is a 1997

adventure An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

published by

Sony Music Entertainment Sony Music Entertainment (SME), commonly known as Sony Music, is an American multinational music company owned by Japanese conglomerate Sony Group Corporation. It is the recording division of Sony Music Group, with the other half being the ...

. It was released for the

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

in Japan, but not in other regions.

Plot

The game takes place in the

Kowloon Walled City Kowloon Walled City () was an extremely densely populated and largely lawless enclave of China within the boundaries of Kowloon City of former British Hong Kong. Built as an imperial Chinese Fortification, military fort, the walled city beca ...

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

. On June 22, 1997, before the

handover of Hong Kong The handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China was at midnight on 1 July 1997. This event ended 156 years of British rule in the former colony, which began in 1841. Hong Kong was established as a specia ...

, the demolished Kowloon Walled City reemerged from the realm of Yin (陰界) back to the streets of Hong Kong in the living realm of

Yang Yang may refer to: * Yang, in yin and yang, one half of the two symbolic polarities in Chinese philosophy * Korean yang, former unit of currency of Korea from 1892 to 1902 * YANG, a data modeling language for the NETCONF network configuration p ...

(陽界). The Hong Kong Supreme

Feng Shui Feng shui ( or ), sometimes called Chinese geomancy, is a traditional form of geomancy that originated in ancient China and claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. The term ''feng shui'' mean ...

Conference (香港最高風水会議) determined that the reappearance of the walled city was a sign of an imbalance of the Yin and Yang, and if the two parallel worlds are not separated once again, great calamity would occur. To set things straight, the order of Feng Shui would need to be re-instilled in the realm of Yin. Thus the protagonist, a Super Feng Shui Practitioner (超級風水師), was sent into the Kowloon Walled City to seek and awaken the

Four Symbols The Four Symbols are mythological creatures appearing among the Chinese constellations along the ecliptic, and viewed as the guardians of the four cardinal directions. These four creatures are also referred to by a variety of other names, in ...

so that order would be revived.

Development

''Kowloon's Gate'' was developed by the New Media Department of

Sony Music Entertainment Japan , often abbreviated as SMEJ or simply SME, and also known as Sony Music Japan for short (stylized as ''SonyMusic''), is a Japanese music arm for Sony. Founded in 1968 as CBS/Sony, SMEJ is directly owned by Sony, Sony Group Corporation and is ...

(also credited to Zeque who also co-developed '' Planet Laika''). This was a multimedia division of the company that worked on non-music products. It was conceived as an early

game as an adventure game with an estimated release by late 1994."Sony PlayStation". ''

Edge Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed by ...

'' issue 11 (August 1994), page 40. As with a number of other titles developed during the early beginnings of the PlayStation, the game was created by staff outside the video gaming industry. The game designer was Hiroshi Kimura who had an

SGI Onyx Onyx is a series of visualization systems designed and manufactured by SGI, introduced in 1993 and offered in two models, deskside and rackmount, codenamed Eveready and Terminator respectively. Onyx's basic system architecture is based on the ...

in the Sony Music office. The plan was to create an exploration experience. Kimura thought about an old

bazaar A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small Market stall, stalls or shops, especially in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa and South Asia. They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets th ...

town in

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

and other

kasbah A kasbah (, also ; , , Maghrebi Arabic: ), also spelled qasbah, qasba, qasaba, or casbah, is a fortress, most commonly the citadel or fortified quarter of a city. It is also equivalent to the term in Spanish (), which is derived from the same ...

type areas "dreaming of the romanticism of the Arabian world". Eventually Hong Kong's

Kowloon Kowloon () is one of the areas of Hong Kong, three areas of Hong Kong, along with Hong Kong Island and the New Territories. It is an urban area comprising the Kowloon Peninsula and New Kowloon. It has a population of 2,019,533 and a populat ...

was chosen as the setting. The team visited the place for research in April 1994. By the end of 1994, images of the ''Kowloon's Gate'' game were released on magazines and it was estimated that the game itself would arrive in 1995, but the development of the game took three years; it was eventually released for the PlayStation in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

on February 28, 1997. It was later re-released on the

PlayStation Network PlayStation Network (PSN) is a digital media entertainment service provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Launched in November 2006, PSN was originally conceived for the PlayStation video game consoles, but soon extended to encompass smartp ...

on April 14, 2010.

