The crowdfunded Time Machine Bronzeville is a journey to 1940s Chicago and the Great Migration

In 2022, Donald and Phillip Jones, brothers and co-founders of Alchemy Media Publishing, published a campaign for a video game on the popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Time Machine Bronzeville is also a desktop application that recreates Chicago in the 1940s while telling the story of the Great Migration through immersive technology.

According to the couple’s Kickstarter post: the impetus to create the game it was about preserving the ability to tell stories about the past for a latest generation. “Growing up, my brother and I were immersed in stories about our parents’ community in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side during the interwar period. The vivid immediacy of their stories – pulsating images, sounds and characters – created indelible images and dreams,” the brothers write. “As time passes, the memory of elders fades and archival records confirming the authenticity of these stories are lost to time. Technology now allows us to preserve memories and media. If we don’t tell our own stories… who will?”

The game was officially released in January 2024 on the popular Steam gaming platform similar to Tales of Kenzera: Zau, published by Electronic Arts, is available for $24.99. According to the game’s description on Steam: “Explore the dynamic urban landscape around East forty seventh St. and South Parkway Blvd — the heart of Bronzeville — on Chicago’s South Side, just because it was between the wars. Meet heroes and villains, survivors and thrivers, in interactive 3D scenes that transport the visitor to detailed reconstructions of this lost community.

The description continues: “It was a time shaped by the Great Depression, Jim Crow segregation, and the burgeoning Chicago Renaissance in music, art, commerce, and culture. It was the time of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans who fled the harsh reality of the South in hopes of a better life in the cities of the North and West.”

In 2023 touched on the topic of Black video game developers, and in an industry that literally owes its invention to Jerry Lawson, the black man who created the first home video game system using cartridges, progress has been incredibly slow. According to 2021 study by the International Game Developers Associationonly 5% of video game employees surveyed identified as black, but independent developers like the Jones brothers are where much of the industry’s increased diversity is positioned.

Xalaver Nelson, a blackface author, game developer and founding father of Strange Scaffold, identified that the problem in the gaming industry is, satirically, a lack of imagination. “I think the problem the gaming industry faces with regard to black people is two-fold,” Nelson said. “The first is to give people a first likelihood because they have not done it yet. The inability to create a space for people to start their journey is a deadly disease that is currently strangling the gaming industry.