Future Memories: Reimaging Hong Kong through Japanese Retro Videogames

Hong Kong constructs a heteroecious space in the world of video games, featuring visual symbols of local gangsters, the cult of “fengshui”, the Kowloon Walled City, and all those cyberpunk-styled spectacles. Though Hong Kong functions as an impressive stage for global video games, it plays a slightly different role in the eyes of western game designers and those from Japan. This paper aims to explore the connection between pre-1997 Hong Kong images and the Japanese retro videogames, reflecting a way of seeing the “East Asian future” that can be an alternative to techno-orientalism. For video games in general, previous studies concluded that Hong Kong individually inspired the imaginations of pioneering transnational cities and several digital art projects of Sinofuturism. However, they ignored the complicated dynamics among Chinese traditional religions, Japanese animations subcultures, the hybrid characteristics of Hong Kong identity, and the mutually influenced film culture between Hong Kong and Japan. Therefore, my research asks how Hong Kong is constructed in Japanese retro videogames, treating the perspective of Japan (or Tokyo) as a structurally similar counterpart with Hong Kong. I will argue that the representations of Hong Kong in Japanese retro videogames share an imagination for hybrid urban life as an East Asian metropolis. To investigate their cultural intertextuality, I will analyze three cases Illusion City Genei Toshi (1991), Wan Chai Connection (1994), and Kowloon's Gate (1997) to illustrate the comprehensive image of Hong Kong.