Black Myth: Wukong

• 1. Introduction

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  Black Myth: Wukong is a 2024 action role-playing game from the Chinese studio Game Science. On the 22nd of August 2024, more than 2.4 million people were playing it on Steam at the same moment. Only PUBG: Battlegrounds had ever drawn a bigger crowd to that platform. Yet this is a single-player game about a staff-wielding monkey. It came from a studio whose earlier releases were two mobile games. Who is that monkey, and what is he fighting to recover? How did a small team turn a recruitment video into one of the fastest-selling games ever made? And what did that success change for the games industry in China?

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• 2. Staff, Spells and Spirits

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  The staff carried by the Destined One can extend and shrink in the middle of a fight. It is modeled on the Ruyi Jingu Bang from the novel Journey to the West. The Destined One himself is a monkey based on Sun Wukong, the novel's hero. The game is played alone, from a third-person view, and borrows ideas from the Soulslike subgenre. Three staff stances, called smash, pillar and thrust, give the weapon a versatile moveset.

  Two meters, focus and stamina, drive the fighting. Landing light attacks and pulling off well-timed dodges fill the focus meter, and each full meter earns a focus point. Those points pay for heavy attacks, which can stand alone or be woven into a chain of light attacks. Stamina works in the opposite direction. Sprinting, dodging and attacking all drain it.

  Spells fall into four categories: mysticism, alteration, strand and transformations. Most spells cost mana and then need time to cool down. Transformations skip the mana cost and have only a cooldown. Through them the Destined One becomes other creatures or beings. One example is Red Tides, in which he takes the form of Guangzhi, a wolfman wielding a flaming glaive. Every transformation brings its own moveset and its own health pool. It ends when its might runs out, which attacking depletes, or when its health does.

  A spirit called the Wandering Wight fights by headbutting, while a vessel called the Plantain Fan raises a hurricane that staggers enemies. Spirits and vessels add passive bonuses and active skills. Each has its own qi, which attacks replenish and which powers its skill. Defeated yaoguai chiefs may leave a spirit behind. The player captures it by absorbing it into a gourd or by retrieving it from a keeper's shrine. A spirit skill works like a transformation with a unique attack.

  Keeper's shrines serve as checkpoints along a mostly linear route that opens into expansive areas. Skill points called sparks can be reassigned freely, so a player can change style at will. Difficulty cannot be adjusted by hand and shifts over the course of a playthrough. Boss encounters follow a deliberate rhythm of rising and falling intensity within each chapter. Finishing the story unlocks New Game Plus and a boss battle mode.

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• 3. After the Pilgrimage

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  After escorting the Tang Monk west and bringing back the Buddhist scriptures, Sun Wukong becomes a Buddha. He still refuses life in the Celestial Court and chooses the simple pleasures of Mount Huaguo instead. The Court grows suspicious and sends an army led by Erlang Shen to make him submit. In their duel, the circlet that binds Wukong incapacitates him, and he is sealed in stone on the mountain. His six senses are cut away and become six powerful relics. For centuries afterward, the monkeys of the mountain try to gather them and revive him.

  Buddhist deities of Mount Lingshan and Daoist gods of the Celestial Court are quietly drifting toward conflict in the background of this world. The land is full of gods from the Chinese pantheon and of yaoguai, beings with supernatural abilities and strange appearances. The game has six chapters, each set in one place. They are Black Wind Mountain, Yellow Wind Ridge, The New West, The Webbed Ridge, Flaming Mountains and Mount Huaguo.

  On Black Wind Mountain, the Destined One, one of those monkeys, defeats the Black Bear Guai and takes the Craving Eyes relic from atop a pagoda. At Yellow Wind Ridge, the Yellow Wind Sage has sealed the Fuming Ears relic inside the severed head of Bodhisattva Lingji. A Headless Monk, who turns out to be Lingji, gets his head and hands back and gives the relic to the monkey. In The New West, Yellowbrow poses as Maitreya and hides the Hubris Nose relic in a frozen lake. Kang-Jin Star is sent after the monkey, and in the fight she crashes into the Gold Cymbals that imprison Zhu Bajie, an old friend of Sun Wukong. Bajie breaks free and joins the quest. Yellowbrow falls into the lake, and Maitreya fishes the relic out for the monkey.

