People have been making games in Iraq for thousands of years. A popular pastime in ancient Mesopotamia –a region that enclosed much of modern-day Iraq and Kuwait together with parts of Syria and Turkey – was a strategy game in which players raced to move their pieces off a 20-square board. Rediscovered as ‘the game of Ur’ by British archaeologists, it predates chess and is a possible ancestor of backgammon.
Videogame development in Iraq, meanwhile, dates back to at least 1993, when a small team of Baghdad University students led by Rabah Shihab developed a roleplaying platformer, Babylonian Twins, for Commodore’s Amiga. Created against a backdrop of high unemployment and devastated infrastructure following the Gulf War, it is an attractive side-scrolling recreation of an age of relative prosperity and great architectural works. Playing as two fugitive princes in sixth-century BC Babylon, players explore levels ranging from the legendary Hanging Gardens to the blue-tiled Ishtar Gate.