Metia Interactive founder Maru Nihiniho on global connection

Maru Nihoniho has had her sceptics. Māori don’t make games; more specifically, wāhine Māori don’t make games. 

These attitudes, she says, have come mainly from New Zealanders and have made her even more determined to prove herself. After all, the 50 year old is one of New Zealand’s most successful game developers, making it on to Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech list (2018) and named an MNZM in 2016 for her services to the gaming industry and mental health.

The founder of gaming studio Metia Interactive sits in front of a Zoom screen backdrop of her latest creation, Guardian Maia – a fictional game about a wāhine Māori who guards the forest and saves her people from a tyrant. Nihoniho is not long back from Gamescom, an international gaming conference in Germany, where she took a prototype of the game to gaming publishers and is waiting for someone to – hopefully – pick it up.

Guardian Māia is Nihoniho’s latest effort to make games with Māori characters, to educate players about her culture via Māori storytelling. She says indigenous storytelling through culture-based games is hugely influential, and a powerful outlet for engagement and learning.

Sharing Māori culture via interactive technology has been the Auckland-based founder’s mission since she launched her company two decades ago. 

“I always wanted to make a game that featured our culture. I would play other games like Tomb Raider, or any action adventure game, and I'd think how awesome it would be if these were Māori characters and it was a Māori story because the gaming platform is really immersive,” she says.

For the past five years she has concentrated on creating games and interactive apps in the educational and e-therapy space for a local audience, for which she is internationally renowned. Businesses and other organisations are increasingly using gaming for team building and learning programmes; a bank, for example, might train its tellers in new programme via an interactive game.

Since 2020, Metia Interactive has won grants via the Ministry of Education to tell the stories of 14 different hapū and iwi via games and interactive media. Working with another company, TupuOra, it brings iwi and hapū stories to life in the digital world.

“Instead of books, you've now got an interactive app that tamariki and rangatahi can read and play through that tells the story of a particular iwi or hapū. They’re learning and having fun at the same time.’’

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How things have changed. When she launched Metia Interactive in 2003, New Zealand’s gaming industry was in its infancy and Nihoniho was something of a pioneer. After undertaking a one-year multimedia course, she was the first New Zealand woman to set up a gaming company. There was just one other New Zealand gaming company at the time – PikPok – and Maru reached out to its founders, seeking advice. Their tips? Go to international gaming conferences – something she advises other founders to do. 

She self-funded those trips and all her research and development. When she asked government agencies for funding, she was “pinged back and forth’’ between Creative New Zealand and Industry New Zealand (a predecessor to MBIE). 

“Creative New Zealand said, ‘no, you’re technical’, and Industry New Zealand said ‘no you’re creative’,” she recalls: “I racked up the credit card. The learning was sitting in lecture halls or conference halls overseas, listening to other game developers talk about how to make a game.’’

She had an idea for a game that had nothing to do with Māori culture but it allowed her to acquire the skills and knowledge about how to publish one. “My eventual goal was pretty lofty at the time – I just wanted to make this a big Māori action adventure game that was going to cost millions of dollars – but I had never made a game before. People in the industry were looking at me and questioning me: ‘you? Really?’”

Her first game – a 3D puzzle game called Cube – was picked up by PlayStation and it provided more than just a contract: it helped Nihoniho be taken seriously by the industry. “You have to go through all these applications to be approved and it’s a big job to get to that stage. So by doing all that, I was able to prove that I'm capable.’’

After Cube, she was approached by Auckland University to develop a mental health education game. Nihoniho created Sparx, an animated 3D game based on proven cognitive therapies. Pitched at rangatahi, it was the first to go through a clinical trial and won international awards.

“It was an eye opener to work on a game like that, because I was thinking Māori games are a really good educational tool to get people to connect to our culture. While making the Sparx game, I realised the gaming platform could be used for anything.”

Gaming is now an established industry in New Zealand. When she started out, her customers were games publishers; now they are educational institutes, businesses and consumers. A turning point, she says, was when smartphones took off and mobile games became popular. There are enough gaming companies now to feed an industry of courses and jobs. She is a mentor for some, and is excited about the arrival of companies like Ngāi Gaming, which is making games in te reo Māori.

Gaming industry companies can now apply for a 30 percent tax rebate, bringing them in line with those in the film industry and ensuring that games are made here rather than offshore. 

Grants are also available for interactive technology and gaming development via the Film Commission, New Zealand on Air, the Ministry of Education and CODE, the Dunedin-based Centre of Digital Excellence. However Nihoniho advises you need to already have the base of a game or a project and seek money to help prop it up or take it to the next level. She got a travel grant to go to Gamescom through CODE, otherwise it would have been difficult to afford to go.

Her other tips? Reach out to others, and have agile thinking. Twenty years since she launched her company, she remains on her toes because the industry is moving at such a pace, especially with the advent of AI.

Back to Guardian Maia. It’s being promoted via social media, and has 70,000 followers on Tiktok (more than half from overseas). Maia is a fictional character but it was important to Nihoniho that she felt authentic – from her moko kauae to the weaponry and language used. Its creator hopes the game will have the same impact as fantasy TV series like The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Ideally, an interactive film might be developed too.

“I don't know anything about The Lord of the Rings, but I learned pretty quickly from watching the movie. So if somebody doesn't understand Māori and Māori culture, they'll probably see it as a fantasy story. And they'll probably be really surprised to find out it's actually based on a real culture.’’

The game will be able to be played in several languages, including in Ngāi Tahu dialect. Ideally, the developers will add other iwi dialects as an option. 

“I really want our people to play this game. I want a global audience to play this game. Because I think everyone is going to learn something. Even Māori are going to learn something. If we're able to have it in as many dialects as possible, then that will be awesome and it will help te reo expand, especially here in New Zealand.’’