China's hit game 'Black Myth: Wukong' has tricky legends behind it

By Howard Chua-Eoan

I’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.

Against that backdrop, Black Myth’s success is heartening for a person like me who prefers reading to toggling. The word after the colon is the given name of the supernatural monkey Sun Wukong at the center of Journey to the West, a five-century-old novel that’s picaresque and cosmic, pious and irreverent in equal measures.

It’s core to Chinese culture but also part of a legacy shared with Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and migrant communities in Southeast Asia — and at its beginnings, JTTW (as I’ll shorten it going forward) is a historical adventure that took a monk from 7th century China to India on a quest for Buddhist scriptures.

The original text can be intimidatingly literary but comic books, plays, operas and movies — as well as stories parents embellished for children — have extended its reach across borders and generations. Even if you didn’t grow up with those influences, you might be familiar with the motifs.

JTTW was key to Japan’s manga-fueled global gaming phenomenon Dragon Ball (where the non-simian Goku is unabashedly derived from Sun Wukong, whose name in Japanese is pronounced Son Goku) as well as the American animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The whole thing is heartening, too, for Chinese patriots. For one, there’s a gaming advantage for those who grew up with JTTW. Black Myth is part of a subgenre called Soulslike, where players have to decipher and master the lore of a secret universe to advance in a game.

In the hugely popular Elden Ring, for example, the game’s mythology and the genealogy of its gods will help you navigate toward becoming an Elden Lord. The same is true for the games from which the term Soulslike comes from: Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.

Those familiar with JTTW will have a head start. Just knowing that foreigners will have to learn more about China to master this latest hit has given Chinese chauvinists a boost.

Black Myth may have morphed JTTW’s personages for video-game efficiencies, but several of the superpowers in the book stay in the game. For example, Wukong can multiply into an army of monkeys to attack his foes.

Players who know the traditional lore will also recognize the golden headband that sometimes appears on Wukong’s forehead. In the novel, it’s the only way the Buddhist monk can control his formidable monkey bodyguard, reciting magic syllables to tighten the band like a vise, torturing Wukong until he follows orders.

The monkey may be part of a religious pilgrimage, but that’s his penance for raising havoc in Heaven in the first place. The pig and the hermit are his allies in the expedition. One of his most powerful enemies is in the game too, Baigujing — the shape-shifting white-bone demon. In recent Chinese history, her name was code for Mao Zedong’s wife and would-be successor, Jiang Qing, whispered by critics who feared China’s communist empress.

That’s just a whiff of how deep JTTW goes in China. So does Steam, even though it’s been blacklisted by Beijing and unavailable to anyone without a VPN in the People’s Republic.

Still, there are more than 11 million account holders there — a number second only to the 13 million in the US. For Game Science, it’s a no-brainer of an initial production — the same kind of reasoning that puts Chinese characters and settings in otherwise Hollywood blockbusters like Meg 2, the monster-shark movie. But Black Myth: Wukong also plays into other agendas.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has been flogging the game for taking game players around into a fantastical China — and making the real China more attractive to foreigners. Indeed, most of the reviews have been ecstatic (though some have noted glitches and inept or absent translations since the default language isn’t English but Mandarin Chinese). It’s the kind of soft-power sweep that China hasn’t really enjoyed (Meg 2 was a terrible movie).

China being China, however, there have already been attempts to control the enthusiasm, even among non-Chinese players. A company that has 20 per cent ownership of Game Science has issued a set of guidelines that forbade commentary on the state of China’s game industry, Covid-19 lockdowns and “feminist propaganda.”

What they will discover, though, is that Black Myth: Wukong and JTTW (and the traditions and histories on which it is based) brings a slew of controversies to a global audience. For example, Wukong looks like he’s based on a militant male model with extra fuzzy mutton-chop sideburns. Traditionally, even though he refers to himself as the “beautiful” Monkey King, that’s just the novel’s sarcastic take on his vanity. He’s really ugly.

Some other likely triggers for debate are scholarly: Is it possible that wordplay in the book and other older stories insinuates that Wukong was originally female? (It’s not unheard of: The goddess of mercy, Guanyin, who makes several appearances in the novel was originally the male Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara before changing sex while migrating across the Himalayas into China).

Apart from transgender issues, some academics have long argued that Sun Wukong was inspired by none other than the monkey god Hanuman, who is still revered to this day in, gasp, India, China’s prickly rival to the south. What will all those patriots say?

China has a hit and a myth on its hands. It must realize, however, that Sun Wukong has also become its latest popular gift to the world. And the world — not China — will decide what it will do with the present.