Who We Are

Tumeke Studio is a Māori-owned, Māori-led game and media studio, founded by Edward Stanaway (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whātua) in 2025.

We exist to create worlds, and to bring kaupapa Māori into the heart of how those worlds are made.  We are doing this not by building a fence around Māori culture, but by bringing this culture directly into global discussion, and by doing so establishing a creative identity for Aotearoa as a place where new IP based works will flourish. These works will be authentic expressions of Māori and indigenous heritage.  While AAA studios book cultural consultants to achieve compliance and limit offense, we build from actual indigenous experience not to limit legal liability, but to share.

Tumeke means “awesome” in Te Reo, the language native to Aotearoa.  It is exactly the standard we strive for.  When we introduce our projects, we want that to be the reaction we receive, and when we support a project, we want that to be the reason why we’re engaged.  Everything we take part in is an opportunity to explore, to invent, to connect with players in ways that feel real and grounded.

This studio was founded to be a space where creators can build with mana, with tikanga, and with joy, in ways that reflect who we are and how we see the world.

We are here to create games and experiences that will carry our voices outward.  This is not to explain ourselves, but to add our voices, our authority, and our experience to the global discussion.

Our Pou (Guiding Principles)

In te ao Māori, pou are the pillars that support a structure.  The support is not just physical, but exists in spirit and in purpose. It makes sense. A home is only a home when investment is made to create one. Without that it’s just a structure that keeps the weather out. The pou show us how to invest in ourselves so we can realize our shared vision.

At Tumeke Studio, we think of our pou as the principles that hold up everything we create: how we work, how we relate to others, and how we care for the stories we tell.

These are the pou that guide us.

Manaakitanga – You are Welcome on Our Journey

Our work is open to the world, and so is our studio.

At Tumeke Studio, Manaakitanga means designing and building in ways that welcome all players, all collaborators, and all perspectives that respect and advance Māori identity.

We do not make games for exclusion.  Our products are not meant to be only for Māori or only interesting to others like us.  They are meant to increase familiarity of the depth and range of Māori culture in global spaces.  This can only be done by including other perspectives in the conversation, not by repeating the exclusions we seek to move past.

Our products are intended to speak globally.  To show the depth, strength, and creativity of Māori identity beyond the tropes the world too often reduces us to requires more than just producing a niche piece of identity.   It requires making that identity accessible, relatable, and appealing to those who are not immediately familiar to it, without watering down that identity in the process.

In our studio, everyone who shares that goal is welcome. In our work, everyone is invited in.

Mana Motuhake – We are Leading Our Own Story

We create from our own voice. This is not to seek approval, and not to fit into someone else’s mold.

At Tumeke Studio, Mana Motuhake means building games and experiences that are driven by Māori perspectives and governed by our own kaupapa. We shape the terms of our work, our collaborations, and our partnerships. We do so openly, so that others can engage with us in ways that respect that autonomy.

It also means staking ground in the global creative space before others define it for us.

We have seen too many examples where Māori and other Indigenous identities are flattened into caricatures like warriors, primitives, wise elders, angry outcasts, and singing sailors. These stories told without depth, by those with no accountability to the cultures they portray. They’re told for entertainment, and to make money.

We are here to change that. We are here to show the depth and breadth of who we are, not just in story, but in system, in aesthetic, and in the creative process itself. 

The worlds we create reflect this: not by being locked away or diluted, but through standing proudly in their own form and carrying the full weight of identity, complexity, and humanity that makes all of our journeys valuable. Our stories enable us to claim our cultural heritage on our terms, and build a space where we can communicate to others in our language, with our own voices.

Te Wairua Auaha – We Bring Meaning to Every Layer

We build creatively and with intent — because how something is made shapes what it can carry into the world.

At Tumeke Studio, Te Wairua Auaha means approaching every part of our creative process with the same care, purpose, and respect that a whakairo carver brings to their work. This is not just about polish or quality — it is about embedding meaning, connection, and integrity into the systems, stories, and experiences we create.

This extends to the language of our visual design. The symbols, structures, and patterns we use, from the whorls in the sky to the grid on the ground, these symbolize the fractured tropes of the world and are chosen with care. They exist to communicate meaning, to carry intention alongside history, and to protect what matters. In our work, nothing is placed without purpose.

