There aren’t that many games where I’ve finished them and immediately thought, ‘Wow, it sure would suck if this didn’t become a full-blown series.’ I’m generally pretty hostile to the entire idea of franchising – after all, nowadays, everything is a franchise.
We live in an era of sequels, remasters, reboots, and adaptations. Video games are even slated to become entire media phenomena before they’re ever released – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 already has a movie deal. Unknown 9: Awakening was designed to be part of a “transmedia series” which was cancelled in part because the game received mixed reviews on launch, but mostly because nobody played it.
But there are games that deserve sequels and never got them. Sleeping Dogs is one of them. In a weird, unexpected twist, actor Simu Liu might be the first domino in a chain of cause and effect to make that happen.
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Simu Liu Might Bring Sleeping Dogs To The Big Screen
I do not think about Simu Liu very much. He’s best known for playing a Korean guy in Kim’s Convenience despite being Chinese, and also playing Shang-Chi in his very own MCU movie while being the most annoying Ken in a movie full of annoying Kens.
I thought Shang-Chi was mid, but it did pretty well with audiences and critics.
He’s just a guy to me, which is fine. I do not need to have any feelings about the majority of celebrities out there. However, one thing he does that I do appreciate is that he’s big on Asian representation and rights. He’s published a memoir about being from a Chinese immigrant family. He’s written a column for Variety speaking out against Asian hate crimes. While it was a little controversial, I appreciated that he spoke about cultural appropriation on Dragons’ Den when a pair of non-Asians pitched a bottled boba tea business.
Now, it seems he’s in talks to create a film adaptation of Sleeping Dogs, despite actor Donnie Yen failing to do the same thing for a decade. According to IGN, the movie is in pre-production and Liu will be producing and starring as Wei Shen. We don’t know if the project will fall through or actually take off – quite frankly, I don’t really care for the idea of a film adaptation – but if it does, it could finally revive the series and make it popular enough to get a sequel. That, I do care about.
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Sleeping Dogs Deserved Better
When we think about Asian video games, we generally think about Japanese games. Until Black Myth: Wukong, there hadn’t been a non-gacha triple-A blockbuster hit coming out of the rest of the continent – namely, China. But before Black Myth, there was Sleeping Dogs, a martial arts focused game set in Hong Kong that focused on its underworld triad culture.
It wasn’t created by an Asian studio, but it felt faithful to contemporary Chinese culture in a way that I’d never seen before and haven’t really seen since. I went to Hong Kong with my mother as a teenager and watched her converse easily with the locals in Cantonese, and I realised that despite not being from Hong Kong, I shared culture with it through my ancestry. It felt closer to home than any video game I played in that era.
In a way, Sleeping Dogs was ahead of its time. It drew comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, did pretty well with critics and even got nominated for a couple of awards, but didn’t meet sales expectations despite having sold 1.5 million units by the end of September 2012. It was ultimately considered to be a commercial failure, with a sequel scrapped in late 2013.
Would a sequel do better today, in a world where culturally Asian media is garnering more global attention and support? Nobody can really say for sure. Perfectly good games launch and fail all the time, especially now. But I do think that Sleeping Dogs was dealt a bad hand. There aren’t a lot of games out there made for people like me, but beyond that, it was a good game. Maybe the sequel will bring it past good and be great.
Sleeping Dogs
- Released
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August 14, 2012
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ due to Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
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United Front Games