WINDRUSH TALES
How UK indie 3-Fold Games is shining an interactive light on the journey of the Windrush generation
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.”
To an extent, the structure of Windrush Tales mirrors the developers’ experiences of piecing together stories from their heritage. It takes the form of a photo album, assembled by the player to build a picture of two siblings who have separately left Antigua in search of a new life in 1950s London, as they adapt to the cold and not always welcoming climate but try to make the best of it.
Research for the game reached well beyond immediate families, though getting firsthand experience isn’t easy, given that few from that original generation are still with us. Funding from charity organisation Okre, however, enabled Ramanan and Brotherson to organise workshops where they could consult Caribbean elders.
The original plan, to release the game in time for the 70th anniversary of Windrush, was overshadowed by a scandal that brought this history to light for the worst reasons. The government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies resulted in the wrongful detention and deportation of immigrants, mainly from the Windrush generation. “People who’d never heard about Windrush were hearing about it in such a negative way,” Brotherson says. That did, however, mean there was even more determination to tell a story celebrating “a generation of people who had the strength and determination to stay in the country despite bigotry, racism and all those issues happening around them.” And one that acknowledged that they were far from left in the past. “We were thinking [the game] could en
