Two years ago, to the day, a Joy Hack event organised by iceAddis brought together young coders in a creative sprint to design computer games and draft accompanying articles. Held over three days on the fifth floor of a nondescript building, the hackathon drew participants aged 16 to 25, who were confined to the venue for the duration of the challenge. Meals, a kitchenette, and sleeping arrangements were provided to simulate an intensive, retreat-like environment conducive to innovation.

The ambiance, part startup bootcamp, part mountain shelter, encouraged collaboration and creative risk-taking. Among the standout efforts were attempts to recreate the Battle of Adwa as a game. One group, in particular, presented promising animation, graphics, and storyline that promised a bright future: showing early signs of creative depth and technical capacity.

About a year ago, I found myself drawn into the world of blockchain-based gaming, a subculture that was quietly gaining traction in Addis Abeba. The entry point was unexpected. A young colleague, reserved, often glued to his phone, introduced me to a deceptively simple game called Hamster Kombat. What appeared at first to be a routine distraction turned out to be part of a much larger ecosystem of decentralised gaming platforms powered by cryptocurrency.

He urged me to download the game, along with others like it, and my initial curiosity soon gave way to a deeper fascination. These games, often dismissed by outsiders as idle time-wasters, were in fact gateways into a parallel digital economy, one where players earned tokens, unlocked rewards, and navigated sophisticated play-to-earn mechanisms that blurred the lines between leisure and labor.

At the time, I wrote briefly about this trend in a July 2024 column, but the scale of what I encountered warranted a closer look. To my surprise, there were half a dozen Amharic-language tutorials on YouTube dedicated to these games, each with thousands of views and active comment sections. These were not fringe curiosities. They represented a growing, digitally native subculture operating quietly on the margins of mainstream media and public discourse.

This virtual face of Addis was not easily visible. It thrived in bedrooms, cafés, and shared apartments, anywhere with a stable internet connection. Young people spent hours behind screens, deciphering game logic, strategizing token accumulation, and chasing digital fortunes with a seriousness rarely attributed to play.

To ignore this world simply because it is not visible on city streets or in headlines is to underestimate the quiet evolution of how youth engage with technology, finance, and community. In retrospect, my glimpse into the crypto-gaming landscape revealed not a passing fad, but an emergent digital economy with its own rules, risks, and rewards; arguably as complex and consequential as the offline world it mirrors.

It was within this context that I came across a game titled Rise of the Fearless, themed around the historic Battle of Adwa, I was struck with excitement. I assumed, perhaps too quickly, that it must have been developed by one of the two brilliant young programmers I had met at a recent Hackathon, both of whom had been working on a project under the same name. Their coding skills were impressive, and it made perfect sense that they would attempt to turn a national legacy into a digital experience.

But a quick online search told a different story. The game had been developed by Kanessa Muluneh, a tech and finance entrepreneur with ambitions to raise over 700,000 dollars to launch the game globally. That figure alone was staggering, hinting at a level of scale and vision that is rare in the local gaming scene. My curiosity shifted, who was this woman who dared to mount such a bold venture?

It became clear that my initial assumption had been misplaced. As technically gifted as the Hackathon kids were, they remained newcomers to the global business arena. Their talents in programming were not in question, but the mechanics of fundraising, intellectual property, and international market penetration remained elusive, gateways often controlled not by skill, but by access.