One of the people behind some of the most popular – and violent – video games has left the world of Grand Theft Auto and developed a game prototype based on the Iranian revolution.
Since Navid Khonsari began work on the game, called 1979 Revolution, it has been labeled Western propaganda by an Iran government-run newspaper and some members of his team still use aliases to protect themselves from the repercussions of creating a video game based on a controversial event that has persistent reverberations today. Khonsari launched a Kickstarter on Wednesday, hoping to take the game from a prototype to tablet-ready, episodic series.
“I wanted people to feel the passion and the elation of being in the revolution – of feeling that you could possibly make a change,” said Khonsari, who moved from Iran to Canada at age 10, just after the revolution. He remembers his grandfather walking him through the early protests in Tehran.
“I didn’t have that realistic view of what was taking place. To me as a 10-year-old boy, it was all pretty exciting – seeing military vehicles roll down the street, seeing massive amount of people being able to take over an entire an area – these mass demonstrations were so impressive,” Khonsari said.
In the first 45 seconds of the game, players get an abbreviated history of the revolution. The main character, Reza, a young photojournalist in Tehran, then recounts the events that led him to be imprisoned in the notorious Evin prison, where political prisoners were kept before, during and after the revolution. The player watches the rendition of these events, and engages in mini-games about administering triage, shutting down the power grid and graffiti tagging.
“I don’t want to preach. I’m making a game, I need to entertain,” Khonsari said. “If I try to educate, I’m dead in the water.”
There is no first-person shooting in the game, a seemingly strange choice for a video game maker with his resumé, but Khonsari said the revolution was not one of gunfights and if he were to be shot at, he would flee instead of fight back – which is part of the game. “I think those elements can be just as suspenseful as what people think they can get from shooting and nailing down characters.”
Players can also hear and collect tapes with Ayatollah Khomeini's words, take photos of the on-screen revolution before being presented with actual photos taken during the revolution by Michel Setboun, and listen to characters voiced by Iranian-American actors including Homeland's Navid Negahban and Argo's Farshad Farajat.
After working on major Rockstar Games titles including Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne and Manhunt, Khonsari created game-production company iNKstories, with his wife, Vassiliki Khonsari, a documentary filmmaker whose professional sensibilities helped inform 1979 Revolution’s design. The team conducted interviews with people who were involved with the revolution and consulted academics and politics experts from "both sides of the pond" to develop the historical contents.
“Particularly in new generations, in the west and places around the world, people recognize Iran as being a place where women are covered in veils and men who are mullahs,” Khonsari said. “It was so unlike the world I had experienced that I wanted to try to make what people think of as unfamiliar familiar through visuals. I wanted people to see what Iran was like in the 70s.”
Khonsari has set a goal of $395,000 for the Kickstarter, meant to fund game production, with the intent of releasing the game by spring 2014. Within a few hours of its Wednesday morning launch, the project had 41 backers and nearly $3,000.
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