From Call of Duty to Dreamtime: These designers are lighting up video games

First Nations creators tell Indigenous stories through video games Mon 6 Jul 2026 at 9:00am Aboriginal Australian creatives are using video games to bring First Nations culture to a global audience. One such creator is Wankanurri man Arthur Ah Chee. After a career that included working on the Call of Duty blockbuster shooters, the founder of Cerulean Creative Studios in South Australia has devoted himself to elevating First Nations stories and artists. Among several on-the-go projects, the animator/producer is currently working on Cheeky Boy with Narungga and Kaurna theatre-maker Jacob Boehme, based on the Narungga Dreaming. A naughty child, who Ah Chee compares to Dennis the Menace, gets outcast for mischief, transformed by the wind spirit into a dingo, then gets helplessly lost in an ill-advised pursuit of a possum. Cheeky Boy is designed to be fun and accessible for school-age Australians, but its darker side appeals to global audiences. "We have a lot of dark stories in Aboriginal culture where it transitions very well into the global storytelling space," says Ah Chee, who works closely with community elders overseeing the project. "The way I picture it is an Aboriginal dark fantasy, a Tim Burton-inspired style." The rise of the 'Bin Chicken' Wiradjuri game-maker Ben Armstrong's latest project, Buru and The Old People, shares Cheeky Boy's surrealist leanings through its unusual main character: Buru the white ibis. Originally, the retired bird thief began as one of Armstrong's Dungeons & Dragons characters. It became a short story published in an anthology before becoming a narrative game which re-imagines Indigenous communities as anthropomorphic characters. That avian protagonist was a bid to avoid the risk of being pigeon-holed, a risk that limits the perceived market for many Aboriginal Australian creative works. "The goal was to break down the barrier of people consuming our stories and looking at them purely as black," says Armstrong, inspired by popular animated features. "I wanted to create [something like] Zootopia where people are like 'this is cute, this is cool. I like this!' And then bam! Hit them with a full-on Blackfella Indigenous story." Despite cute appearances, Buru and The Old People still asks questions about values, conflicts and sovereignty that non-Indigenous Australians are often fearful to address without significant cultural consultation, rooted in the perspective and storytelling tradition of Aboriginal Australians. "If we're going to create a game that is Indigenous storytelling, but we want everyone around the world to be able to also experience it and enjoy it, how can it be relatable to them? Anthropomorphism does that," Armstrong says. "It really breaks down that barrier. "If I was to replace every character in this game with humans, it would be the same story. But it allows us to have a little bit more fun too." For instance, players will just have to guess which Sydney beach suburb inspired its ostentatious seagulls, weighed down by gaudy jewels and wide-brimmed hats. Seasons and space pirates Noongar creative technologist and game developer Kat Gledhill-Tucker purposely pushes against western reference points, using an eclectic "anti-disciplinary" skillset to exploit gaming's power to proactively create empathy and sustain players' focus and attention. "I think there's an opportunity to tell a story about the connection between body and country and ourselves, that continuous spirit connection, within a video game," they say. Their currently unnamed solo project is a rhythm game. Each level reflects the Noongar Six Seasons, and the vibrant earthy colours and rich biodiversity that characterises the Borloo and the Wadjuk Buja Country in Western Australia. It's a work mediated through personal experience and earnest effort to connect with Country's deep history. "Sound reflects Country and Country holds memory," they say. "Rather than a pastiche of different cultural artefacts, movies or films that inform my practice, it's a cultural connection that I'm trying to embody in that piece." "We have such incredible biodiversity in this part of the world, and the colours that show up are so, so different to anywhere else, and certainly anything that exists in other games — especially from the Northern Hemisphere." Another of Gledhill-Tucker's projects, Wyrmspace Tactics by Naarm-based Wali Studios, is about a crew of space pirates who unpack trauma between raids. Even in outer space, their First Nations experiences inform the characters she writes as the game's narrative designer. "They all have their own planets and places that they're connected to, they're all refugees in different ways," they say. "What does distance mean for First Nations peoples and what does it mean to be so far away from your own country? And what are the ways that you might practice and feel more connected to culture when that distance is so great?" A minority in a minority As an artistic medium, video games give First Nations Australians a new format to continue oral storytelling traditions going back more than 10,000 years and create entirely new stories. As a business, despite its small size, Australia's games industry can still do more to support them. "There's not a lot of us in the industry at the moment," says Armstrong, who credits his own longevity to Screen Australia funding. "It's growing, which is great, but it's hard to skill up. It's hard to catch up." After years of advocating for support at policy round-tables with ministers, the same barriers remain: Internship programs provide an entry point for First Nations developers, but they're a short-term measure that don't compensate for a slow start in an often unstable industry. "It's one thing to have programs to help Blackfellas get in, but what are you going to do to accelerate us?" Armstrong feels the industry needs to speak the government's language, and improve data collection, to demonstrate arts funding for First Nation studios creates jobs and cultural impact. "If I look at Buru and The Old people, we've got people who've never worked in games before. Now they're working in games. We've got people who were unemployed, now they've got jobs," Armstrong says. Ah Chee is doing his part too. A prominent figure in South Australia's industry with plans to nurture the Central Australia game development scene, he's working to accelerate Aboriginal developers with subcontracting opportunities and mentoring. But there's a limit to what the one-man studio can do at its current capacity. "In games, you're a minority within a minority because the games industry is quite small," he says. "And the Australian industry in general isn't set up to fund directive projects. "People still don't realise how big the games sector is and how, as Aboriginal people, we're locked out of the games market." In a competitive grant funding space, Armstrong feels the problem isn't solved by dedicated First Nations seed funding rounds from national and state governments alone — although they play an important role in upskilling Aboriginal developers. Those initiatives often leave a gap when moving from a prototype to full production, a stage demanding specialised artists and programmers for studios to compete in the global market. In 2023, Screen Australia's First Nations Games Studio fund granted $300,000 each to the studio Guck, to work on Blaktasia, and to the studio Awesome Black. Ah Chee hopes to see a greater volume of grants targeting Aboriginal developers as well as these important one-off initiatives. Ah Chee considers cash-flow constraints as a significant impediment to Aboriginal developers, including himself. "We can make projects, but we can't build sustainability because sustainability comes from recurring sales and getting to market," Ah Chee says. A mentor, industry figure, and more recently a philanthropist personally funding Aboriginal Australian-made prototypes, he's also investigating partnership and fundraising opportunities to diversify funding sources and prove demand to global publishers. To solve the cash flow problem, he's experimenting with an imaginative revenue-share business model designed to fund and promote Aboriginal-made projects. The concept behind action game Crimson Cutlass was inspired by Indonesia's geopolitical concept of Wawasan Nusantara. The same way thousands of islands create a shared identity, he sees the game as a portal to collect and fund Aboriginal-made games under one platform. "You may be an island, but you're still connected through the sea. We're apart, but we're still not at the same time, which is this interesting way of thinking about it," says Ah Chee. He hopes to introduce players to new Aboriginal cultures through video game's enticing sense of mystery after players land on an island's shore and choose to buy the game within. "You're like a fish out of water. If you visit some place you've never been to in real life, you have to understand the new culture, different environments, and different ways of happening. It's that on-the-ground cultural exchange," says Ah Chee. In the professional games industry, it's common to spend your entire career working on other people's intellectual properties. Faced with that prospect, Ah Chee chose to pursue Crimson Cutlass and a less dependable career direction to bring his ideas, and those of other First Nations communities, to life. "We're trying to build a platform to house stories," says Ah Chee. "Let people tell their own stories. That's where I want to be." [Image text:] RJS KAU BATTLE SIMULATO