🥤Nigerians are playing games that feel like home

October 02, 2026 | Read online

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👋 Good afternoon! Nigerian Twitter has been running—literally. Since one game developer dropped a web-based Lagos race game, a whole herd of other race games has followed, and nobody seems ready to stop. Nigerians, meanwhile, are playing.

Haven’t heard of them yet? Keep reading for the story and the ways to play them. I’ve tried some myself (particularly Lagos Run), and honestly? They’re fun.

Let’s get into it!

In this edition: This week in culture, the man building an app to help Yoruba people find love, and why Nigerians are gravitating towards trends that feel like home. New Music Friday and more.

If you’re enjoying this, don’t forget to subscribe and join The Juice community. We’re building this together ♡.

Shalom Tewobola,
Editor.

🗞️ THIS WEEK IN CULTURE

🎵 MUSIC

British-Nigerian rapper Dave has announced upcoming artist Zaylevelten as the supporting act for his first headline concerts in Lagos, taking place October 16 and 17 at the National Theatre.

The two-night run will close out his The Boy Who Played the Harp tour, giving one of Nigeria’s rising alternative acts a major home-stage moment alongside the British-Nigerian rapper. Tickets are now on sale, and yes, we want to be involved too.

📽️ FILM

The Esiri brothers’ Clarissa is heading to some U.S. cinemas on December 11, with NEON handling the distribution, and its trailer is finally out.

After making its way through the international festival circuit, including Cannes and Venice, the Lagos-set adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway gives us a first proper look at the film. The trailer is absolutely stunning! You can watch here. It saddens us that there are no Nigerian dates yet.

📚 LITERATURE

Nigerian author Elnathan John has unveiled the cover and announced the January 26, 2027 release of his memoir, A Memory This Size and Other Fragments. The book traces his childhood in Kaduna and his experience of growing up alongside the loss of his sibling, who also appears on the cover.

With the memoir, John is turning personal memory into a story about childhood, grief, and the experiences that shape who we become. We’ll be reading.

🎟️ EVENT

PiggyVest marked its 10th anniversary with the fourth edition of its OpenHouse event, bringing together conversations, product launches, and opportunities for small businesses. Three businesses also shared ₦10 million in grants.

The event puts some attention on the people and businesses building within Nigeria’s growing startup and business ecosystem.

⚡TRENDING

Nora Awolowo, Damilola Osikoya, and Rixel Studios have made Guinness World Records history with Black Market, after its Lagos screening drew 51,258 people. The film now holds the record for the largest attendance at a film screening, surpassing the previous mark of 43,624.

The team had set a goal of bringing 50,000 people to Tafawa Balewa Square for one screening, and they went beyond it. Now that’s how you premiere a movie! The massive turnout shows just how far audience interest can stretch when a local film becomes a major communal experience.

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MAIN SQUEEZE

Awofisoye built an app to help Yoruba people find love

Dating apps may be everywhere, but finding someone who understands your culture, values, and expectations around relationships can still feel like a different challenge.

For Anjola Awofisoye, that gap inspired Yétúndé, a dating platform built with Yoruba people and intentional relationships in mind. We spoke to him about why he created the app, what its users have taught him about finding love, and the successful connections that have come from it.

Dating apps are everywhere, so what made you look at the way Yoruba people find love and think there was room for Yétúndé? And how did you arrive at the name?

There are many dating platforms, but we noticed that a lot of Yoruba people still wanted something that understood their culture, values, and expectations around relationships and marriage.

For many Yoruba families, love is not just about finding someone you are attracted to. It is also about shared values, family, culture, language, and ultimately building a home. We felt there was room for a platform that understood that from the beginning.

Yétúndé is built around the idea of helping people find relationships that can ultimately lead to marriage. What have you learnt about what people are actually looking for when they come to the app?

One of the biggest things we have learnt is that people are looking for intentionality.

Of course, attraction matters, but many of our users are looking beyond that. They want someone serious about relationships, who shares similar values, and is genuinely interested in building something meaningful.

We have also learnt that people want to feel understood. For our users, being able to connect with someone who understands their cultural background, family dynamics, and expectations can make the dating experience feel much more natural.

Since launching Yétúndé, have you had any user story or successful match that made you think that this is exactly why you built this?

Absolutely. Every time we hear from users who met through Yétúndé and have gone on to build serious relationships, it reinforces why we started.

We have had couples who connected through the platform, progressed into serious relationships, and eventually got married. We have also had users share their stories of how they met and how their relationships developed.

Those stories are special because they take Yétúndé from being just an app to something that is actually playing a role in people’s lives. Knowing that two people may have crossed paths because of something we built is incredibly meaningful to us.

Building a dating platform around a specific cultural identity comes with an interesting question of who gets to belong. What do you think about people from other ethnic backgrounds who may be interested in using Yétúndé?

Yétúndé was created specifically for Yoruba people, so our cultural focus is very intentional. We want the platform to preserve that sense of identity and community.

At the same time, we understand that love does not always follow ethnic boundaries. People from different backgrounds may genuinely appreciate Yoruba culture or have a personal connection to it.

