Rebel Inc. is a game heavily influenced by the culture and socio-political landscape of Afghanistan. Although the game world is fictional, it looks at important real world issues and was extensively researched to make sure it dealt with them correctly. As part of this, we went to the Afghan Embassy in London to meet with the Ambassador and embassy staff to get their feedback on the game.
“Rebel Inc. is sophisticated and engaging. It shows the complexity of war and insurgency with interesting options to achieve success through stability and peace."
- H.E. Said T. Jawad, Ambassador of Afghanistan to the UK
The staff we met at the embassy were extremely positive about our plans for Rebel Inc. Often people don’t think about or realise what is going on in Afghanistan and they hoped that our game would encourage players to explore and understand the complexity and scale of the situation in the country. They gave us great insight and lots of useful comments on our simulation and the Ambassador even shared a number of personal experiences which we were able to integrate into the game. You can read a letter from the Embassy about the work we did with them here.
We were also asked if we could translate the game into Dari and Pashto (the two official languages of Afghanistan) so that the people of Afghanistan could play the game in their native languages. We immediately agreed and now, after lots of technical challenges (to be discussed more in a later blog post), we’re really excited to announce that Rebel Inc. is now available in Dari and Pashto on iOS and Android (PC soon).
“I’m grateful to the Afghan Ambassador and his staff for sharing their experiences during the development of Rebel Inc.," said James Vaughan, Rebel Inc.'s creator, "and I’m excited that players in Afghanistan can now play in their native languages.”
Following the release of Rebel Inc. we went back to the Ambassador to ask him what he thought of the game. He said “Rebel Inc. is sophisticated and engaging. It shows the complexity of war and insurgency with interesting options to achieve success through stability and peace."
We’d like to say a huge thank you to all the embassy staff for their help and also our teams of Afghan translators for all the hard work they put into translating almost 25,000 words into Dari and Pashto! We really hope that the people of Afghanistan enjoy playing our game.