During the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, a mostly unknown Chinese video game studio dropped the first 13-minute gameplay trailer for Black Myth: Wukong, becoming a viral sensation globally and demonstrating how video games are fast becoming a new instrument of soft power.
The game, created by Game Science, appeared to be something of an underdog at first. The pre-trailer demo was created by a relatively tiny studio, and yet it generated tremendous buzz.
Comments poured in: “Please make an English translation!” Within 24 hours, the trailer racked up two million views on YouTube and more than 10 million on Chinese video sharing site Bilibili, much to its creators’ shock and delight. Within two days, it added another 2.4 million views on Imagine Game Network (IGN). Even before launch, millions had pre-ordered the game. Within three days, the game sold 10 million copies.
Except for viewers who already familiar with the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, which inspired Black Myth: Wukong, most overseas fans reacted with a combination of confusion and wonder. One trailer commentor reflected what many were thinking:
“What is this?,” the commenter wrote, adding thirteen minutes later: “WHAT IS THIS!!!”
That wide-eyed remark sounds like pure cultural shock, but it belied cross-cultural appeal. Black Myth: Wukong shows how a Chinese studio braided together philosophy, religion, and universal hooks like love and family to build an emotional bridge between Chinese and Western gamers. As @AndrewEthanZeng put it: “Great to see Eastern mythology finally getting its time to shine in the game world.”
Game Science founder and CEO Feng Ji, in an interview with CCTV, insisted that the international appeal was by design. “Telling Chinese stories to a foreign audience is like giving a gift,” he said. “If you shove it into their hands, they might not want it. Wrap it in beautiful art and flashy effects, and people get curious; once they open the package, they naturally see what really moves them—the cultural core.” Games exist to be played, he added, and the games industry exists to lay new roads for cultural exchange.
Video Games’ Soft Power
In today’s media ecosystem, few platforms can vividly deliver a country’s guiding ideas for a global audience that are more visible and interactive—and therefore unforgettable—than video games.
Everything about Black Myth: Wukong is reflective of Chinese national values. Chinese diplomacy—steeped in the Confucian-Buddhist-Daoist triad—prefers “peaceful coexistence” and “joint development,” expressed in a low-latency, cooperative play style. Black Myth literalizes that ethos: demons, deities, and humans share one currency—“灵韵/Will”—so harmony emerges from balancing, not eradicating, difference.
The game is more than a hero-makes-good story; through narrative structure, aesthetics, and philosophical allegory, it performs a fable-like act of cultural projection. In one of China’s four great classical novels, Journey to the West, most people know the headline: the Monkey King wrecks Heaven. But Black Myth: Wukong flips the camera to the aftermath—the scorched earth after the riot. Sun Wukong has fallen, his secret sixth relic(六根器) blown to the wind, and on Flower-Fruit Mountain, the bonfire crackles with nothing but rain and memories for company.
U.S. diplomacy, forged in Greco-Roman republicanism, swings harder: freedom, rights, democracy, delivered with the boss-battle intensity of a Bethesda or BioWare title—clear binaries, loud stakes, save-the-world swagger.
So, how did Black Myth: Wukong manage to leapfrog oceans and captivate not just U.S. gamers, but gamers around the world? First, the hyper-realist visuals transcend culture and language. Second, the game’s protagonist Sun Wukong is an Eastern mythical icon who simultaneously feels both familiar and mysterious to Western audiences. The character echoes childhood memories of the Japanese anime Dragon Ball but adds a twist of unexplained cultural details. Thus, the pairing of low barrier in game mechanics and high cultural mystique triggers a curiosity loop: The less you understand, the more you crave subtitles and backstory, turning viewers into grassroots amplifiers of the Chinese narrative.
To read the blood-soaked plotline of Black Myth: Wukong, you also need the game’s “cosmic rules.” Its backdrop is an Eastern worldview: Confucian harmony-without-uniformity (seek common ground, keep differences) and the Daoist / Five-Element cycle of mutual generation and restraint. The game weaves these threads into ecosystems, boss mechanics, and offhand lines: demons, immortals, and humans share one map yet check one another’s harmony-without-uniformity in motion. Wood conquers Earth, Earth conquers Water, mutually beneficial and mutually destructive, mirrored in skills and dungeons. As Western players feel that shifting balance through a controller, they are “test-driving” a Chinese worldview—one that believes in plural harmony, not zero-sum endings.
The core arc—fated hardship, self-cultivation, refusal of pre-ordained destiny—channels “cultivating the self to pacify others” and “transcending adversity,” hallmarks of Confucian and Daoist thought. This spirit of resisting fate without upending order contrasts sharply with U.S. games in which heroes overturn the old system, embodying liberal individualism. The result communicates an East-Asian philosophy of order and introspection.
The world-building carries the Confucian notion of “harmony without uniformity”: demons, deities, and humans coexist; even the most unruly creatures exhibit filial piety or loyalty. Good and evil interweave, mirroring a Daoist logic of mutual generation and balance, again diverging from the binary moral universes common in most of the U.S. arts. No sermons are needed. By being playable and resonant, the game transmits China’s philosophical logic, aesthetics, and values almost subliminally to global players.
