Efe Ukala, Esq.
March 12, 2020Boris Kodjoe
September 25, 2021LUAL MAYEN
CEO & FOUNDER, JUNUB GAMES
Lual Mayen is the founder of Junub Games. He has rich story from growing up as a refugee to becoming a game developer. For 22 of his 25 years of life, Mayen lived in a refugee camp in northern Uganda. A few years back, Mayen saw a laptop computer at a registration station for the refugee camp. He told his mother he wanted one. She saved money for three years to get the $300 to buy it for him. He discovered Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and the joy of playing at an internet cafe. He regularly walked three-hours to get to the internet cafe to charge his computer and play games.
As a child born in a violent war, Mayen thought about how to create a game that could inspire peace. He taught himself to make games and formed his own company, Junub Games. Based on the realization games can be helpful and a powerful too brigde communities together and contribute for peace and conflict resolution. He started making a video game for his country, so video games can divert their minds from destructive activities.
His first game, Salaam (an Arabic word that means peace), is about protecting communities from being destroyed. It was a 10-megabit mobile game, but he could only distribute it via Bluetooth networking. It spread in a viral way. A conference organizer at A Maze discovered it, tracked him down, and asked him to speak at a conference on games in South Africa.
Last year, Mayen appeared at The Game Awards, where he was named a Global Gaming Citizen in conjunction with an award sponsored by Facebook.
Mayen now is working with Facebook Gaming to publish Salaam as an Instant Game. Mayen currently resides in Washington, D.C., and is working with a team on Salaam which Premiered at the Game Awards 2019.
Mayen also made a board game, Wahda, that encourages peaceful conflict resolution. He did so because it does not require a computer to play, and so, refugees may have a chance to play it.
Salaam is a high tension runner game that puts the player in the shoes of a refugee forced to flee a war torn region set to launch on both PC and Instant games in Summer 2020.