{"id":33421,"date":"2018-07-17T19:25:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T19:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/322313"},"modified":"2018-07-17T19:25:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T19:25:00","slug":"dont-miss-how-1979-revolution-black-friday-drops-players-into-a-real-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/17\/dont-miss-how-1979-revolution-black-friday-drops-players-into-a-real-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Miss: How 1979 Revolution: Black Friday drops players into a real crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Navid Khonsari was a 10 year-old\u00a0in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.\u00a0The country\u2019s pro-Western Shah was overthrown and replaced by a fundamentalist Ayatollah, who declared Iran to be the world\u2019s first Islamic state.<\/p>\n

It was a time of rapid change that at first seemed\u00a0promising to many.\u00a0But it quickly turned into something tumultuous and terrifying.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mom would scream to get down, because the soldiers are shooting into the air,\u201d Khonsari recalls. \u201cThere was fear in her\u00a0voice. Any hope for change had dramatically shifted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khonsari is the developer of\u00a01979 Revolution: Black Friday<\/em><\/a>, out now on Steam, which is set\u00a0in the midst of this revolution. Players control Reza, a young Iranian photojournalist who\u2019s spent the last year abroad in Germany. He comes home to Tehran, only to see his homeland being ripped apart by a scary\u2014and at times, bloody\u2014upheaval.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Players quickly get the sense that Reza has no good options. And every choice he makes in this turbulent city affects his friends and family, as well as his own safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Reza, which side do you take? Do you join the opposition\u00a0or not?\u00a0What role do you, as a young Iranian familiar with the outside world, play in your home country\u2019s revolution?\u00a0A passive one, or a violent one?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Moment-to-moment gameplay is somewhat like a Telltale episodic adventure filtered through a very dark chapter in history. Early on, Reza is captured and interrogated by an\u00a0anti-Shah prison warden (who is based on a real person). He offers Reza a cup of tea. Players can accept it, or refuse\u2014but to refuse\u00a0is a cultural indiscretion in Iran. If Reza refuses and knocks the cup on the floor, text in the corner of screen flashes. The warden won\u2019t forget this.<\/em><\/p>\n

At another point, a group of anti-Ayatollah youths try to start a fight with Reza and his childhood friend Babak, who is decidedly pacifistic. The gang calls Reza \u201ca punk with a camera.\u201d You can fight them or not. If you don’t, the game tells you: \u201cBabak won\u2019t forget this.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Later, Reza\u2019s in the midst of a heated conversation between Babak\u00a0and Reza\u2019s cousin, Ali, a committed revolutionary who thinks the time has come to turn to violence. Do you side with your flesh and blood? If you do, your new radical agenda will distance your\u00a0from several\u00a0key characters in the game.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Khonsari wants players to wrestle with the gray areas, just as real Iranians were forced to do\u00a0during the revolution.<\/p>\n

His game started as a Kickstarter back in 2013, but donations gave out around $90,000 short of its $395,000 funding goal. Khonsari and his team eventually found backers that got the project off the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Khonsari spent several years\u00a0with Rockstar Games, directing motion capture and writing dialogue on games like Alan Wake<\/em>, Max Payne<\/em>, and the Grand Theft Auto<\/em> series. But he is a filmmaker by trade. His studio\u00a0Ink Stories<\/a>\u00a0is also working on documentaries, graphic novels, and narrative feature films.\u00a0So why did he want to create a game about the Iranian Revolution, and not a movie?<\/p>\n

Khonsari says that while film can definitely brings stories to life, they\u2019re more of a passive, fleeting experience;\u00a0you watch the movie, and you may talk about it with your friends the next day, but then you\u2019re done. He believes that\u00a01979<\/em>\u2019s audience will be given far more responsibility\u2014and feel far more empathy\u2014as they\u2019re put in the shoes of Iranians on the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The game incorporates other people’s memories as well as Khonsari\u2019s.\u00a0The 1979<\/em> team interviewed a group of 40 Iranians of all ages and social classes\u00a0who were actually living in Tehran during the revolution.<\/p>\n

The look of the game is literally made up of real snapshots of the era. At one moment, players see actual family photos in a room that the they’re exploring. Other settings pull from\u00a0indelible images\u00a0taken of massive protests or group prayers that were taken by real photojournalists, or from graffiti that actually existed on the streets of Tehran during the revolution.<\/p>\n

Khonsari thinks video games are the perfect way to put players in those sort of challenging situations that have no clear, conventionally heroic decision. And he aims to show that games can make history come alive, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll understand how your choices have an emotional impact on those around you,\u201d Khonsari says. \u201cAt the core of the most popular games or AAA titles, there\u2019s an element of overcoming: Get to the next stage of level. It\u2019s great, but we can expand beyond that, and navigate reality and choices and characters that are neither good nor bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGames are, hands down, the hardest experience to try to create,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d love to see more developers go down this path. But I really think the core of it is putting yourself into the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Navid Khonsari was a 10 year-old\u00a0in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.\u00a0The country\u2019s pro-Western Shah was overthrown and replaced by a fundamentalist Ayatollah, who declared Iran to be the world\u2019s first Islamic state. It was a time of rapid change that at first seemed\u00a0promising to many.\u00a0But it quickly turned into something tumultuous and terrifying. \u201cMy mom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}