Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Native Americans in Video Games

 

Native American Protagonists

There have been too few Indigenous characters in video games. Off the cuff, there are only a few video games with Native American characters that come to mind: Nightwolf from "Mortal Kombat 3", Chief Thunder from "Killer Instinct", T. Hawk from "Street Fighter", War Wolf from NES's "Werewolf", and Turok from (of course) "Turok".

Out of all those, Turok was the only one that depicted a Native central protagonist (main character)...and that was way back in the late 1990s.

We can now add one more title to this list.
PREY is the new kid on the video game block and it features an Indigenous central character at the helm. It is a first-person shooter (FPS) game with a lot of very sweet special effects and really big guns (RBGs) to use.

Indigenous Talent

Oh, one more thing... PREY goes one step further and uses actual Native Americans for its Native American parts. It is sad that this is a novel idea, but in video game media, this is a novel idea. Tommy, Prey's central character, is voiced by Michael Greyeyes, a Native actor, teacher, and dancer. In addition, he is joined by Crystle Lightning, who provides the voice of Jen, Tommy's girlfriend.

It's about time a video game with Indigenous people came out...I am getting tired of playing my same old version of Turok this whole time. We Native people need all the heroes we can get...it's good to see one prominently displayed in such a popular media as the video game industry.

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