The Berlin-Based Nigerian Developer Behind the Danfo Game Everyone Is Playing

On the 26nd of September, Opeyemi Adeniran shared a link. Two days later, 7,000 people had driven a danfo through Lagos without leaving their phones. By the end of that week, the number grew to 27,000. Now, it is past 90,000. The post announcing it has been seen 9.4 million times, and counting.

He built it at night while holding down a full-time job in a country 3,000 miles away from the city the game is all about.

The game is called Lagos Run. You drive a danfo. In it, you run routes like Ojuelegba to Yaba. You pick up passengers for fares. You dodge okadas and traffic. A radio plays in the background pulling audio from real Lagos stations. There is nothing to download. Nothing to log into. You click a link and you are driving.

According to Opeyemi, it took four or five weeks to create the game, and he did it while working time as a senior frontend engineer in Berlin. When I asked how he managed both, he said, “I’ve always been a night owl as a techie. Nights are for building and experimenting.”

“The reception has been lovely and encouraging, especially the way people embraced the game and owned it.”

— Opeyemi Adeniran

Adeniran was raised in Ojota and went to secondary school in Epe. He studied computer science at Yaba Tech, started his tech career in 2017 in Yaba while still a student. After school, he moved to Germany for work, and recently finished a remote master’s degree at the University of Essex. “All my life I’ve been around Yaba,” he says. “It’s almost all my life in Lagos.”

This is the part worth sitting with, because it explains the inspiration for the game. Adeniran is several years and two countries removed from the city and what he chose to build was not a transport game for Berlin, where he currently lives. When I put it to him that he seems unable to let go of Lagos, he agrees without hesitation, and reframes it as something closer to obligation.

“Lagos is a very big creative spot. A lot of ideas everywhere. The danfo culture is something very big, and a lot of creative artists in Nigeria seek inspiration from that concept. I’m in tech, so why can’t I bring this into reality too?”

— Opeyemi Adeniran

Notice how the words are phrased. He did not ask “why don’t I” but “why can’t I.” Painters and musicians have been exploring the danfo culture for years. He is a tech person and a Nigerian, and so for him, the Nigerian identity and the danfo culture are his material too regardless of what time zone he works in.

Historically, Lagos Run is not the first attempt at adopting the danfo culture into the gaming world. In 2007 Bayo Puddicombe created a danfo game before he co‑founded ChopUp. Maliyo Games had a version. Goondu Interactive produced Danfo Saga and Danfo Hustle. The yellow bus has been circling game development for almost twenty years without ever quite breaking through. What Adeniran did was get it to land.

Lagos Run attracted people who had never thought of themselves as gamers. Now, those people compare leaderboard scores, file bug reports, feature requests and make jokes on X about passengers who will not get off. Lagos Run also pulled in developers. Within days of the launch, other Nigerians released their own Lagos/Africa themed games of different kinds. The conversation shifted from whether local cultural IP could succeed to how far it could go. The idea had been waiting for eighteen years. Adeniran is the person who proved it travels.

One creative detail that made people immediately enjoy the gameplay was the sound. Adeniran knew what a danfo actually sounds like from the inside, which is to say loud and layered and competing with itself. “You hear loud noises,” he says. “The danfo’ driver playing the radio on the raggedy sound system, the passengers making various noises left and right.” But he had no way of recording any of it in real life. “I don’t have a studio, and I am not in Naija” he says, “so I couldn’t record all those sounds.” What he did instead was research streaming stations and wire real Lagos radio into the game so that whatever is actually broadcasting in the city at that moment is what plays while you drive. It solved a production problem and became the feature everybody talks about.

“Radio is a big culture in Lagos too. So I thought, let’s bring our people to listen to radio again. You’re on your way to work, inside the bus, you play the game, you listen to radio.”

— Opeyemi Adeniran

He said he still goes to Lagos though not often and when he does he ensures to pay close attention. On one such trip, what really stood out to him was the Lagos rail line. He called it impressive and when he started building the game, his mind was thinking about how to bring that into the game. He imagined the drivers picking up passengers at one station and taking them to the next crossing. “The real life experiences made sure the possibilities in the game are endless,” he said.

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The decision not to ship the game to app stores was on purpose and that’s mostly why it grew fast. “One of the easiest ways to reach people is through the web,” he says and then explains the technical side: the web can handle big models now without slowing down and his own experience creating products helped shape the tools he picked. Another major reason was iteration speed. A new game attracts a lot of feedbacks and he wanted to fix problems and add new features the same day they are identified instead of waiting for app store approval and user updates. “Imagine you’re pushing updates every minute,” he says. “We can’t always ask users to update the app. Then they miss out.” The app stores are still the goal, in the long run. They just weren’t the place to start.

The feedback came in just as he expected and some of it was unhinged. People have actually asked to withdraw digital credits earned from the game as real money. He takes it in good humour and sorts the signal from the noise, which mostly turns out to be interface housekeeping: declutter the screens, move the buttons, make things smaller. He however said more feedback are welcome. He wants to hear it all.

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This is not Adeniran’s first attempt at building for Lagos. In 2020, he built Owambe, an app for finding parties in Lagos. In 2018 he entered his first hackathon at a Figma and GitHub event and came second. Eight years later, he put a danfo on the internet and ninety thousand people got on the wheel. What actually triggered it was smaller than any of that. He gave the game to a friend to test. The friend played it enjoyed it and insisted Adeniran post about it immediately. “He made sure I sent a tweet instantly,” Adeniran said. “That was what blew the app.”

Within 72 hours of his launch, a few other Lagos-themed games came out from other developers, one especially came from the DevFest Lagos as part of the event’s marketing roll out. Most people in his situation would see that as being copied. He sees it as the scene growing. He is completely calm about it partly because he knows those people. “We always went to DevFest Lagos ” he says, “so the guys we are all friends. It is not a problem all.” He has been on the side of it too: sitting with an idea while someone else released theirs and the lesson he learned is the one he keeps sharing now.

“Once I build something I push it out there no matter how scrappy it is. Build things, give them to your friends, ask them to test it out. You never know.”

— Opeyemi Adeniran

When I asked about what he’s most proud of about the success of the game, he said the community. The way Nigerians have received Lagos Run has a flavour, the same energy that surrounded the Dangote IPO. “I love it when a community comes out to support their own,” he said. “It’s something we Nigerians have always been good at, and trust me, it’s one of the things other countries envy about us.” The game did not appear as something a developer made and released to an audience. It appeared as something that already belonged to everyone and somebody built it. People are posting scores, bug reports and arguing about passengers who refuse to get off. He is answering requests for agbero and LASTMA in the game. He added an Independence Day paint job.

There is also the matter of what it costs to build a trendy game like this. The servers are not free and he is currently is paying for them out of pocket. He has started a crowdfunding campaign to bring the agbero feature in and he is thinking about introducing proper monetisation later.