Black Myth: Wukong
A new era for the Chinese gaming industry?
Chien-ming Lin is a Taiwanese computer scientist. Previously, he spent five years studying and working in Beijing.
I’ve been waiting for the release of Black Myth: Wukong 黑神话：悟空 for four years. On the day the game was released, August 20, it set a new record with 2.2 million peak concurrent users on Steam, more than any other single-player game in history.
Here’s why it was such a smash hit.
Popular Gaming Culture in China
The CCP wants people to spend less time playing video games. State-affiliated media refers to video games as “spiritual opium.” The number of hours children are allowed to spend gaming is strictly regulated.
That rhetoric and policy direction may seem extreme — but the CCP is responding to a domestic gaming industry that’s often, frankly, exploitative.
Consider the video game Genshin Impact. Genshin is markedly Japanese in style, mimicking Nintendo’s classic Legend of Zelda with a “skin-changing” 換皮遊戲 format, designed to squeeze the player base for massive profits. It relies on built-in gambling mechanics — essentially like a capsule-toy gacha machine for mobile — and it’s very good at taking players’ money.
MiHoYo, the development company behind the game, wanted to obscure its Chinese origins. The name “Genshin” is a Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters yuánshén 原神, and “MiHoYo” also sounds quite Japanese. Perhaps MiHoYo wants to hide its Chineseness to appeal to the global market (only 30% of the game’s revenue comes from players in China). Or perhaps this was because MiHoYo felt it would be shameful to put a Chinese face on extractive microtransactions.
And when Genshin wasn’t busy exploiting its Chinese player base, MiHoYo was content to leave those players by the wayside and instead focus on attracting overseas players. In large part, that’s because MiHoYo knew Genshin was up against Tencent’s massively addictive Honor of Kings 王者荣耀 — a mobile rip-off of League of Legends which relies on the same gambling-for-characters model as Genshin. Honor of Kings is the most profitable mobile game of all time, raking in 10 billion RMB yearly; 95% of that comes from inside China.
In other words, Chinese game developers treated their player base like jiǔcài 韭菜, a crop of vegetables. But Black Myth: Wukong broke that mold.
Latent Demand for Chinese Culture
Daoists believe that god status is earned and achieved, not just reserved for divine beings. Follow the path (ie. dào 道), and you can become a god yourself.
That sounds like a great setting for a video game, right? Black Myth was not the first to take notice and capitalize. Two other games came first and defined the genre: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國志 (1985, Japanese), and The Legend of Sword and Fairy 仙劍奇俠傳 (1995, Taiwanese).
These games are regarded as classics, beloved by Chinese players — but neither was made in mainland China. This dilemma is a familiar one for China’s cultural exports (how could DreamWorks produce a film like Kung Fu Panda before any Chinese company?), and the challenge inspired a generation of Chinese developers who dreamed of producing games that showcase Chinese culture globally, instead of waiting for foreign companies to tell those stories.
These young gamers grew up, passed the gāokǎo, and got the credentials necessary to design such games. But they despaired when their bosses at Tencent ordered them to bury their passion for coding such games and instead get Asia hooked on online gambling.
One disaffected developer was Mao Xingyun 毛星云. He wrote foundational Mandarin-language textbooks on game programming in Windows. Microsoft awarded him the Most Valuable Professional award in 2014, while Mao was still a graduate student.
He committed suicide in 2021 by jumping off the roof of the Tencent office building where he worked. After his death, this post from Mao’s Weibo account resurfaced:
To the Revival of Our Domestic Games:
I have a dream that one day in the future, everyone will be able to play high-quality games rooted in our own culture.
I have a dream that one day, “Journey to the West” will be released as an action game, allowing foreigners to experience the thrill of battle in Chinese culture through “Fighting Buddha.” It would surely be deeper and more profound than Western action masterpieces like “God of War” or “Devil May Cry.”
I have a dream that one day, “The Bund” will be released as a sandbox game, so we don’t have to play “GTA” to feel the American dream, or play “Sleeping Dogs” to experience a foreign company’s forced interpretation of our “Chinese culture.”
I have a dream that one day, many AAA titles won’t need to be localized into Chinese, because they will be our own games, with Chinese voice acting and culture.
I have a dream that one day in the future, domestic games will stand tall like other Chinese industries, taking the lead as they face the world, face the universe, with pride and confidence.
