors. Perhaps they’ll roll against themselves, score a critical success in logical thinking, and escape the grifter dungeon masters pulling their strings.