Reception

Famitsu , formerly , is a line of Japanese Video game journalism, video game magazines published by Kadokawa Game Linkage (previously known as Gzbrain), a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, Kadokawa. ''Famitsu'' is published in both weekly and monthly f ...

'' gave the game a score of 26 out of 40. Critic Shin Muramatsu drew on his experience with the game's "Hong Kong Gothic" version of the Walled City to compare the past and future of Hong Kong itself. It ultimately sold 135,000 units in the region.

Legacy

Initial sales were not good. Still, as time went by, a fanbase developed who enjoyed the mysterious experience of ''Kowloon's Gate''. Its fans uploaded videos to video-sharing sites on the web, leading to a minor

following ''Following'' is a 1998 British independent neo-noir crime thriller film written, produced, directed, photographed, and edited by Christopher Nolan in his feature film directorial debut. It tells the story of a young man who follows strange ...

for the game in Japan. In the

video game magazine Video game journalism (also called games journalism or video game criticism) is a specialized branch of journalism that covers various aspects of video games, including game reviews, industry news, and player culture, typically following a core ...

'', a 2009 reader poll of games with highest demand for a sequel ranked the game tenth with 151 votes. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the game, the original creators came together and re-made the game world on ''

Second Life ''Second Life'' is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an Avatar (computing), avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for person ...

'', and was released in 2007.

Prequel and sequel

In October 2017, a VR prequel named ''Kowloon's Gate VR Suzaku'' was released as a

PlayStation VR The PlayStation VR (PS VR) is a virtual reality headset developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, which was released in October 2016. The headset works with the company's PlayStation 4 video game console and is forward compatible with PlaySta ...

exclusive by Jetman Inc. A non-VR version was added in an update to the game on December 21 of the same year, allowing the game to be played without a

VR headset A virtual reality headset (or VR headset) is a head-mounted device that uses 3D near-eye displays and positional tracking to provide a virtual reality environment for the user. VR headsets are widely used with VR video games, but they are als ...

. An

Oculus Go The Oculus Go is a discontinued, standalone virtual reality headset developed by Meta Platforms, Meta Reality Labs (formerly Facebook Technologies) in partnership with Qualcomm and Xiaomi. It is in the first generation of Facebook Technologies' v ...

version was released in October 2018. In November 2019, a sequel, ''Kowloon's Rhizome: A Day of the Fire'', was announced. It was originally planned to be a 3D dungeon crawler, but the prototype did not match the developers' expectations in its entertainment value, so they decided to make the game into a visual novel instead. A fall 2021 release was planned for

Nintendo Switch The is a video game console developed by Nintendo and released worldwide in most regions on March 3, 2017. Released in the middle of the Eighth generation of video game consoles, eighth generation of home consoles, the Switch succeeded the ...

PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013, in ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

in Japan, but this has not been realized. A pilot version of the game split into 8 parts was planned to be released on

Pixiv Pixiv is a Japanese Virtual community, online community for artists. It was first launched as a beta test on 10 September 2007, by Takahiro Kamitani and Takanori Katagiri. Pixiv Inc. is headquartered in Sendagaya, Shibuya, Tokyo, Shibuya, Toky ...

's Booth service, with the first part released in February 2023.

References

External links

Game website
{{in lang, ja 1997 video games Adventure games Japan-exclusive video games PlayStation (console) games PlayStation Network games Single-player video games Video games developed in Japan Video games scored by Kuniaki Haishima Video games set in Hong Kong Works set in Kowloon Walled City