Seeing the Windrush generation through a bold new game

In June 1948, a huge, repurposed German cruise liner docked in London, having travelled all the way from Australia. It was carrying more than 1000 passengers, but the vast majority of them – more than three quarters – had embarked in, and had lived in, the Caribbean. These people set sail for Britain invited by a country looking for help rebuilding after the Second World War, entering under a brand new British Nationality Act, which allowed anyone from a Commonwealth country residency there. That ship was the HMT Empire Windrush, and its name would go down in history as marking the beginning of a migration to the UK that would last more than 20 years and number hundreds of thousands of people. It would change the face of Britain forever.

A lot is owed to those people – the people of the Windrush generation – who faced and overcame adversity to settle in the UK. They laid the foundations for a multiculturalism that we, the people who live here, gain so much from today. From food to music to fashion to sport: the impact has been immense. The Windrush’s arrival is such a significant part of modern British history it was even recreated for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

This is why Chella Ramanan and Corey Brotherson, who both have Caribbean heritage, were planning to make a game to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Windrush. Chella Ramanan is the writer and narrative designer behind Before I Forget, a BAFTA-nominated game about a woman living with dementia; and Corey Brotherson is a writer of comics, screenplays and video games. He even briefly wrote for Eurogamer a very long time ago.

Chella Ramanan’s father came to the UK from Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean, in the 1950s. She is, as she said during a GDC talk I watched earlier this year, “a child of Windrush”, and she wanted to celebrate the cultural impact the Windrush generation has had. “There is no representation of Caribbean people in games, really, especially the British Caribbean experience,” she said during that talk. “People don’t know it beyond the UK.” So, she wanted to change that.

Corey Brotherson’s grandfather came to the UK from St Kitts in 1955. He left his wife and children behind to try and establish a life in the UK they could eventually join. “And his experiences vary,” Brotherson says. “It wasn’t like he had horrendous experiences here. He had a couple of bad moments, and naturally it was very lonely and isolating for him at times, but for the most part it was good enough for him to feel like it’s fine for my grandmother and my dad and all of his siblings to come over, which I’m obviously very grateful for.”