Grief empowered actor Abubakar Salim – now he’s making a video game about it

Abubakar Salim, best known for playing the lead role in open-world adventure Assassin’s Creed Origins, shot through 2023 like lightning. First he was cast in the second season of Game Of Thrones spin-off House Of The Dragon, then he played French general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas in Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon. And to cap the year off, he revealed his debut game as a developer, Tales Of Kenzera: Zau, with a giddy on-stage appearance at The Game Awards in December. For most, this would be a year of career highs – but Salim is only getting started.

We meet in a vintage studio in east London, where a prop gun lies discarded on a dusty piano. Gregarious and prone to fits of booming laughter, Salim is sitting in an old leather chair, and his excitement about Zau – now just a few weeks away from launch – is contagious. “It’s all happening too fast,” he giggles.

Out on April 24, Salim’s 2D platformer follows titular character Zau (played by Salim), a young shaman who bargains with Kalunga, the god of death, to bring his dead father back to life. It’s a deeply personal project – and is inspired by Bantu (an ethnolinguistic group across Africa) mythology that has been passed down through Salim’s Kenyan family.

Much like Zau, Salim values family highly. He credits his parents – his dad, a software engineer; his mum a carer – for supporting his creativity from an early age. “My father was a very good storyteller – he was very good at getting people to listen, and he took you on this journey,” says Salim. “But the artist-y side definitely came from my mum. She loved films, westerns, and books. There was an element of artistry that my mum exuded.”

Tragically, ten years ago when Salim was just starting to find steady work as an actor, his dad Ali died from cancer. “I remember thinking this wasn’t supposed to happen, this wasn’t part of the plan,” says Salim. “He was a very healthy man – [his cancer] even went into remission – and then suddenly it came back with a force.”

The experience shattered Salim’s “vague” plans for the future. “It made me realise that nothing is written. It really made me look creatively at my work and think, ‘if something like that can happen, what can happen tomorrow?’”

“What I’m aiming to be is the guy who opened the door for other storytellers”

Salim tried to “soldier on” and bear the weight of his grief on his own. Eventually, however, pretending to be OK felt “poisonous”, and he began speaking about the experience in therapy. “There’s a lot of power in being open and honest, and baring all, because you get to share that with people – and they get to share it with you,” says Salim. “It feels communal in a way. Honesty is the best way of connecting.”

Now, whenever Salim talks about his dad, it’s to celebrate his life, rather than linger on its loss. His eyes shine with pride when we talk about their relationship – and though he speaks modestly about his own abilities, he often makes his father sound like the world’s greatest storyteller. It’s a talent that Salim, who is effortlessly compelling while telling his own tales, has inherited.

Eventually, Salim started to see his loss as another story to be told, and the first seeds of Zau were sown. He considers the metroidvania genre of video games – in which players start off as weak characters and must find the right tools to explore large, often confusing worlds – a metaphor for grief in itself, and wanted to combine it with tales his father had passed down from his grandfather, who was a nganga (a spiritual healer in Bantu culture). But by the time he started taking the idea of developing a new game seriously, his acting career was in full flight. In 2017 he played vengeful warrior Bayek of Siwa in Assassin’s Creed Origins, and in 2020 landed a lead role on the TV side, starring as an android in Ridley Scott’s big-budget HBO sci-fi Raised By Wolves.

When it came to making Zau, Salim decided to found his own studio rather than risk pitching it somewhere that might jeapordise his creative vision. With self-conscious laughter, Salim says he started by constantly messaging people on social media. Some, including legendary game writers Mike Bithell and Caroline Marchal, offered advice on becoming a founder. Others loved Salim’s idea, and joined his fledgling company Silver Rain Games (now called Surgent Studios). Using his own money, Salim funded the team while it made an early prototype for Zau, which eventually allowed him to find a publisher – Electronic Arts (EA), one of the biggest in the world.

Last December, Salim revealed Zau to the world at The Game Awards 2023, a flashy Los Angeles ceremony that’s part annual awards bash, part marketing platform for new game reveals. The game’s premise, along with Salim’s enthusiasm at simply being represented at such a huge event, was widely praised online. And that momentum hasn’t slowed. “The reception has been ridiculously phenomenal,” he says. “It’s blown our expectations, and EA’s, out of the water. We’re in a place now where you cannot deny that being honest, open, truthful and artistic is the way forward, and something you should strive for.”

Like any studio head would be, Salim is now nervous about delivering on those expectations. But he also feels responsible for proving that games based on under-represented cultures can succeed in this industry. “There’s additional pressure of Zau being an African story, and feeling like this has got to really do well otherwise I could potentially screw up someone else’s chance of telling an African story,” he explains. “But the trick is to not think about that and focus on telling your own personal story, and delivering that the best way you can.”

“We’re in a place now where you cannot deny that being honest, open, truthful and artistic is the way forward”

Salim points out that the “beauty” of African tales and cultural stories lies in the oral tradition of telling them out loud. When we ask if he had any favourite stories he loved to hear as a child, Salim pauses. After a brief silence, Salim begins retelling a tale his dad told him about his own father in Kenya.

“It was raining one day in the village, and everyone was getting wet,” he says, suddenly very still in his chair. “My granddad, because he was a nganga, picked up a blade of grass and put it over his head. And he was suddenly dry. Then everyone started doing [the same thing], then everyone else was dry.”

As if he’s spent the last minute bottling it up, Salim immediately bursts into laughter. “I remember looking at my dad, like, ‘what were you smoking?’ But at the same time, he’s got that cheeky grin – it was all part and parcel of the story.”

“That just really sticks to me, because I remember the way he would tell it, I’d be so enamoured,” he explains. “Then as soon as he said the whole blade of grass thing, there was a moment of being like, ‘ah, okay, now you’re playing with me’. Because obviously his father did the same thing with him!”

As a result, Zau is a mix of Bantu culture – its protagonist goes on a quest to become a nganga just like Salim’s grandfather was – and Salim’s own story of loss. While grief is a universal emotion, we discuss the fact that everyone can experience it differently, and whether that makes Zau’s story easier or harder to relate to.

“The beauty of art is that you, the viewer, are reacting to it from your own perspective and putting your own ideas on it,” he says. “That’s what helps. I can’t relate [to] a kid fighting a giant lightning bug, but I can understand where he’s coming from. You can find a moment, or place, and remember being like that.”

Originally, Salim wanted Zau to send the message that it’s “OK to not be OK”. While that’s still true, he now hopes to encourage more people to tell their own stories as well. Salim points to critically acclaimed metroidvania games Dead Cells and Ori And The Blind Forest, both of which were massive inspirations to him – and says that he wants Zau to have a similar impact.

It’s an idea that he’s been thinking about more, lately. When we ask him what he’d rather be remembered as – an actor or developer – he says: “What I’m aiming to be is the guy who opened the door for other storytellers,” Salim says. Before its first game has even launched, he’s already planned out Tales Of Kenzera in the same way that Marvel, which announces its films years ahead of their release, does. Importantly, Salim also wants to get creators and writers from other cultures involved. “The idea of being able to open the door, like, ‘hey, come on in – I want to hear your stories’, that’s what I want to be remembered for.”

‘Tales of Kenzera: Zau’ is out April 23, 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.