IRAQ

As western military shooters reduce their homeland to a backdrop, we talk to the Iraqi developers challenging preconceptions

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.

With western game publishers variously hard to pin down or reluctant to work with an Iraqi team, Babylonian Twins never made it to shelves. Shihab and his colleagues left Iraq in the late ’90s, pursuing careers across the globe, but they reconvened to update the game for iOS in 2009. The new version includes the game of Ur as a collectible – a reminder of its connection to one of the world’s oldest traditions of game-making. But as Shihab explains, the principal “trigger” for Babylonian Twins wasn’t that tradition but a videogame created outside Iraq: Electronic Arts’ Desert Strike, the Gulf War fantasy in which you rain destruction on the Middle East from the controls of a US Apache helicopter.

Naseer  Alkhouri

Rabah Shihab

Samer Abbas

Shihab was saddened by this brutal portrayal of his birthplace. He wanted to offer an alternative vision of Iraq, devoid of both gun-toting Americans and Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. “People don’t know Iraq, they don’t know the history. It’s thousands of years. Yes, we had a dictator, we had wars, we were in a mess, but people don’t know about what came before. I think the more people know about this, the more we can bring people together, and understand the problems,” he explains.