Thieves made stealing $102 million worth of jewels look easy at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year. The culprits, dressed as construction workers, embarrassed French authorities in broad daylight, evading the police on electric scooters and disappearing for nearly a week (when they were finally caught, though many of the jewels remain at large).
For the creators behind Relooted, a new heist game predicated on the notion that breaking into museums is anything but a cinch, the burglary proved, if not embarrassing, at least a little disappointing.
“We make museums seem like they have high-tech security, when apparently all it takes is a ladder,” joked the game’s narrative director, Mohale Mashigo, referring to the mechanical furniture lift that the criminals used to access one of the Louvre’s second-floor galleries.
But in the fictional world of Relooted, heists serve a higher purpose, reminding players that museums themselves have sometimes benefited from an element of pilfering. The game follows a band of thieves who hold Western museums accountable for stalling on an agreement to repatriate objects believed to have been stolen from African countries. Relooted, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer, was released on Tuesday for PC and Xbox.
A crew that includes a retired history professor and a young security specialist must organize the theft, gathering provenance information and finding an escape route. Motion sensors, alarm bells and shutter doors prevent an easy getaway in a thriller designed to evoke heist movies like “Ocean’s Eleven.”
Ben Myres, the game’s creative director, said Relooted did not dwell on the real-world politics of returning stolen artworks. The game avoids debates about the ability of African museums to store delicate artifacts or the role of diplomacy in settling disputes over returns.
“We are not really interested in convincing anyone who plays the game about what should happen with these artifacts,” said Myres, 32, who in 2016 helped found Nyamakop, the studio in Johannesburg that developed the game. “We want to let people make the decision of whether these deeply spiritual things should come home.”
Working with a team of designers from about a dozen African countries, Myres chose to represent real artifacts while leaving the museums that house them ambiguous. So despite one mission involving a 19th-century buffalo figure from Dahomey, a region of western Africa that is now a part of Benin, players do not navigate a simulation of the Metropolitan Museum’s wing of African art — where such a figure is actually displayed — to retrieve it.
As a young developer in South Africa, where only a few hundred people work in the video game industry, Myres faced an uphill battle to attract investors for Relooted. He eventually crowdsourced enough money from friends and family to build an improved prototype of the game. When that failed to impress investors at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, he nearly gave up on the concept.
But when he partnered with the global talent agency UTA a year later, Myres found a more receptive audience. “We got funded off an elevator pitch,” he said, adding that the budget was several million dollars — robust for an indie studio in an industry where larger companies spend upward of $300 million on a game.
Some players have criticized Relooted for ensuring that its Black protagonists become thieves. Mashigo, 42, suggested that people did not always know how to interact with work by Africans about Africans.
“I think people are applying their politics and cultural perceptions to an African perspective, and a lot of the nuance is lost,” she said. “Perhaps Relooted is an opportunity for people to interact with stories from the continent and find a new way to perceive them.”
But the strangest part of the experience came near the end of development, Myres said, when he started hearing from museums.
“We had a museum in Australia offer to let us 3-D-scan artifacts and put them into the game to reclaim,” said Myres, who declined the proposal. “This is some weird kink. Why are you asking us to steal your artifacts?”
Developers are engaging some cultural institutions in discussion, however. Next month, at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, Myres and Mashigo will discuss Relooted with Erica P. Jones, a curator who in 2024 oversaw the repatriation of seven looted artifacts to the Asante kingdom in what is now Ghana.
Jones said the collaboration made sense. What better way to get students interested in repatriation topics than a video game?
“There is so much that aligns museums and video games,” Jones said. “In both cases, it is about storytelling.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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