Cross-cultural–communication scholar Edward Hall, in Beyond Culture, divides cultures into low-, medium-, and high-context categories, with higher-context cultures being harder to decode. He places China at the extreme high-context end.
Applying Hall’s model, most Western core gamers sit in the “low-context” camp. They are first drawn in by explicit cues—4K graphics and Souls-like combat—and only later “catch up” on Journey to the West references through streamer commentary and YouTube channels. East Asian and Chinese-speaking players, by contrast, arrive with Sun Wukong lore already in their cultural muscle memory; they care more about how the game reinvents the classic and mirrors live anxieties such as generational pressure or systemic gridlock. The result is a two-pronged audience spectrum: technical highlights hook low-context viewers, cultural depth rewards high-context fans, and the two sides amplify one another until the conversation goes global.
Game Science breaks heavyweight symbols into art assets, level design, and voice-line Easter eggs, turning high barriers into tactile thrills and slashing cross-cultural friction. That gives players a genuinely immersive, sensory hit. Public-diplomacy scholar Nicholas Cull calls this “experience public diplomacy,” and in 21st-century cultural outreach, letting foreigners play your story often beats asking them merely to listen.
So, when Western streamers pause mid-broadcast to explain “harmony in diversity,” they’re already re-amplifying China’s narrative. When some gamers admit they can’t parse Sanskrit chants yet still feel the story land, they prove that experiential diplomacy outmuscles slogans.
Audiences steeped in individualism find the “lone hero on a grand quest” trope instantly familiar. On Western platforms, posts that simply explain who Sun Wukong is and what powers he has routinely draw 3,000-plus likes. One tiny comment—barely 30 words—introducing the 30-person Game Science team scored more than 7,000 likes, because the “small studio outclassing big publishers” storyline meshes perfectly with low-context cultures’ taste for hero-centric narratives.
Chinese Mythology Goes Viral
Some overseas players finished the demo for Black Myth: Wukong and still felt hungry for context. Classic Journey to the West cartoons, live-action films, and explainer videos began spiking on YouTube and Bilibili, while related threads shot to the top of Reddit and Amazon’s book charts—proof that a 16-century myth can be reborn via 21-century algorithms. Take the channel Overly Sarcastic Productions: a normal episode sits at around 200 K views, yet its six-part series “Legends Summarized: The Monkey King (Journey to the West)”—posted between 2015 and 2018—now ranges from 3 million to 8.9 million views, with Black Myth fans still clocking in daily in the comment section.
China, capitalizing on the appeal, mounted a large-scale live concert series for the soundtrack of Black Myth: Wukong, premiering at Shenzhen’s Poly Theatre. The CCTV National Symphony Orchestra performed the Black Myth: Wukong main theme in a nationally broadcast CCTV during the Chinese Spring Festival. The Bilibili New Year’s Eve Gala also garnered approximately one million views on YouTube, combining different bloggers. Overseas fans went wild—especially for the second chapter, a Shaanxi “story-singing” segment—and their enthusiasm so moved the Game Science team that the music itself became a new bridge for cross-cultural praise.
From a trailer that blew up every feed to a symphonic concert that broke out of the gaming bubble, Black Myth: Wukong has already completed a Long March across China’s market and media on the back of its “playable philosophy.” The bigger leap, though, happened on the diplomatic and industrial charts: when Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng held the game up at the Forbes China–U.S. Business Forum (Aug. 27) as a model of China’s “first-release economy,” and when product-valuation theorists began pricing its spill-over benefits in functional, emotional and asset terms, the title stopped being a one-off hit and became a new beacon on the US-China narrative track. “Some of you may have noticed that the Chinese game Black Myth: Wukong topped one million concurrent players within an hour of launch, and every co-branded item sold out almost instantly,” Xie told the forum. “That shows the huge consumption power of China’s first-release economy and the magnetic pull of marrying traditional culture with modern tech.” He reminded the audience that China now hosts 463,000 high-tech firms, holds over four million valid invention patents, and ranks first among middle-income economies on the Global Innovation Index.
Until now, China lacked a flagship industrial product in the entertainment space: blockbuster sci-fi—proved by Wu Jing’s The Wandering Earth—had ticked the “film-tech” box, but AAA-grade game pipelines were still a blank. Black Myth: Wukong fills that gap, marking a milestone from “under-developed” to “nascently mature” in China’s digital-content industry. The payoff is larger than a single title’s success; it arms Beijing with fresh, high-spec material for cultural diplomacy in the years ahead.
That explosive debut of Black Myth: Wukong was a major commercial win for China, lighting the first spark of “experiential soft power.” The challenge now is whether that spark of curiosity can travel the full consumer-decision arc—orders, hands-on play, and fan-made spin-offs—until it hardens into a durable asset in China’s national narrative. Can word-of-mouth keep snowballing? Will player-generated content plus social-media echo chambers fan the blaze or let it fade?
