Cook Inlet Tribal Council invests in sustainability with 'Never Alone': partnership develops new 'world games' genre in consumer video games.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: ALASKA NATIVE CORPORATIONS

"An Alaska Native game with whispered significance and a soul of its very own," says the online edition of the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mirror about the recently released video game called "Never Alone." Dozens of other publications, from gaming magazines to Forbes.com, give it high praise.

"Never Alone," a partnership between educational gaming force E-Line Media and Cook Inlet Tribal Council's for-profit arm CITC Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), is forging new ground in several different fields. It's the first partnership between an Alaska Native organization and a video game developer and also the first time a game developer has worked inclusively with an indigenous people to include the stories and culture of that community within a commercial video game. But based on the success E-Line and CEI have seen so far, this game will be the first of many of its kind.

Telling an Old Tale In a New Way

Making "Never Alone" was a business decision by Cook Inlet Tribal Council employees working under its relatively new for-profit arm CEI. Pita Benz, vice president of Social Enterprise for CITC, says the organization set up the for-profit venture to reduce dependence on grants and federal dollars.

"We spent a year looking at a variety of projects. We ended up talking at lunch one day about, how do we really reach Alaska Native youth? How do we leverage technology to reach Alaska Native youth and make money? We stumbled on the idea of video games," Benz says.

But the idea was voiced as an unlikely choice. Benz says she was surprised when CITC president and CEO Gloria O'Neill directed her to pursue it.

Benz did and asked E-Line Media to come up to give the company a primer on video games. E-Line did their best to discourage the company from jumping into the often-unpredictable world of gaming.

"Initially, we really tried to stress that this is really risky; over the years, we've seen hundreds, if not thousands, of game companies come and go," says E-Line president and co-founder Alan Gershenfeld.

E-Line performed a three-month business analysis to assess both the opportunity and risk with CEI and, at the end, Cook Inlet Tribal officials agreed to move forward on the project. Choosing a theme was relatively easy, Benz says.

"Every step of the way we've analyzed the business and what's best for the organization. You're best off doing what you know best, so we focused on Alaska Native stories," she says.

Cook Inlet Tribal employees collected dozens of Alaska Native stories--enough to fill several boxes--and shipped them to E-Line's Creative Director Sean Vesce. Ultimately, in collaboration with Ishmael Hope, an Alaska Native writer, a story written by Robert Cleveland of Ambler was chosen as the basis for the game. But the game is multi-faceted and includes tales from other regions of Alaska, from vengeance wreaked by Northern Lights spirits bent on swiping the heads of people who stay out after curfew and using them as footballs to stories of the Imminnaurat, or the Little...