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| Kowloon's Gate | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Sony Music Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | Sony Music Entertainment |
| Director(s) | Hiroshi Kimura |
| Producer(s) | Akira Sudo |
| Designer(s) | Hiroshi Kimura |
| Composer(s) | Kuniaki Haishima |
| Platform(s) | PlayStation,PSP,PlayStation 3,PS Vita |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Kowloon's Gate (クーロンズゲート,Kūronzu Gēto) is a 1997adventurevideo game published bySony Music Entertainment. It was released for thePlayStation in Japan, but not in other regions.
The game takes place in theKowloon Walled City inHong Kong. On June 22, 1997, before thehandover of Hong Kong, the demolished Kowloon Walled City reemerged from the realm ofYin (陰界) back to the streets of Hong Kong in the living realm ofYang (陽界). The Hong Kong SupremeFeng Shui 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 theFour Symbols so that order would be revived.
Kowloon's Gate was developed by the New Media Department ofSony Music Entertainment Japan (also credited to Zeque[1] who also co-developedPlanet Laika). This was a multimedia division of the company that worked on non-music products.[2] It was conceived as an earlyPlayStation game as an adventure game with an estimated release by late 1994.[3]
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.[2] The game designer was Hiroshi Kimura who had anSGI Onyx in the Sony Music office. The plan was to create an exploration experience. Kimura thought about an oldbazaar town inMorocco and otherkasbah type areas "dreaming of the romanticism of the Arabian world". Eventually Hong Kong'sKowloon was chosen as the setting.[4] The team visited the place for research in April 1994.[4]
By the end of 1994, images of theKowloon's Gate game were released on magazines and it was estimated that the game itself would arrive in 1995,[5] but the development of the game took three years;[2] it was eventually released for the PlayStation inJapan on February 28, 1997. It was later re-released on thePlayStation Network on April 14, 2010.[6]
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Famitsu gave the game a score of 26 out of 40.[7]
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.[8]
It ultimately sold 135,000 units in the region.[9]
Initial sales were not good. Still, as time went by, a fanbase developed who enjoyed the mysterious experience ofKowloon's Gate.[10] Its fans uploaded videos to video-sharing sites on the web, leading to a minorfollowing for the game in Japan.[11][12]
In thevideo game magazineFamitsu, a 2009 reader poll of games with highest demand for a sequel ranked the game tenth with 151 votes.[13]
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the game, the original creators came together and re-made the game world onSecond Life, and was released in 2007.[14]
In October 2017, aVR prequel namedKowloon's Gate VR Suzaku was released as aPlayStation VR exclusive by Jetman Inc.[15] 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 aVR headset. AnOculus Go version was released in October 2018.[16]
In November 2019, a sequel,Kowloon's Rhizome: A Day of the Fire, was announced.[17] 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.[18] A fall 2021 release was planned forNintendo Switch,PlayStation 4 andMicrosoft Windows in Japan,[19] but this has not been realized. A pilot version of the game split into 8 parts was planned to be released onPixiv's Booth service, with the first part released in February 2023.[20]