A good joke about game launches

South Africa-based game studio Nyamakop posted a map to social media yesterday and labeled it as follows:

“WORLDWIDE release times for Relooted’s launch tomorrow!”

The map featured just three release times, aligned to four cities: Lagos (4pm), Cairo (5pm), Johannesburg (5pm) and Nairobi (6pm).

“Just kidding,” they posted in a follow-up. The studio shared a second map with several more cities added, from Los Angeles to Beijing.

Relooted, to be clear, is available all around the world. Out today, it’s a PC/Xbox heist game about the repatriation of art and artifacts from Western museums, back to the lands of their origin. Players break into booby-trapped compounds to steal real art and artifacts that were taken from Africa and placed in western museums. (Last August, I wrote about the game and one of its real artifacts, which is currently displayed in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I got the studio’s map joke right away, as did others online. I confirmed it directly with Nyamakop lead game designer Ben Myres, who soon spelled it out online:

This joke is just for me 😅

The number of times I see similar WORLDWIDE release times graphics [that] just have Africa dark and unmarked in the centre is wild

I get that most of the revenue doesn’t come from the continent but still a wild thing to see continuously 🥲

Back in 2023, the game critic Tauriq Moosa started tracking and posting video game launch-time maps that skipped Africa.