African games meet quantum research at Gamescom

A quantum-gaming experiment shared a Gamescom stand in Germany with studios from Ghana, Kenya and South Africa earlier last month. The link-up at the massive annual video game trade fair offered a glimpse of how emerging computing tools could eventually reach a wider game-development community.

Inside the Indie Arena, the event’s larger independent-games area in Hall 10.2, the W Love Games booth served as a shared host space. MiTale and Moth formed the quantum-research side of the collaboration. MiTale showed Clay – The Last Redemption, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that experiments with quantum computing, while Moth presented work aimed at making real quantum hardware accessible to game developers.

Games From Africa formed a separate showcase within the booth, featuring Karmzah from Ghana’s Leti Arts and Hiru from Nairobi-based Kunta Content. The line-up included two games presented by Narratify Agency: the Africanfuturist action-adventure Relooted; and Black Sailors: Bay of All Saints.

Clay was not a new Gamescom reveal. MiTale first publicly detailed work with IBM quantum technology in 2020, released a demo in 2021 and showed the game at Gamescom again in 2022. The new take in 2026 was the environment around the project: a long-running quantum experiment was sharing space with a broader network of African developers and games.

The shared stand combined African game showcases with MiTale’s quantum experiments and Moth’s efforts to make real quantum hardware accessible to game developers.

A six-year quantum experiment

Clay uses simulated quantum circuits to influence narrative dynamics, procedural environment generation and selected visual effects. The current build therefore does not require a quantum computer to run. MiTale is simulating quantum operations using conventional computing while investigating how similar systems could eventually work with real quantum hardware.

Natasha Skult, MiTale CEO and W Love Games chairperson, began exploring quantum applications in games with then-IBM Research scientist James Wootton in 2019. Their work included experiments connecting IBM’s open-source Qiskit quantum software with the Unity game engine.

The research has since become a central part of Skult’s academic work. In March 2026, Skult defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Turku on interactive storytelling with quantum computing. The research examined how quantum technologies could affect game-design methods, narrative structures and player experiences, with Clay, the quantum-fluid puzzle prototype QWiz and the hand-tracked VR experience QPlayground among the case studies.

The dissertation found potential for more complex procedural generation, adaptive narratives and dynamic game worlds. The research also highlighted the difficulty of predicting player experiences and adapting established development workflows to quantum systems.

“Quantum computing is often discussed in terms of science, finance or optimisation, but we are interested in what happens when you give this completely different kind of computing technology to game designers and storytellers,” says Skult. “With Clay, we want to explore whether quantum computing can help us create even more immersive experiences for our players, where each player decision and style of gameplay can affect the game worlds, narrative structures and experiences in real time, that would be difficult to approach in the same way with conventional tools.

“We started experimenting with quantum computing in games years before there was a clear commercial roadmap for it. The technology is now developing rapidly, and so are the tools around it. Our aim is not to create technology demonstrations, but to understand how quantum computing can eventually become another useful tool for game developers. This is just as graphics processors, game engines and artificial intelligence have become part of modern game development.”

Wootton is now chief science officer at Moth, which develops quantum technology for games, media and other creative applications. Moth joined MiTale at Gamescom 2026 with a more immediate example of quantum gaming: Quantum Backrooms, an open-access game whose changing mazes are shaped using real quantum computers. Each qubit in the quantum processor corresponds to part of the maze, while relationships between qubits help determine structures such as walls and openings.

Moth invited game developers and other creative technologists to sign up for early access to the platform and run jobs on real quantum hardware. That moves at least part of the quantum-gaming idea beyond simulation and towards tools that developers can experiment with directly.

MiTale has shifted Clay from Unity to the Godot engine as the studio explores quantum technologies beyond Qiskit. The project continues to test how those technologies could fit into commercial game design.

African ties go back further than Gamescom 2026

The connection between MiTale and African game development predates this year’s event.

Skult and Leti Arts CEO Eyram Tawia created and co-taught a game development course at Ashesi University in Ghana in 2023. The programme was intended to build practical development skills and strengthen the country’s games ecosystem.

