What China’s smash-hit video game Black Myth: Wukong does for its soft-power ambitions

Open this photo in gallery:

In Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese epic, the characters make it as far as India. A video game loosely based on the saga has made it a lot farther.

Black Myth: Wukong, released last month, sold more than 18 million copies worldwide in its first two weeks, and has since matched that total on a single platform, Steam, where it is now one of the most-played games of all time.

But even before its rapid rise to the top, Black Myth: Wukong was dogged by controversy, and since its release it has been caught up in conversations about geopolitics and censorship – and whether China can overcome its chronic lack of cultural cachet relative to its Asian rivals Japan and South Korea.

Created by Chinese developer Game Science, Wukong serves as a sequel of sorts to Journey to the West, which tells the story of a Buddhist monk and his bodyguard, Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King. In the game, the player is tasked with reviving Sun Wukong after he was punished for angering the gods. This involves battling through a host of gorgeously rendered historic Chinese settings.

Journey to the West is one of China’s best-known stories, akin to the works of Shakespeare in English-speaking countries. High-budget, or “triple-A,” games based on the story have always been a safe bet in China, where the original saga has been adapted countless times, though never as a video game of Wukong’s scale.

While some adaptations of Journey to the West – such as a 1986 Chinese TV serial beloved by diaspora audiences, or more recently Disney’s American Born Chinese – have found fans in the West, there was no guarantee foreign players would shell out up to $80 for a game from a first-time developer, based on a property that is little known outside China.

Open this photo in gallery:

But gamers around the world have embraced Wukong, whether they understand its lore or not. In a five-star review for The Guardian, Patricia Hernandez wrote that the game’s self-assuredness in presenting a potentially unfamiliar world to a mass audience is “a rarity in big-budget games, where concerns about mainstream palatability often inspire timidity instead on the part of their developers.”

Li Ang, a 28-year-old Beijinger, said he grabbed the game as soon as it was available. While he felt it didn’t quite live up to the hype, Mr. Li said he’d give it around an eight out of 10 “from an objective standpoint.”

“But if I consider personal feelings and national pride, the score could be even higher,” he added.

He’s not alone in feeling this way. Wukong has been embraced by Chinese gamers accustomed to foreign titles dominating their charts, and even by the state propaganda apparatus, which once denounced video games as “spiritual opium.”

In part this is because Wukong is a rare soft-power win for China, which has long looked enviously at the cultural footprints of Japan and South Korea. Even better, it has none of the political awkwardness of previous exports like The Three Body Problem – a Netflix series adapted from a trilogy of sci-fi novels set partly during the Cultural Revolution – or TikTok, attacked by conservatives in the West as a tool of Chinese surveillance and propaganda.

For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has exhorted the country’s creators to “tell China’s story well,” something Wukong, in exposing foreign audiences to a beloved classic and proving Chinese video game studios can compete at the triple-A level, has undoubtedly achieved.

But political correctness in one market does not necessarily translate in another. While Wukong has dodged and weaved around Chinese censors – long blamed for the country’s soft-power drought – to produce a high-quality product, Game Science was criticized for urging foreign reviewers and streamers to avoid a list of topics, including “feminist propaganda, fetishization, and other content that instigates negative discourse” in their coverage.

The studio, which did not respond to an interview request, also faced backlash after reporters unearthed social-media posts by some of the game’s developers, including sexual, homophobic and misogynist jokes. This criticism promptly sparked a backlash of its own, with many fans accusing others of trying to “cancel” the game. Skeptical Western reviewers, in particular, were attacked by Chinese nationalists who felt they were unfairly targeting Wukong. (One site removed its reviewer’s byline “for their safety.”)

Almost a month after its initial release, the controversy around Wukong – “too mediocre for all this drama” in the words of tech site The Verge – may actually be helping to propel sales, according to Shannon Liao, an independent games journalist. She pointed to the title’s adoption by both Chinese gamers and “anti-woke” fans in the West as a key part of its “recipe for instant success,” without which “I’m not sure anybody would be talking about Black Myth: Wukong.”

There’s also the novelty of such a high-production-value title coming out of the Chinese market, which both domestic and foreign players associate with free-to-play games like Tencent’s Genshin Impact. Mr. Li, the Beijing gamer, said the triple-A concept “has previously been monopolized by Japanese and Western developers.”

“Many support this game because Chinese players hope to see more games like this in the future,” he added. “We know that if you like something, you need to vote for it with your money: You need to show capital that the single-player market can be profitable.”

So far, that seems to be paying off, with several more high-budget titles in the pipeline from Chinese developers. But whether these will achieve the success of Wukong without the novelty of being “China’s first triple-A game,” or the cultural and political furor that has surrounded Game Science’s title, remains to be seen.

With a report from Alexandra Li