Ultimately, our focus is on creating a space where Yoruba identity and values are central, while encouraging everyone who interacts with the community to approach it with genuine respect and serious intentions.

With a dating app, user feedback can shape the product as much as the original idea. What have users taught you that has changed the way you think about Yétúndé?

Our users have taught us that trust is just as important as matching.

People want to know that the person they are speaking to is genuine, that their information is protected, and that the platform takes their safety seriously. That has influenced the way we approach verification, moderation, and the overall user experience.

They have also taught us that everyone’s journey is different. Some people know exactly what they want, while others need time to figure out what works for them. So we are constantly learning how to make the experience more personal and meaningful rather than treating everyone the same.

As Yétúndé grows, what are you most interested in improving or introducing next? Is there something about the dating experience you still feel the app hasn’t figured out yet?

There is always more to improve. One of the biggest things we are interested in is making the journey from matching to building a genuine relationship much better.

Matching two people is only the beginning. The real challenge is helping them communicate, discover compatibility, and move from an initial connection to something meaningful.

As Yétúndé grows, we want to continue improving matchmaking, personalization, trust, and the overall experience for our users. We are also interested in introducing features that make it easier for people to connect intentionally rather than simply matching and moving on to the next person.

There is still a lot we are learning, but that is part of what makes building Yétúndé exciting. We are building alongside our community and allowing their experiences to shape where we go next.

🔪 THE PEEL

A picture of the creator of Lagos Run game and the game banner

How Nigerians are embracing trends that feel like home

The discourse

The streets of Twitter are buzzing with different car-race games, but this time, the car is the danfo you see on Lagos’ streets. The setting is Nigerian, with a yellow danfo bus, familiar Lagos routes like Ojuelegba, street hawkers, bus stops, and more details pulled from everyday Lagos life.

The response has been interesting. People aren't just playing the game, but also sharing their experiences, making jokes online, reacting to the details, and seeing pieces of a world they already know reflected in them.

This highlights how deeply audiences resonate with entertainment that mirrors their lived experiences and familiar surroundings. Together, these observations point to a growing connection between Nigerians and trends that feel authentic to their culture and identities.

Peeling it back

Opeyemi Adeniran, popularly called Eureka Seamless, released Lagos Run. What started as a test has gathered over 9 million views on Twitter, alongside a steady stream of interactions from users and brands featured in it. There's even an ongoing "The Driver, the Bus" picture challenge where people show their faces alongside the designs they chose for their danfo buses.

Then came more examples. Game developer Shalom Rayhamen shared Lagos Life, a Naija-like Sims 3 game, while software engineer Oluwaferanmi Adeniji created KinniJije, a meal-suggestion platform for West African dishes with recipes attached.

On the surface, these are different projects. One is a race game, another is a simulation game, and the third is a food platform. But they share something important by taking things Nigerians already recognize and turning them into experiences people can interact with.

In Lagos Run, pidgin is the prominent language used for instructions, while the game takes players through routes like Ojuelegba -Yaba. The traffic, conductors, crowded places, and the everyday chaos of Lagos’ daily commute.

Games have understood this for years. Subway Surfers, for instance, uses location-based updates to bring landmarks and visual details from different cities into familiar gameplay. These Nigerian projects tap into that appeal too, taking familiar parts of life and giving people a new way to experience them.

Another layer

Danfo Run is not the first time Nigerians have connected with entertainment that feels unmistakably theirs. Solana’s Okunkun became a much bigger conversation partly because it leaned into Yoruba language and culture, as seen in the work of Lodù and Celeste Ojatula, whose Yoruba identities and cultural influences are present in their music.

This goes further back too, with the Lijadu Sisters making music deeply rooted in Nigerian and Yoruba identity decades ago, and Fela embracing Pidgin in his music.

Film has shown this appetite before too. Nigerian romantic comedies are hardly new. The Wedding Party, Isoken and Chief Daddy all built audiences around familiar Nigerian relationships, families and social realities. It is no surprise, then, that Call of My Life, the 2026 romantic comedy, is currently the highest-grossing Nigerian film of the year, having made ₦901.3 million at the box office.

That makes Danfo Run interesting beyond the fun of putting a danfo in a racing game. It belongs to a longer story of Nigerian creators taking things that are unmistakably ours and discovering that their specificity can be the very thing that makes them connect.

The Core

We can become so used to our surroundings that we stop seeing what makes them interesting. Sometimes, it takes seeing them through someone else's lens to notice what was always there.

That may be part of the appeal of these projects. Nigerian life already comes with its own humor, struggles, stories, frustrations, characters, and experiences. We are constantly turning them into jokes, conversations, and stories without necessarily thinking of them as entertainment.

Then someone puts those same things into a game, a platform, or another creative experience, and suddenly we see them differently.

Maybe that's why entertainment that feels familiar can still feel like an escape. It doesn't take us somewhere completely new. It gives us a new way to look at somewhere we already know. And somewhere in that familiarity, we recognize ourselves.