video-games · 3 min read
Black Myth: Wukong, or how Monkey King rewrote the map of game development
In February 2007, a 25-year-old Tencent developer named Feng Ji posted a 6,000-word essay to Chinese gaming forums under the title “Who Murdered Our Games?” He attacked the addiction-optimized item-store model eating the industry and asked, bluntly, whether studios should treat players “like livestock.” The post circulated. People agreed and moved on. Feng Ji filed the argument away.
Seventeen years later, the argument shipped.
Black Myth: Wukong launched on August 20, 2024, developed by Game Science — the Hangzhou studio Feng Ji co-founded in 2014 with a handful of former Tencent colleagues. The team numbered around 140 people at launch, working for six years on a $70 million budget, adapting Wu Cheng’en’s 1592 novel Journey to the West into a single-player action game with no microtransactions, no live-service passes, and no free-to-play compromise (Wikipedia). The decision to sell it as a standard $60 purchase was deeply unconventional for a Chinese studio. It was also a direct answer to the 2007 essay.
Players control the Destined One, a monkey-demon retracing the aftermath of Journey to the West’s 81 trials. Game Science had spent years documenting Buddhist cliff temples and imperial pagodas in Shanxi Province, then reconstructing them in Unreal Engine 5. The result looked like nothing else on the market: a Chinese mythology action game that could match anything from Tokyo or Santa Monica on visual polish alone.
The Steam numbers confirmed it. On August 22, 2024 — two days after launch — Black Myth peaked at 2,415,714 simultaneous players, becoming the highest-concurrent single-player game in Steam history, second only to PUBG’s all-time peak among any title (SteamDB). It sold 10 million copies in three days, 20 million within the first month.
The warning sign had come four years earlier. On August 20, 2020 — exactly four years before launch — Game Science released a 13-minute pre-alpha gameplay trailer when the entire team numbered thirty people. The video earned 10 million views on Bilibili within 24 hours and flooded the studio with more than 10,000 job applications (Wikipedia). Feng Ji’s response was to ask the public to disregard the trailer, citing a crowd-combat scene where the framerate had dropped. Nobody listened.
The launch triggered effects beyond the sales figures. Xinhua, China’s state news agency, called it evidence that “the default language of a major game no longer has to be English, but can be Chinese” (Al Jazeera). Tourism to the Shanxi heritage sites recreated in the game measurably increased. Follow-on investment in other ambitious Chinese single-player studios accelerated; rivals pointed directly to Black Myth’s market performance when raising funding. Game Science announced a second title, Black Myth: Zhong Kui, set in the same universe.
The Monkey King’s defining trait across Wu Cheng’en’s novel is refusing to accept the ceiling he has been assigned. He wins the argument eventually. Feng Ji, it turns out, read the source material closely.
Sources
- Black Myth: Wukong — Wikipedia — release date, development history, 2020 trailer reaction, Steam concurrent peak, sales figures.
- SteamDB — concurrent peak announcement — confirmed 2,415,714 peak CCU on August 22, 2024.
- Al Jazeera — why Black Myth is taking the world by storm — industry significance, Xinhua quote, cultural and economic impact.
- Game Science — Wikipedia — Feng Ji’s 2007 essay, studio founding, operating philosophy.