Preface: I’d like to thank Bluesky users Robin (@cyberia-mix) and Alan (@alangiminez) for sharing some research materials with me. Robin pointed out that Kowloon’s Gate appears in this 1994 promotional video which led me to learning that this was in fact part of GTV’s lineup of promotional videos. Alan was kind enough to take photographs of their own personal copy of Hyper PlayStationwhich features interviews with some key staff of the game.
For those interested in playing Kowloon’s Gate in English, Hilltop has released a translation patch which can be downloaded for free on their own Patreon page here.
In the two decades following WWII, the British colony of Hong Kong transformed into an industrial city, besetting a period of economic growth and urban expansion. In turn, it was during the 1970s that, much like the United States, France, and Japan, a thriving youth culture—symptomatic of modernization—emerged in Hong Kong, perhaps best exemplified by the popularity of a new style of faster-paced martial films being produced by Golden Harvest. Here was Bruce Lee in The Big Boss (Lo Wei, 1971) and The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 1972), glistening, bloodied, and righteous, ushering in a new era. The circumstances of these wider changes, alongside Hong Kong’s identity as a British colony and proximity to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), led Hong Kong as being perceived as a “global” city, one straddling the line between the East and West (McDonogh & Wong, 2005, p.xii). While Bruce Lee would also go on to become a world famous icon, one has to look no further than Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985) to see how a certain strand of Cantonese action films were changing with the globalized times. The film’s conclusion takes place at the Wing on Plaza mall, a gleaming complex of glass and skylight embodying the so-called “historical break” of postmodern architecture and the emergence of what cultural theorist Frederic Jameson dubs the “new world space of late multinational capital” (1991, p.6). Watch Jackie trounce—and get trounced—across department stores whose surroundings and merchandise quickly become impromptu weaponry, including a Mattel glass display of a Barbie home and one Yamaha motorcycle. This is Hong Kong, but just as easily could be Tokyo, Los Angeles, or New York.
For as much as Hong Kong seemed indicative of the present moment, others looked towards it as a symbol of the future. The rise of cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s saw a subset of literature and films cribbing from the culture and history of East Asia as a means to establish mis-en-scene of the future. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) may be set in Los Angeles, but its depiction of the American west coast sprawl was equally inspired by cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong. Science-fiction scholar Wong Kin Yuen suggests that Hong Kong functions as a “model for the global megalopolis of the future” and that it’s Hong Kong’s urbanity, alongside its makeup of racial and cultural differences, that attracted the attention of cyberpunk culture (2000, p.18). Make no mistake, Yuen is far from romanticizing the interpretation of Hong Kong from the West, pointing out that Hollywood has held a “long history of misrepresenting Hong Kong, from white-male fantasies about oriental girls (The World of Suzy Wong [1961]) to exploitative soft-core pornographic eroticism (the Emmanuelle films)” (2000, p. 3 – 4). But if we’re to understand Hong Kong as a “postmodern city par excellence, a mega-pastiche” (Yuen, 2000, p. 18), and thereby as an international city based on cultural hybridity, then we can also understand why writers and filmmakers were drawn to Hong Kong as a subject in the first place. This line of reasoning holds true for the video game developer Zeque, who in 1997, working within Sony Music Entertainment, developed and released the adventure-RPG Kowloon’s Gate for the PlayStation.
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