“The beautiful thing about what Black Panther did was it essentially showed there can be heroes that look like me,” says Abubakar Salim. “The feeling I had when watching was I wish I had this when I was a kid, because it shows to me, as an actor, I don’t have to be the best friend of the cop, or the buddy character. I can actually be a hero.
“If this game has that same effect to audiences and to players and developers, then great. We’re doing a good thing. I want to go for that.”
Salim is perhaps best known as the voice actor of beloved Assassin’s Creed: Origins protagonist Bayek. Now he’s jumping into the world of game development with Tales of Kenzera: Zau. On the surface it’s a Metroidvania inspired by the Bantu Tales of African myth with a dash of the sort of Afrofuturism seen in Black Panther. Beneath that, it’s a narrative about coping with grief, paralleling Salim dealing with the passing of his game-loving father with whom he would play together.
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