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About the Antura Project

Our Team

This original Arabic project was developed by the Cologne Game Lab – TH Köln (German university of Applied Sciences),  Video Games Without Borders (a nonprofit organization registered in Spain) and Wixel Studios (a Lebanese development studio).

Later on, several additional partners joined and helped adapt the game to address other emergencies and learning needs in different contexts with the priority set on 3 humanitarian crises: Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Our team is located all over the world and mainly comprises European, Middle Eastern and North African residents and refugees. It is a mix of veteran game developers, scientists and humanitarians. More than 100 people collaborated on the development and distribution of this game.

Funding partners

In 2017, Antura and the Letters won the international EduApp4Syria competition, funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and focused on helping Syrian refugee kids.

In 2019, Antura and the Letters received the UNHCR’s NGO Innovation Award for its plans for scaling its impact to Afghanistan.

In 2021, Ubisoft started supporting the initiative with the focus set on helping Afghan children and, more recently, Ukrainian refugees.

In 2023, Antura was awarded an Erasmus+ grant from the European Union to improve the game to help the integration of migrant children in European countries by discovering also the local culture, starting from France and Poland where we’ll run the pilot test in 2025 and 2026.

Partners & Community

The Antura initiative was possible thanks to the support of many people and organizations who helped develop, test and distribute the game through the years.

A special thanks to all partners who helped on the original game:

  • University of Verona, Department of Computer Science (game development)
  • The Bahcesehir University (testing and dissemination)
  • Université Chouaib Doukkali (testing)
  • Université Libanaise (testing and dissemination)
  • Libraries Without Borders (dissemination)
  • Unity3D (Donated Pro License)
  • Slack (Team communication tool)
  • EA (PR services)
  • Ubisoft (Digital marketing support)
  • Abdullah & Ebtisam’s Charitable Association (trailer support)
  • Glasgow Caledonian University (game jam about Antura)

Finally, being selected as winner of the Education Category at the Techfugees Global Challenges Competition 2018, we established a longlasting partnership with Techfugees for scaling our impact!