  The Fourth Sister of the spider guai family helps the monkey on The Webbed Ridge. Her Second Sister captures Bajie and brings him to the matriarch, the Violet Spider, but the monkey rescues him. The Violet Spider flees to the Hundred-Eyed Daoist Master. He absorbs the Envious Tongue relic he once gave her and mortally wounds her. The sisters then turn on the master, and the Destined One helps them defeat him. Bajie and the Violet Spider were once lovers. They share one last glance, and Bajie sorrowfully turns away toward the relic.

  In the Flaming Mountains, the monkey rescues someone who claims to be Pingping, daughter of the Bull King and Princess Fair Fox. The Bull King sees through the ruse and recognizes his own son, Red Boy. He hands the Grieved Body relic to the monkey, but Red Boy intercepts it and consumes it. The Destined One and Bajie defeat him. His mother, Rakshasi, pleads for mercy and offers her Plantain Fan. Red Boy refuses to submit and kills himself, and the relic reappears.

  Maitreya leads Erlang Shen and the Destined One from the Great Pagoda in The New West to Mount Mei. There the monkey defeats Erlang Shen and the Four Heavenly Kings. Erlang Shen took the Mind of Sun Wukong after their ancient battle. From his third eye he now releases Wukong's memories. He also shares a realization that the old fight let Wukong set a path toward breaking free through a mortal death.

  Back on Mount Huaguo, the Destined One and Zhu Bajie retrieve Sun Wukong's armor and the Jingubang. They pass through the stone on the summit into a realm shaped by Wukong's lingering memories, where the Old Monkey ferries them across the water. The group meets versions of their present selves. The Old Monkey then reveals that the Destined One is the mind of Sun Wukong. A mind, he explains, is unique to each life and fades when that life ends. Wukong can never return as he was, but the universe will always bear him a successor. The Destined One defeats Wukong's broken shell, and the five relics he gathered unite with him. Wukong's circlet appears on the dissolving shell and drops into the shallow water. In one ending, the Old Monkey places the circlet on the Destined One and binds him. In the other, the Destined One has recovered Wukong's memories from Erlang Shen, does not wear the circlet and remains free.

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• 4. A Trailer for Recruits

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  On the 25th of February 2018, Game Science decided to make a single-player game. In December of that year, the team moved from Shenzhen to Hangzhou. A company-wide survey had shown that action role-playing games had the longest Steam playtimes among the staff. Feng Ji said that making the kind of game they played themselves would help the team understand and empathize with players.

  Xianxia and wuxia were both discussed as themes, but the team was most enthusiastic about Journey to the West. They chose to tell a story that picks up after the ending of that tale. The series name Black Myth reflects the dark themes explored through Chinese mythology. The game took the title Black Myth: Wukong because Sun Wukong was the strongest link between the novel and the game. The team designed thirteen levels, including Lion Camel Ridge and the Kingdom of Women, but scheduling forced them to prioritize. By the end of 2018 they had implemented core gameplay functions and largely formed the Mount Huaguo level. Work then shifted to Black Wind Mountain.

  On the 20th of August 2020, Game Science posted a gameplay trailer from a pre-alpha build, running on Unreal Engine 4. It went to social media without any advance word to media outlets. Within a day it had nearly 2 million views on YouTube and 10 million on Bilibili. The point was to attract future colleagues, so the studio showed the Black Wind Mountain level exactly as it stood. The team had begun with seven people and numbered about thirty at the announcement. Recruiting through personal networks had stopped being enough.

  Over 10 thousand people applied. Even so, the studio kept its plan to hire only ten to fifteen people for the time being, to avoid growing too fast and losing its original vision. By the end of development, the credits listed 140 team members. On the 20th of August 2021, another trailer revealed a switch to Unreal Engine 5, which a spokesperson said would serve their pursuit of realism.

  Bloomberg reported a budget of US$70 million over six years, partly funded by the investor Hero Games. Game Science had made two mobile games first. The team approached the larger project cautiously, shaped both by the need to stay afloat as a new studio and by the risks they had seen in large-scale development at their former employer, Tencent. A tax notice about a 2023 research incentive put the core research and development costs above CN¥300 million, or US$42 million. That figure excludes external contributions and wider company expenses, so it is not the whole budget. The team's own hopes were modest. They expected sales of between 3 and 5 million units, enough to keep the studio viable and pave the way for later projects.