This is a dream we will achieve together.
I am waiting for the good news.
~ Mao Xingyun, June 2013, in Ukraine
Before Black Myth, China’s gamers often played pirated versions of American or Japanese games. But most players in the Chinese audience wouldn’t dare pirate Black Myth — they know how demand signals work, and they want to vote with their dollars to fund a grassroots shift across the whole of China’s game development industry.
That’s why this game activated such a wide base of support — players pay only once, up front, and are free to play as much as they want. Players know that it cost US$40 million to develop this game. They remember when the trailer was released four years ago, along with an employment offer for young game developers who didn’t care much for money.
This game shows that Chinese culture can be cool.
Of course, you do need a pretty fancy gaming PC or a PS5 to play. The fact that Black Myth became the world’s most popular video game overnight, though, shows that the gamers of China are willing to shell out big bucks to support this new era in gaming.
Journey to the West
Black Myth: Wukong is based on “Journey to the West” 西遊記, one of the great classical Chinese novels. In China and Taiwan, every student studies this novel in primary school.
The novel tells the story of the monk Xuanzang 玄奘, who traveled from China to India to collect Buddhist scriptures to bring back to China. Xuanzang was protected during the journey by Sun Wukong 孫悟空, the Monkey King, who became a god through Daoism, rebelled against heaven, and now must atone.
In Black Myth, you play as Sun Wukong, complete with shapeshifting abilities and other powers earned through the practice of Daoism.
The Monkey King has deep cultural significance in China. During China’s Cultural Revolution, much ancient Chinese culture was purposely destroyed and replaced with worship of communist ideology. (Perhaps that’s why China has struggled to produce cultural exports like Japan has with anime and Korea has with skincare and idol groups.)
But the Monkey King was spared during the Cultural Revolution, and Journey to the West remains a beloved classic. Here’s The Economist’s reflection after an adaptation of The Monkey King was released on Netflix:
Each Monkey King retelling has served as a mirror on its times, reflecting the anxieties of its creators. Some interpretations have concentrated on the need for discipline to quell the inner voice. Others have stressed the democratizing elements of a story about a lowly being who rises to great heights.
Flexible interpretation of the novel’s message has allowed the story to thrive in Communist China, even when other aspects of traditional culture were crushed. Mao Zedong admired Monkey King, who repeatedly challenged the hierarchies of Heaven, as a “wrecking ball who battles the forces of tradition,” says Julia Lovell, who translated the novel into English in 2021. A stage adaptation of the classic in 1955 praised Monkey’s “working-class wisdom” in defeating his oppressive rulers, the court of the mythical Jade Emperor. During the Cultural Revolution some of Mao’s Red Guards likened themselves to Monkey Kings, rebelling against the Party as Monkey did against the immortals.
The game’s graphics are directly imported from 3D scans of ancient Chinese architecture. The resulting visuals are stunning, which explains why the game uses up so much hard drive space. From Southern People Weekly 南方人物周刊:
In the game, players can see Yan-style 颜体 calligraphy of the Diamond Sutra 金刚经 carved into cliffs, Western Xia 西夏 dynasty’s stone tablets standing on northern plains, and weathered Buddha statues with broken arms…
Yang Qi 杨奇 and his team … scanned buildings such as Foguang Temple 佛光寺. Then, they scanned buildings and statues from the Wei 魏, Jin 晋, and Song 宋 dynasties, and then vessels and pottery from the Ming 明 and Qing 清 dynasties.
…
These artworks, shaped by generations over centuries, had been restored dozens of times and weathered by the passage of time, resulting in colors and textures that were nearly impossible to replicate.
Yang Qi told his colleagues in the 3D team that they must preserve every detail of the items they scanned, including the current color, damaged corners, weathered details, and even the grass stems embedded in the statue and small bits of exposed wire. “It’s very cool to look at it from the current perspective and observe the time at the same time,” said Yang Qi.
From this perspective, Black Myth: Wukong can be said to be a “Chinese tourism simulator” 中国旅游模拟器. The game’s sculptures of the Twenty-Eight Constellations come from scans of the Jade Emperor Temple in Jincheng, Shanxi 山西晋城玉皇庙. The setting of the Great King Huangmei 黄眉大王 — xiǎoxītiān 小西天 — is modeled after the Shuilu A Temple in Lantian, Shaanxi 陕西蓝田水月庵. The statues of Pilu Buddha are scanned from Mingshan Temple in Anyue County, Ziyang, Sichuan 四川资阳安岳县的茗山寺. The game also recreates aspects like the transformation sequences of hell, the Western Pure Land, and the protective deities’ niches from the Dazu Rock Carvings in Chongqing 大足石刻.
