The first Native American games company

Sean Vesce has been designing games since the mid-1990s, sometimes games that casually touch upon historical indigenous artifacts: Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure and Tomb Raider for example, both of which draw inspiration from the opening scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the natives protecting their mystical birthrights with blowpipes.

He'd been getting tired of triple-A gaming's drift towards huge teams and ultra-specialization. He yearned to get back to the days of small teams working together, problem-solving creatively. That's why he agreed to talk when Gershenfeld called to say he might be launching a new project, something intimate.

Gershenfeld spoke about his meeting with O'Neill and about their conclusion, that a game in the mode of stylish, spiritual experiences such as Journey or Limbo, but with clear Alaska Native themes, would be something new in the world.

A few weeks later Vesce was in Barrow, the most northern city in the United States and home to the Inupiat. He watched the festivals, listened to the stories, the songs; visited museums, read books. Some of the locals taught him how to build a boat out of walrus and seal skins.

He was transfixed by the genius of the technology, of the tools and methods used to survive in such a hard country, for so many centuries.

The project took on a new form for him. "It was a responsibility and a duty that we try to not only recreate those things in game form, but to introduce a lot of this stuff to a broad gaming audience," Vesce says.

"It goes to more than just the tools. For us, the values and especially the stories. There's a tremendous amount of wisdom, some people would call it ancient, but I think it has direct applicability to modern culture.

"One of our goals for the project is to imbue the game with both a meta-story and also stories within the game, kind of vignettes, that offer insights and wisdom that modern players will take and assess in their own lives."

The first thing the Upper One team did was look back at how Native Americans have been depicted in the past in games. It was not a particularly edifying experience.

Gross racism and misogyny marks the most notorious example, an Atari 2600 game called Custer's Revenge, in which the main character seeks to rape a tied-up native woman.

The "heap big magic bad medicine" school of Red Indian lingo features in jokey platform games, like the comedy witch doctor Mumbo Jumbo in Banjo-Kazooie and his wigwam-dwelling female rival, Humba Wumba, a sexually suggestive minx.

Fighting games have their own Native Americans. As a genre, it is not renowned for depth of character, and so Nightwolf, Thunder Hawk, Chief Thunder and Julia Chang are pretty much as you would expect from the likes of Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Killer Instinct and Tekken: two-dimensional constructs designed primarily for action.

The "Indian Nations" are depicted in historical games like Civilization and Age of Empires, but history being written by the winners, they either pursue the same expansionist-acquisitive concerns of their real-world conquerors, or they perform as bulwarks and rebels.

Native American imagery is often appropriated for sci-fi tribes, such as the buffalo-like Tauren, first seen in Warcraft 3, fighting off an invasion of rapacious Orcs from the east.

Cowboy games throw Native Americans into the general Badlands milieu, and so they, along with rustlers, bandits and other Wild West ciphers, usually turn up as target practice.

The "half-breed hero" trope is oft-used, in Gun, Assassin's Creed 3 and Red Dead Redemption, for example — though in the latter game, Native Americans appeared as interesting characters in their own right, with specific personalities and concerns. Assassin's Creed 3 also took the time to portray native women as powerful individuals, while also dabbling in Earth Mother mysticism.

In 2006, the Association for American Indian Development (AAID) called for a boycott of Activision's Gun, arguing that it glorified genocide. The company's apologists retorted that the main character was half-Apache.

Vesce, Gershenfeld and the team looked back at these portrayals, classified them in ways that might help them understand what they wanted to do that was different.

"We don't really want to be judges of how others have done this before," says Vesce. "We just want to really delve deep into the culture and make the themes and the things that were presented have an indelible mark on the game itself. Not just borrowing a few elements for convenience. That's why we've done so much research and community outreach."

In Upper One's view, games dealing with indigenous people always do one of four things.

• Appropriate — make use of stereotypes for exaggerated effect.
• Sample — include earnest individual elements lacking context.
• Depict — present historic documentary-style representations.
• Infuse — permeate the experience thematically and creatively.

Generally, games fall into the first two categories. The last category is the one least likely to figure in games, although there have been books, TV shows and movies that have sought truth.

"We kept seeing numerous successes created in other media for cultural creatives," says Gershenfeld. "Folks that really want to dive into meaty themes, world themes. Indigenous themes are definitely high up on that list.

"We realized there was very little in the game space, but a lot of these consumers of world music and these kinds of films really do cross over with the gamer generation, especially the independent gamer generation."

The Inupiat advisers on the game also had useful perspectives on how they have been portrayed. "They're very aware of the stereotypes that have portrayed them," says Vesce. "We talked about the misconceptions that they see. But I'd say they desire a means of getting out information about the real beauty and the gifts that their culture has."