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• 5. Silk, Ink and Song

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  For four years, the team traveled across China to scan real places. They worked with local cultural institutions to capture buildings and statues. In the first year, Yang Qi and other team members scouted locations to plan the scanning. The resulting asset library far exceeded what the game needed. Some of it appears on screen, with scenes based on the Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, the Wulong Temple in Langzhong and the Dazu Rock Carvings.

  The actor Yin Kai, a martial arts practitioner, supplied motion capture for the Destined One and several other characters. Most of his work covered the protagonist's combat actions. Other actors performed the movements of different characters.

  Six animated cutscenes, made by multiple animation studios, close the six chapters. The first three are grounded in Chinese philosophy. The fourth portrays love, and the fifth addresses grief and anger. The sixth is a reverse-chronological flashback to key events from Journey to the West. The first cutscene, "I See", drew on the classic work of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio and on lianhuanhua comic strips, combining realist xieshi and expressive xieyi techniques. The sixth, "Unfinished", also took the lianhuanhua style, with touches of baimiao ink line drawing and old murals such as those at Dunhuang. The remaining cutscenes range from stop motion to anime.

  Artists from the China Academy of Art created the character portraits and the in-game murals. The portraits are Song-style ink illustrations on silk, made with both gongbi and xieyi techniques. The murals are painted in color on silk by traditional methods. They draw on Song dynasty paintings such as Searching the Mountain, Gathering Herbs, Monkey and Cats and Five Hundred Arhats. They also draw on Ming or Qing dynasty illustrated books and block prints of Journey to the West.

  The studio 8082 Audio produced the music and voice work, mixing Chinese instruments with Western orchestral elements. Its vocal styles come from Chinese traditions: Shanbei storytelling, Hua'er folk singing from Gansu and Buddhist chanting. For the English voiceovers, Game Science encouraged actors to explore regional accents, such as Brummie for the character Yin Tiger. PitStop Productions, the studio behind them, handled this character by character and kept the voices fairly broad. A highlight of the score is a symphonic adaptation of "Yungong Xunyin", which Xu Jingqing composed as the theme song of the 1986 television series Journey to the West.

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• 6. Launch and the Xbox Delay

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  In January 2023, a short film for the Year of the Rabbit revealed that the game would arrive in the summer of 2024. At The Game Awards in December 2023, a trailer gave the date: the 20th of August 2024. That was four years to the day after the first trailer. Black Myth: Wukong has been the most-wishlisted game on Steam since May 2024, and pre-orders opened on the 8th of June 2024. Buyers received a bonus item, the Trailblazer's Scarlet Gourd, which can also be earned through play. By early August it ranked first on Steam's global top sellers chart.

  When the preload went live, Steam's download bandwidth reached 70 terabytes per second, a record that had belonged to Cyberpunk 2077 since 2020. Hero Games, a marketing partner, reportedly emailed some content creators an activation code along with guidelines not to discuss topics such as politics and feminism in their launch coverage.

  The game launched on Windows and PlayStation 5 on the 20th of August 2024, but not on Xbox. In June 2024, Game Science said the Xbox Series X/S version was delayed for optimization. Reports pointed to the limits of the Xbox Series S, and some sources suggested a memory leak. IGN reported, from an unnamed source, that an exclusivity deal with Sony was the real reason. After speaking to his own sources, Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb said Sony had no marketing deal keeping the game exclusive. In September 2024, Microsoft said the delay was not due to Xbox limitations "that have been raised to us." In January 2025, Feng Ji wrote that the "10 GB of shared memory" was hard to work around without years of optimization experience. In June 2025, Game Science announced the Xbox date, calling the work "no easy feat." The Xbox version arrived on the 20th of August 2025.

  Four editions shipped at launch: Digital Standard, Digital Deluxe, Deluxe and Collector's. The Digital Deluxe Edition adds a weapon called the Bronzecloud Staff, a set of Folk Opera equipment, a curio called Wind Chimes and a digital soundtrack. The two physical editions include an activation code for that digital version. The Deluxe Edition adds a steel case and a color print on a silk scroll called Chaos at the Peach Banquet. The Collector's Edition swaps in a protagonist figurine called Confront Destiny and a silk scroll called Teaching of the Heart Sutra. Neither edition came with a disc. Game Science said limits in offline resources made a simultaneous disc release difficult. The PlayStation 5 physical edition with a disc followed in December 2024 or January 2025, depending on the region.

