Becoming the Monkey King and picking up the glittering golden cudgel to slay demons and monsters is the childhood fantasy of every "Journey to the West" reader. With the release of the first Chinese 3A game "Black Myth: Wukong" on the 20th, players can finally realize it in a realistic game world. "I have been an 'assassin' in France, a 'god of war' in Northern Europe, and a 'samurai' in Japan, but in my heart I have always hoped to become a hero in a game full of Chinese elements and create my own story." said Xu Zhi, a gamer from Shanxi.
3A games generally refer to high-cost, high-volume, high-quality stand-alone games. Previously, this market was mainly occupied by game companies from Japan, the United States, France and other countries.
Four years ago, the first live video of Black Myth: Wukong went viral online. With the enthusiastic attention of players around the world, this game with a strong Chinese classical style finally came to the market.
On the Internet, some people played the game theme song with various instruments, some introduced the history of the game's filming location, and some deeply analyzed the stories of the characters in "Journey to the West", which once again set off a wave of enthusiasm for Chinese traditional culture. "I hope to see more and more similar works come out," said Yu Junhui, a video creator at Bilibili.
China is the world's largest game market, with sales revenue exceeding 300 billion yuan in 2023, but the main share is mobile games. Experiencing a domestic 3A game with exquisite graphics and top-notch production has gradually become a long-cherished wish of Chinese players. In order to create an immersive "world-class" game, the team of the research and development company Game Science spent several years shooting scenes in historical scenic spots across China, uploading models of ancient buildings, sculptures, etc. into the game through real-scene scanning technology, and undergoing a series of technical processing to achieve lifelike and difficult-to-distinguish game pictures. "What we can do is to restore these treasures as realistically as possible." Yang Qi, the game's art director, said that they had tried to create some buildings, sculptures and other content, but eventually found that the existing cultural relics themselves were attractive enough.
One player left a message saying that it was the first time he saw buildings and sculptures with distinctive Chinese style in a "world-class" 3A game, and he felt a sense of pride.
At last year's Cologne Game Show in Germany, a Shaanxi storytelling segment presented in Black Myth: Wukong drew applause from the audience. Foreign players praised the perfect integration of the game and intangible cultural heritage, which also sparked their interest in Chinese culture.
In recent years, more and more games, movies, music and other cultural and entertainment products have been integrated with traditional culture at an accelerated pace. At the China International Comic and Game Expo that ended last month, a media report showed that among the 3,800 IP "super topics" on Weibo from January 1 to June 11 this year, domestic animation accounted for 46%, and this proportion is still growing.
Han Xiao, a lecturer at the School of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of International Business and Economics, said that combining China's excellent traditional culture with games, animation and other forms of entertainment that are popular among young people can deepen their love for Chinese culture. "As workers in the fields of culture and education, we are also studying how to use new carriers to better combine traditional treasures with the interests of young people."