Tahrir Square becomes Facebook game

Cairo: An Egyptian games developer has released a Facebook game to relive the glory days of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

The Tahrir Square Defense game, released this month, is based on battles between protesters and thugs during the revolution.

“Tahrir Square Defense is a tower defence game that emulates the Battle of the Camel in the Egyptian revolution. It represents the value of freedom versus dictatorship, and will of people versus greed and authority,” reads the website of Al Kotab, the Egyptian games development company responsible for the game.

Battle of the Camel took place on February 2 2011, when pro-Mubarak thugs on horses and camels attacked protesters arrayed in Tahrir Square. But it was a battle they lost, turning the tide of public opinion irreversibly against the Mubarak regime.

In the game, the player must defend Tahrir Square from continuous attacks that come from Abdul Monem Riad Square. The player can build and upgrade different types of towers to achieve his mission.

The game is made up of 15 levels designed to tell the story of the events that happened that day, starting from camel- and horse-back attacks in the morning to Molotov attacks at night. The game has a skirmish mode too, where the player can play through different difficulty levels.

The developers say the game will allow players to “have a glimpse of the battle that happened that day and witness how the people stood to defend their freedom.”

The game provides cartoon visuals of the iconic square, and also includes real sound recordings from the square and politicians’ speeches during the early days of the revolution. Al Kotab is a new Egyptian startup for game development and animations with Arabic themes and content, founded by Eslam Al Mohandes, Omar Al Khafif and Mahmoud Adly Ezzat.

The team includes engineers and artists who dream in a better future for Egypt. Some of them decided to resign from their jobs to put Al Kotab project into action. The company started as a dream in 2006, but its first official appearance was at September 2012 as the developers won awards in Fekrety, a national business idea competition organised by The American University in Cairo’s (AUC) Entrepreneurship & Innovation Program (EIP), in cooperation with Intel.

Al Kotab developers’ aim is to attract young people in particular to games and animations that introduce them to their history and present, and invest in them to build a brighter future.

“We believe that games and cartoons are not only for entertainment, but also for delivering high values like changing people’s perception to problems and raising national causes in the heart of the youth,” reads the company’s website.

— Ayman Sharaf is a journalist based in Cairo