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• 7. Record Numbers

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  On release day, the game reached over 2.2 million concurrent players on Steam, passing Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077. That made it the single-player game with the most simultaneous players the platform had seen. Bloomberg wrote that the surge could help the game "seal its place in industry lore."

  Game Science announced 10 million units sold, using data as of 9 PM (UTC+8) on the 23rd of August 2024, with 3 million concurrent players across all platforms. Demand for the physical editions was intense. On JD.com, a supply of 30 thousand units sold out within seconds, after more than 700 thousand people had signed up for a chance to buy.

  Hero Games CEO Daniel Wu, an investor, told Bloomberg the game had sold 18 million units in two weeks. Bloomberg called it one of the fastest starts the global gaming industry has seen. Sony reported that it was the most-downloaded PlayStation 5 game in North America, Europe and Japan during August 2024. At the Tokyo Game Show in September 2024, former Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Ken Kutaragi said it had sold 20 million units in its first month.

  Epic Games confirmed the milestone on the 1st of October 2024 at Unreal Fest Seattle, saying the game had passed 20 million units the previous week. Feng Ji sent a video message, saying one of the team's best decisions may have been building on Unreal Engine. Guinness World Records listed the game as the "Fastest-selling videogame based on a classic novel." Sony's PlayStation Partner Awards in December 2024 gave it a Grand Award, as one of the top three titles from Japan and Asia by worldwide sales. In May 2025, Mike Yum, CEO of PM Studios, which distributed the PlayStation 5 physical edition across several regions, said the game's physical sales did very well. He recalled calls after Christmas and the New Year from people saying it "saved their business."

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• 8. Ripples and Next Steps

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  Li Shen, a former CTO of Tencent Games China and Epic Games China, noticed a change in publishers after the game sold millions of copies worldwide. Chinese developers had always been interested in single-player games, he observed, but investors grew more willing to fund them. Black Myth: Wukong is widely regarded as the first AAA game from the Chinese video game industry. Nikkei Asia described it as a new standard bearer for a sector long dominated by mobile games and gradually shifting toward consoles. The South China Morning Post reported that analysts expected government agencies to become more inclined to encourage AAA projects. Reuters noted that the highly positive response from Chinese state media signaled recognition of the industry's cultural and export value.

  In the week before launch, PlayStation 5 sales on Tmall doubled compared with the same period the year before and topped the video game hardware chart. Shuhei Yoshida, a former president of PlayStation Studios, recalled hearing that no PS5 consoles were left to buy after the release. Sony named the game and one other third-party title as key contributors to higher sales in its Game and Network Services division in the three months ending the 30th of September 2024. The influence also reached beyond games. The game boosted tourism to the real-world locations in its scenes and sparked wider interest in other media based on Journey to the West. The Fourth Sister and Pingping became popular cosplay characters. At the 2025 World Aquatics Championships, the Chinese team won gold in the artistic swimming team technical routine with a Wukong-inspired performance set to music from the game.

  Critics gave the game generally favorable reviews on PC and PlayStation 5, according to Metacritic, and it won several awards, including Game of the Year honors. Beth Park, a lead performance director on the project, was named a BAFTA Breakthrough in 2024. In December 2024, a free update added a boss battle mode, a map for each chapter and an armor set marking the Chinese New Year. Concerts took place across China and in venues such as Carnegie Hall. An art exhibition at the CAA Art Museum in Hangzhou included a life-sized replica of a keeper's shrine. In January 2025, Game Science launched a merchandise brand called BLACKMYTH, run by a team separate from the game developers.

  Inside the studio, the game was known as B1, short for Black Myth One. Feng Ji said he felt stuck in a haze after finishing a project he had imagined for nearly twenty years. In 2025 he proposed making a new game rather than more downloadable add-ons, and the second installment, Black Myth: Zhong Kui, is now in development. He promised that Sun Wukong's story would return in a more complete and substantial way. Game Science's own message to fans reads: "the westward journey won't end here."

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