Leon 2527 -  Work in Progress

Leon 2527 is a real-time game in development, built in Unreal Engine 5 and co-produced with Iconem. It returns al-Hasan al-Wazzan, the sixteenth-century diplomat known as Leo Africanus, to the year 2527, in a Sahel reconstructed from photogrammetric scans of UNESCO heritage sites carried out by Iconem.

Born in Granada and raised in Fez, al-Wazzan crossed the Sahara on diplomatic missions before being captured by corsairs and given to Pope Leo X, who had him write the account of Africa that Europe treated as reference for three centuries. Knowledge taken under constraint, encoded in the language of the power that seized it, and replayed as neutral. The project reads that history as the early architecture of a training corpus, and gives the captured figure back his own voice, speaking Arabic, five centuries later.

The images below are early work-in-progress captures. Visuals, dialogue and interactions are still in development and do not represent the final work.