WINDRUSH TALES
Generation game
How UK indie 3-Fold Games is shining an interactive light on the journey of the Windrush generation
Chella Ramanan and Corey Brotherson
This June marked the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury, Essex, bringing with it the first post-war migrants from the Caribbean to the UK – a symbolic beginning of modern multicultural Britain. Windrush Tales director Chella Ramanan, though, had begun thinking about creating a game to commemorate this event long before – a year prior to the 70th anniversary, in fact. She was keen to tackle the topic in part because it had never been done before in the medium. “There aren’t that many Black British Caribbean developers working in indie,” says Ramanan, whose father and uncle came from Grenada.
Fortunately, she found someone who fit the bill: Corey Brotherson, at the time a copywriter and producer for Sony who also had experience writing screenplays and comic scripts, whose parents emigrated from Saint Kitts and Barbados respectively. “I knew bits and pieces just from talking [to family] day-to-day growing up, but it felt like a whole chapter of their lives, so you don’t want to be nosy,” he says. “But for the game I had to specifically sit down with them to talk about it.”