The history of Iran's very first video game: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

gamedeveloper.com:

Arash Hackimi is a video game journalist hailing from Iran. This article was written with editing assistance from Amirhossein Mirzaei and Brandon Sheffield.

When I started my career as a video game journalist in 2005 in Iran, it was widely believed that the inception of the games industry in the country was a very recent thing. We believed we were experiencing the very beginnings of the local medium, with games like Quest of Persia: The End of Innocence or Nejat-e Bandar.

But since then, I've been researching the full history of video games made in Iran, and in the process have discovered there were some earlier games—much earlier in fact, originating in the mid-1990s.

Not long ago, I published an article outlining the Iranian game history as widely as possible through web, print and field research.

In that article, Iran video games timeline: from 1970 to 2019, I mentioned that the first published Iranian video game was Tank Hunter by Honafa Game Studio. But a few months after publishing the article, Ramin ZafarAzizi contacted me via Twitter and sent me some documents about the development and production of his game, Ali Baba, which turns out to have been released in 1995, some months earlier than the aforementioned Tank Hunter.

Documents related to its development go back to 1993, showing an even earlier start to game development in Iran than we expected. ZafarAzizi has handily compiled a package of documents, including reports in magazines and videos, the game’s source code, and even the official governmental registration of the game in Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology.

This is the story of what we now believe to be the very first Iranian video game: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

But first,