China's Hit Game 'Black Myth: Wukong' Has Tricky Legends Behind It
East Asian gamers may have a leg-up because they’ve grown up with the epic. The lore can be pretty intoxicating and controversial.
Sun Wukong of 'Black Myth: Wukong', in a Hangzhou shop window.
Photographer: STR/AFPI’m not a gamer, but I perked up to the news this week that millions of people around the world were obsessed by a virtual role-playing extravaganza based on a 16th century Chinese novel about a trickster monkey, a naive monk, a laconic hermit and a libidinous pig.
Black Myth: Wukong, seven years in the making from Shenzhen-based Game Science, set records on Steam, the online store and video-game distribution service that about 70 million people use daily. On the day it made its debut alone, more than 2.1 million people got on the site to engage in Black Myth’s swords-and-sorcery duels. That is a one-day record for a single-player game and, when all on Steam are considered, is exceeded by only one other — the multiple-participant PUBG: Battlegrounds, where 100 individual gamers race to ransack a variety of sites and terrains, until only one remains.