Long before Black Myth: Wukong made a splash at the 2024 Game Awards – the Oscars of the video games industry – in December, winning both the player’s voice award and best action game, Chinese culture had served as an inspiration for the international gaming community.
One could go as far back as the naming of Atari, one of the earliest video game makers, which was co-founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972.
According to author and journalist Harold Goldberg’s 2011 book, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture, Bushnell was a big fan of weiqi, a strategy board game originating in ancient China, because of how challenging it was to play.
Inspired by the game – more popularly known by its Japanese name, Go – Bushnell named the company after one of the game’s Japanese terms, atari.
“The definition is the equivalent of the word ‘check’ in chess, but also means ‘you are about to become engulfed’,” wrote Goldberg.
Games drawing from Chinese history, mythologies, pastimes and martial arts have often been especially popular (Black Myth: Wukong is based on one of China’s four great literary classics, Journey to the West). Here are five series that gamers worldwide are perhaps most familiar with.