But intent alone is not enough. Creativity is a living process. Through it, we sometimes discover new resonances, new meanings that we had not fully seen at the start. We hold our craft with discipline, but also with openness. By allowing the work itself to speak, it shapes us in return. This is part of the responsibility of Mahi Whakairo.

Through this, we aim to create games that do more than entertain. We want them to carry mana.  In more colloquial terms, we want our works to carry meaning; to offer experiences that resonate beyond the screen, and that open new ways for players everywhere to engage with Māori ways of seeing and being.

Why Does Tumeke's Work Matter?

We are here to build games that feel alive. Worlds that respond, react, and change as players move through them.

Too many games today repeat familiar patterns and core systems with the same stories and the same ways of keeping players busy without giving them something real to engage with.

We’ve all seen it: killing ten rats to get an Outcast axe from a farmer who won’t even thank you when you return. It’s busywork. It’s boring. And it’s everywhere.  The journey is missing, so players rush to the end. Studios chase ‘endgame’ loops hoping to salvage player interest, but the reality is the product itself often lacks substance.

Without substance, players push past what they rightly see as filler and embrace the meta, whether through power builds, optimal gear, or simply griefing others1. All of this reinforces a basic imperial mindset that is at the heart of current gaming: That might makes right.2

Research shows that strong relational systems and meaningful choices give player engagement purpose, and by doing so directly counter this mindset. 3,4 True fun arises when players are learning and mastering systems that matter and not when they are trapped in shallow loops of extraction and dominance5. This is where Māori worldview can make significant contributions.

Though we’re trying to be inclusive, game developers are still failing, sometimes catastrophically, with formal complaints being filed against AAA studios for creating genuine cultural harm6. At best inclusion has been largely superficial, along with many other so-called innovative tropes in recent design canon.

Is it really going to make our games better because we have to trim our characters beard when they age, and fight arthritis as their virtual joints degrade? No. What will improve games is world building. Because currently the content in many games is either uninteresting or flattens culture into marketable tropes, from “Space Samurai” to “Viking Barbarian”.

Or studios duck the issue of culture entirely by creating character archetypes that are purposefully non-human. While this is a valid approach, our approach seeks to tackle this issue head-on.

Instead of asking for permission to be brought into the discussion and waiting for a reply that will inevitably come with its own terms and restrictions, Tumeke is staking our own claim in the discussion itself. We invite you to join us.

Because the truth is, even when indigenous content is included, it is too often layered on top of systems that remain unchanged. It’s the same gameplay loop. There’s nothing fundamentally new about it.

But the tools have changed and so has the opportunity.

We can now build games where actions matter and long term consequences can be projected. A world where relationships evolve, and where the world reflects the weight of what has come before. Where players interact with systems that carry meaning, and because those systems carry meaning their reactions evolve and aren’t just about mechanics and playing the spreadsheet effectively.

And with modern tools, we can bring real language, real depth, and real cultural presence into those worlds. This isn’t done as decoration, but as part of how they live and breathe.  This exposes people to learning not just through behavior modelling in game, but through actual language being used, and filtered through in-game translation mechanisms so that players may gradually de-code the language through game mechanics, but they often may learn a few real words along the way.

This is all part of Tumeke’s mission, and it isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. While people debate the merits of creating AI friendships, AI therapists, and AI intimate partners, we’re using it for something functional and practical.  We’re using it as a translator inside of our products, taking the language you type and creating live cultural experiences between players of different in-game alignments.

This allows people to experience life through the lens of “the outsider”, flipping modern power dynamics on their head, and creating opportunities for real social growth and awareness through interactions inside play spaces.

 

At Tumeke Studio we’re not here to make “cultural games.”  Those games are great, and we love their purpose.  But they’re also easy to pigeonhole into educational branding, and thereby write-off as something other than world-class entertainment.

We’re here to make culturally aware games. To make better games that are deeper, more human, and more connected. Yes, our games will educate. All good games educate. Ours will do so through exposure, relevance, and interaction with alternative points of view in the same way humans interact in the real world. By doing it this way we’re not just being inclusive, we are actively practicing manaakitanga.

Modern technology has begun to enable the creation of games that that respect the intelligence of the player and the complexity of the world they move through. This means we can add complexity, nuance, and legitimacy to the experience, instead of just another NPC with a fur cloak, a bad voiceover, and a canned script.

This creates space for discovery and not just consumption.

Our platform is built to help us do this. By shaping persistence, consequence, and relational depth at the system level we can create worlds that carry meaning in every layer.