Secret Boss Battles
The most difficult boss of the game is Yang Jian 楊戩 (aka Erlang Shen 二郎神), who leads the army sent by heaven to punish Sun Wukong for his disobedience. Yang Jian is a major antagonist and drives the plot throughout the entire game, but he’s actually not the final boss — defeating him is so difficult that the developers made it optional. If you defeat the final boss without first confronting Yang Jian, the game ends with Sun Wukong being imprisoned in a rock instead of being reincarnated.
There are three phases to the fight with Yang Jian, and each phase comes with new attacks, new environmental hazards, and new combinations of attacks from previous phases. He has a resilience system for blocking the player’s attacks and defeating him requires expert use of in-game items, treasures, and spells.
For China’s independent game developers, however, the boss battle has only just begun. Rumors are already circulating that Tencent and MiHoYo are trying to poach the programmers behind Black Myth.
Tencent already tried to build this game when it released Asura/God of War 斗战神, an MMORPG that was initially so well received that players burned through content faster than Tencent could produce it. After the third chapter of the game, Tencent started cutting corners on production to reduce costs, losing most of its player base in the process. Tencent disbanded the God of War production team, and the developers they fired went on to found Game Science, the company behind Black Myth.
If we really are witnessing a shift in China’s gaming industry, it remains to be seen whether giants like Tencent will be able to re-enter the market they patronized and abandoned.
Jordan Notes on the Game
It’s good for world peace for China to succeed on the global stage in cultural exports. I would much rather have nationalist pride fed with Olympic sports, video games, and movie exports than Kinmen and Spratly’s. There’s all this angst in Chinese political discourse about not being looked upon as a first-rate nation by the rest of the world. Let’s all hope that this chip on politicians’ and netizens’ shoulders can be ameliorated by video game sales and not ADIZ violations.
When I published this contemporary Chinese music roundup by Jake Newby of Concrete Avalanche, which featured everything from psychedelic rock and Beijing kawaii core to Uyghur folk and Tibetan chants, someone in the DC policy universe reached out to me and said “This deradicalized me a bit — I didn’t know people made music in China like this!” I do hope that this game can do the same and remind people that there’s more to China than the Party.
One interesting dynamic that an article in The Initium highlighted was the self-policing going on in the online discourse of fans encouraging each other not to engage at all with the critiques around Game Science’s apparent misogyny in its leadership’s past posts and recruiting marketing to preserve the good energy around the release. It’s also curious that just as the game was being praised in state media for its achievement, someone dug up a 2013 Weibo post of Black Myth lead artist Yang Qi flipping off Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square that has some real Ai Weiwei energy. We live in different times…
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On the game itself, I find it interesting how little handholding there is in the game’s story — it gives you very little in-game context on who its characters and monsters are, expecting that the audience will broadly already get the references. Setting aside its positive reception in the West (82 on Metacritic), this is first and foremost a game made for a Chinese audience. 90% of the Steam player base, after all, is based in the PRC.
It is also hard — I’ve put an hour into this snake boss — and I don’t think I’ll go much further until there are mods to make it easier. It’s not like Elden Ring where you can explore your way around a boss or use clever game mechanics to compensate for being bad. That said, the visuals are glorious, clearly made with a ton of love and care. It’s also been my first experience of cloud gaming, with NVIDIA’s GeForce Now working surprisingly smoothly even on my non-fiber connection. This game will reset the Chinese videogame equilibrium, giving publishers confidence to invest in not just exploitative mobile games but creative products, and I could not be more excited to see what comes next.
Let’s close with a line from a Steam review: “130GB on my hard drive really isn’t that big, because in those gigs is not just a game, but countless Chinese dreams of a AAA game.” “接近130GB的硬盘空间占用并不算大，因为它装载的不仅仅是一个游戏，而是无数中国人属于自己的3A梦.”
Fantastic piece, and would love more non-western perspectives on games like this. The industry would benefit greatly from it.
Nicely written! Kudos!