I make it up as I go.

Sunday 25 August 2013

The birth of Kenya's games industry and other July articles

I meant to write this a few weeks ago, but I’ve been busy moving house, keeping up on assignments, and getting my workload back to full time (which I'm now happy to say is becoming the norm — I only eased off because of the move).

I had a busy month in July, with PAX Australia, my first hardware review (I'll discuss that in my August roundup), and a big feature story all happening at once. I also got to see two very special articles published.

One was on a guy called Tom Koska, who I like to think of as Typewriter Tom (I’ve seen him described elsewhere as “Tom the typewriter man”, but mine has more pizzazz). Tom fixes typewriters for a living, or at least he used to. Now semi-retired, he lives above his shop and only opens it by request — repairing and servicing typewriters for people from all around Melbourne (and sometimes beyond).

I shared his story in a piece called Carriage Return for the excellent iPad publication The Magazine. I also explored the so-called typewriter resurgence, and wondered at my own attraction to the mechanical beasts.

The other was a rather lengthy report on the birth of Kenya’s games industry, starring Wesley Kirinya of Leti Games/Leti Arts and Nathan Masyuko of NexGen Ltd — with a few others, including the very nice gentlemen at University of Games, holding support roles. It’s a wonderful story of people driven by their passions to achieve the impossible, like how Kirinya made a crude African Tomb Raider rip-off and got it distributed online and in local stores, despite the absence of reliable (or speedy) Internet access in the country at the time.

It’s also a story that I lucked my way into. I got an email back at the end of January from Blaise Kinyua asking me to take a look at the pre-release version of his company’s first game. I thought Election Thief was an interesting idea (and I ended up reviewing it), but I was more taken by the fact that these guys were making a game in Kenya — where as far as I knew there was no games industry.

I pitched a story on them to Russ Pitts at Polygon, scribbling in a note at the last minute that I’d also be interested in doing a larger piece on Kenya’s emerging industry (my due process research indicated that there are other developers in the country) if he’d prefer. Then I waited. A few days later, Russ asked for more information on the latter idea. I did my research and fired back a new pitch. And I waited again. A couple of weeks later, after a quick follow-up reminder, Russ greenlit the story. We agreed on a March 18 deadline, and Russ looked into the possibility of including it in the Human Angle video series. That didn’t work out, and my story got bumped around in the schedule for a while.

But it finally saw the light of day on July 3rd, and boy was it worth the wait. I’m super happy with the final product. Judging by the reception I’ve seen in the comments, on Twitter, and around the web, so is everyone else. Wesley Kirinya told me that it’s particularly made waves in Africa, which I think is just awesome.

All in all, I had 17 articles published in July. The other highlights for me were the five PAX Australia stories I put together for Mac|Life — my first bit of convention coverage — and a gallery I wrote up that highlights 10 iOS apps for the blind and partially sighted (also on Mac|Life).

In no particular order, here are all the links:

I’ll be writing a separate post soon to talk about my big August-published feature, Blind Games: The next battleground in accessibility. Then I’ll roundup my August writings not long after.
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