That fits into a much longer ambition at Leti Arts. In 2022, Tawia described the Ghanaian studio’s efforts to build games around African history and folklore as part of a long-term vision to make games from Africa for the world.

The MiTale relationship later moved onto the international games circuit. Leti Arts, MiTale and Moth exhibited together at Gamescom 2025. The 2026 stand broadened that grouping further, with Kunta Content and Narratify joining the same space and Relooted adding a South African-developed title to the mix.

Leti Arts participated in the first Games From Nigeria pavilion and the Africa Games Industry Mixer, extending the connection beyond a single shared booth. Kunta Content used the Games From Africa presence to present HIRU, its action-adventure game drawing on African mythology.

Could African studios eventually use quantum tools?

The more consequential question is whether the tools being developed around experiments such as Clay can move beyond specialist research teams and into the hands of conventional game developers.

MiTale is developing Naviqate, a tool intended to make quantum functionality accessible to developers who are not quantum programmers. The project is designed to connect quantum systems with familiar development environments including Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot and the Ink narrative system.

If tools of this kind mature, developers using conventional engines could experiment with quantum-driven systems through interfaces closer to the software they already use.

At Gamescom, Leti Arts and Kunta Content shared that environment with MiTale and Moth, while Relooted added a South African-developed title to the stand. Skult and Tawia also already have an educational collaboration behind them.

The significance lies in that proximity. Teams trying to make quantum technology usable by ordinary game developers are increasingly crossing paths with studios building the next generation of African games. Moth’s invitation for developers to experiment with real quantum hardware shows that access is also starting to move, cautiously, from research concept towards something developers can try.

What could quantum actually change?

Clay itself is not a showcase for cutting-edge game graphics. Its presentation is heavily text-led and built around relatively static 2D elements, putting the emphasis on narrative and underlying systems rather than visual spectacle.

Quantum computing has no inherent visual style, and high-end graphics would say little about whether quantum-driven game systems are useful.

The more important question is whether players can eventually notice the difference.

Procedural generation already allows conventional games to create different maps, encounters and combinations on repeated playthroughs. Quantum computing does not make procedural generation possible for the first time, and producing more variations does not automatically produce better ones.

Quantum systems could, however, give designers different ways to represent and process complex sets of possibilities. Skult’s dissertation points in particular to more complex procedural generation, adaptive narratives and dynamic game worlds, where a larger range of possible states could influence how a game responds to players.

For a player, those technical distinctions are significant only when they lead to worthwhile choices, encounters or stories.

The more exciting design thought experiment is to apply the principle to a role-playing game with the production scale and authored depth of Baldur’s Gate 3. Quantum-driven systems could theoretically influence world states, encounters or narrative branches so that campaigns diverge through a larger and less predictable web of possibilities.

The limiting factor would still be authorship. Developers would need to write convincing characters, dialogue and consequences, build environments and animations, and make sure generated combinations remain coherent. More variation without enough authored structure could simply produce endless permutations of the same ideas.

If those two sides eventually come together, the result could be extraordinary replayability: a carefully authored world capable of reacting to players through systems whose possible states become increasingly difficult to exhaust. The fantasy is a role-playing game that could remain surprising over years of play, rather than one whose branches become familiar after a handful of campaigns.

That kind of role-playing game remains a future possibility. Clay is valuable instead as a long-running test bed for quantum-influenced game design and for the questions developers will need to solve before such systems can scale.

Gamescom 2026 supplied a key reason to pay attention. MiTale’s experiment shared space with developers from a growing African games ecosystem at the same event where Moth was inviting developers to experiment with real quantum hardware. The question is becoming less about whether these tools could reach conventional game developers, and more about what those developers will eventually find worth doing with them.

The push to take quantum gaming beyond specialist research continues this week with the Global Quantum Game Jam, which runs online from 25 to 27 September. The event brings game developers, quantum physicists and other creators together to build games using quantum themes, simulations or real hardware, with no previous experience in quantum physics or game development required.

* Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and deputy editor of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.