Yang has been a graphic designer for over 15 years. Now, the Wukong team is based in Hangzhou, Yang's favorite city because he lived and studied there for many years. He was fascinated with Star Wars in high school and went to China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. After releasing two mobile games, one of the co-founders, Art Director Yang Qi, told Feng, "It's time to do what we wanted to do from the beginning." Under his father's influence, Yang started learning traditional Chinese painting when he was 5. The Chinese gaming market is saturated with free-to-play mobile games and online games, and it's considered a very commercially risky move to develop a premium console game. Game Science's two mobile games brought in stable revenue streams and allowed it to pursue a high quality AAA story-driven action-RPG game. Although Art of War: Red Tides has now stopped updates on Steam, over 6,000 reviews of the game are Mostly Positive. One of the RTS games, Art of War: Red Tides was featured in the Apple App Store globally, and when Tim Cook visited China in 2017, Game Science Studio was one of his stops.
Before Black Myth, Game Science Studio used Cocos and the Unity engine to publish two mobile games. This is the first time the teameam has used Unreal Engine 4 to develop a game. The reason they released this video now is because the studio is trying to recruit more talent - they were not expecting it to be this popular. Feng told me that it took them six months to produce this demo, and the team has been working on the game for about two years. The level shown in the trailer is part of the beginning of an area called Black Wind Mountain. There are three monkeys shown in the trailer, and players have to wait to figure out who is the real Wukong when they play the game. Different from Journey to the West, the story talks about the Monkey King (Wukong) escorting a monk who has obtained the sacred scroll from the West, but Black Myth: Wukong is much darker and more complex. Similar to Asura, Black Myth: Wukong is a gritty take on this classic Chinese tale. All of them worked on an MMORPG project called Asura, which is a fantasy game based on Journey to the West, with Feng acting as creative designer. A lot of the developers, as well as game producer Feng Ji and other co-founders, all previously worked at gaming giant Tencent. Right now, the team is made up of about 30 people. When I finished this interview and walked out of their office at 2am, there were still a few people working. However, employees are used to sleeping during the day and working at night, most of them leaving work after 10pm. Their working day starts at 2pm, and there is no fixed time for when they need leave work - with workers encouraged to leave when they want to, or to work from home if they'd prefer.
The studio provides free lunch, dinner, drinks, and snacks, which is very unusual for a Chinese company. My first impression of this studio was that it was very different from other gaming companies. IGN China was the only gaming media granted an exclusive interview after the trailer went viral and, last weekend, I walked into the Game Science studio in Hangzhou, China. The quality of the trailer looks like it was produced by a premium AAA gaming company, but it's actually from a Chinese indie studio, Game Science, that no one had ever heard of before, catching the industry by total surprise. Original God of War director David Jaffe was amazed by the gameplay, and current God of War director Cory Barlog called it “awesome” on Twitter. The next-generation graphics look stunning, with the gameplay in this 13-minute demo showing that this was not just some CGI animation. The debut trailer for Black Myth: Wukong grabbed everyone’s attention in the gaming industry, accruing over 5 million hits on IGN’s YouTube channel alone.
Last month, a new game trailer came from out of nowhere, much like the monkey jumping out of the stone in the tale of Journey to the West.