For more than three thousand years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The story of Kunuuksaayuka, for example, is a simple tale of how our actions affect others: a boy named Kunuuksaayuka goes on a journey to identify the source of a savage blizzard. In the calm eye of the storm, he finds a man heaving shovelfuls of snow into the air, oblivious that they gather and grow into the squalls battering Kunuuksaayuka’s home downstream.

The Iñupiat’s oral tradition, however, is at risk. Over the past few decades, advances in technology and communication have opened up the community to a flood of other stories delivered in new ways. “As is common for indigenous peoples who are also part of a modern nation, it’s been increasingly difficult to maintain our traditions and cultural heritage,” Amy Fredeen, the C.F.O. of E-Line Media, a publisher of educational video games, and of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (C.I.T.C.), a nonprofit group that serves the Iñupiat and other Alaska Natives, said. “Our people have passed down knowledge and wisdom through stories for thousands of years—almost all of this orally—and storytellers are incredibly respected members of society. But as our society modernizes it’s become harder to keep these traditions alive.”

For the C.I.T.C., the challenge was to find a way to preserve the community’s stories in a way that could withstand modernity. As the team pondered the problem over lunch a few years ago, the council’s C.E.O., Gloria O’Neill, suggested a video game. O’Neill had been looking at examples of indigenous communities expressing their heritage through modern forms—such as the film “Whale Rider,” which explores gender roles in Maori culture—and was considering whether the medium could help to preserve the Iñupiat’s cultural heritage. “We all agreed that, if done well, a video game had the best chance of connecting Native youth with their cultural heritage,” Fredeen said.

Moreover, the council believed that a video game offered a chance to share the community’s stories and culture with new audiences around the world. “Our stories feature strong characters, fascinating settings, and are filled with wisdom and learning that address universal human themes. We believe they can travel.”

In conjunction with E-Line, the C.I.T.C. founded Upper One Games, the first indigenous-owned video-game company in the United States. “We looked at a range of options for reaching the community’s business and creative goals,” Sean Vesce, a creative director at the company, told me. “We quickly settled on the idea of a game inspired by and based on the rich storytelling traditions and culture of the Iñupiat people. The climate in which they live is some of the most remote and extreme on the planet. We were immediately drawn to their world view, traditions, and values, and how that might translate into a video game.”

With any creative project in which a group of privileged Westerners look to recount the tales and customs of an indigenous group, there is a risk of caricature, even amiable racism. “We’ve repeatedly seen our culture and stories appropriated and used without our permission or involvement,” Fredeen said. “People were skeptical that the project would turn out like these other examples, all appropriation and Westernization.” To reassure them, the development team assembled a group of Iñupiat elders, storytellers, and artists to become partners in the game’s development and lend their ideas and voices to the venture. “As it became clear to the community that this project was only going to move forward with their active participation, that hesitancy quickly evaporated,” Fredeen said. “We’ve had everybody from eighty-five-year-old elders who live most of the year in remote villages to kids in Barrow High School involved in the project.”

The result is Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa in the Iñupiat language), which comes out tomorrow for P.C., PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In the game, players assume the dual roles of a girl named Nuna and her pet arctic fox. Each character has a different set of skills, and the pair must work together to overcome obstacles on a journey that mirrors the one taken by Kunuuksaayuka, the blizzard investigator. This theme of interdependence is central to Iñupiat stories, no doubt born of the need to help one another in order to survive the harsh Alaskan conditions. It’s a message Never Alone seeks to impart through both its spoken narration (which has been recorded in Iñupiat) and the unspoken story communicated by its rules and mechanics.

For Vesce and the rest of the game’s development team, partnering with amateur game makers was unusually challenging. “To make Never Alone, we had to break from some traditional and fundamental ways of making games and bring the community into the creative process—a community that knew very little about the medium but that had strong thoughts on what they wanted to see in a game based on their culture,” Vesce said. He called this kind of collaboration “inclusive development,” in which each group is a student of the other’s world. “While it’s extremely rewarding, it also requires a huge commitment from all sides to build a foundation of mutual trust and respect.”

Despite the importance of keeping the Iñupiats’ vision for the project, there was no formal approval process during development. “It was more subtle, involving conversations with many different people, soliciting and gauging reactions to ideas, and finding creative solutions to meet both the community’s goals and our goals as game developers,” Vesce said. “When we encountered things that sounded great to us as game developers but didn’t resonate with our community partners, they would often present alternatives that ended up being much more interesting and often more challenging to incorporate.”

Never Alone’s purpose is to preserve fading stories, but in order to convince the Iñupiat young people of the stories’ enduring power and worth, it must also succeed as a video game. In a sense, it was perhaps the riskiest way of approaching the Iñupiat’s problem: this kind of storytelling requires an entirely new vocabulary. Reconciling narrative demands with the need to be engaging and functional remains one of the greatest challenges in game development; it’s a struggle for even the largest and best-funded teams.

Video games are well suited, however, to render in exquisite detail historical places and periods, and even the societies within them—the environments and systems that facilitate story creation in the first place. Players are often cast as a game’s protagonist, with an active role in its story, where they cannot help but see things, at least superficially, from a new perspective. Never Alone, if nothing else, offers a way, however incomplete, to experience life as an Iñupiat girl. The greater challenge will be to convince audiences that this is a virtual life worth living and, by association, a story worth preserving.