Errata is our first step on this path, but the larger goal is to help expand what games can be, how they can speak, and how indigenous voices can bring value to these platforms.

How We Are Using AI

Tumeke Studio is also breaking new ground in how we use AI, and we are stating this openly.

We believe we are among the first Indigenous-led studios to use AI not to replace people or automate content, but to protect our creative autonomy and enable development that would otherwise be out of reach for a studio of this size.

AI allows us to:

  • Maintain full authorship during narrative development, concept design, and system building, without handing those processes to external contractors or investors.
  • Rapidly iterate and prototype ideas internally, keeping creative and cultural decisions within the studio.
  • Share our ideas externally through concept imagery, eliminating months or even years of aesthetic debate during prototyping.
  • Support the development of critical infrastructure by assisting workflows for testing, iteration, and content-layer logic design. No off-the-shelf tool provides this capability.
  • Share our language through linguistic modelling in-game.
  • Share our culture through an indigenous shaped world where relationships build on player action, not on checklists and prerequisites.

We do not treat AI as a hype element. We’re also not here to debate the “ethics” of AI use except to state this: Indigenous cultures have long been marginalized.  We believe using AI responsibly as an assistant can help to correct this, not by replacing people, but by allowing us to communicate clearly with them.

Artists are not being replaced.  They’re being given clear direction.

Investors are not being misled.  They’re being shown our intentions as we see them, so they can fully grasp the scope of our work.

We treat GenAI as a partner that must operate under sound governance processes and serve the studio’s kaupapa. We understand there are risks inherent with the use of AI both as an aid and as a piece of back-end-engineering, but accept those risks can be managed with proper oversight and that the benefits to accessibility outweigh the risks due to not fully understanding an emerging technology.

As part of this we are building a responsible use framework for individuals and companies who wish to use GenAI to represent indigenous people. While we can’t speak for all indigenous societies, we can share what we have learned and create an example for discussion.

Without this approach, a studio of our size and position would be forced to compromise at every stage. We will not do that.

Where Are We? What's our Funding Status?

Tumeke Studio is currently self-funded. Those of us working full time on the studio are doing so while building revenue streams to sustain momentum and growth.

We are open to aligned capital that respects our kaupapa and supports the work we are building here.

At this stage, we welcome interest from angel investors, grantors, pre-Seed partners, and creative fellowship programs that understand the value of building strong cultural IP and original worlds and who see the long game we are playing.

The studio is bootstrapped through personal investment and targeted grants. We will scale deliberately, with purpose. Not through fast growth that forces creative shortcuts.

As we grow, we will expand into transmedia where appropriate, under the same governance principles.

Progress is deliberate and controlled. We are building for creative sovereignty, not speculative scale.

Market Opportunity

The Errata fiction presents some unique structural conditions that facilitate transmedia expansion for indigenous intellectual property.

These are:

  • An expandable world logic
  • Role-driven agency
  • Platform-agnostic systems

All three of these conditions are satisfied through Errata’s unique world systems, behavioral consequence mechanics, and survival-infrastructure design.  Errata’s wahka, unique technological innovations, and inter-factional systems operate independently of plot, by design.  This allows their logic to be modularized across print fiction, XR, tabletop, interactive, and collectible platforms.

By embedding Māori cultural value throughout the systems Errata enacts the concept of manahau7 through the concepts of earned reputation, behavioral integrity, and the carefully crafted interlocking systems that produce cause-and-effect relationships that good stories are built on.

The world is not explained in Western narrative language, but it is understood through a common set of shared experiences, values, and concerns anchored in modern-day discussions.

Errata is not indigenous branding or a celebration of heritage.  It is a complete indigenous franchise that is forward thinking, speculative, and takes ownership in today’s social concerns in the same ways the world’s most popular science fiction franchises have done.

How To Engage

We are building for the long game, and we welcome those who want to be part of it.

If the kaupapa speaks to you, follow the work. If you believe in what we are building and want to help move it forward, we are open to those conversations. We will be direct about what aligns with our values and what does not.

We welcome:

  • Partners and collaborators who respect our kaupapa and want to build with integrity

  • Investors who understand this is about sovereignty and depth, not fast returns

  • Media who are genuinely interested in the work and the thinking behind it

  • Players and supporters who want to walk this path with us

To ensure thoughtful and purposeful engagement, we use separate pathways:

We look forward to connecting with those who walk this path with us.