Kowloon's Gate

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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	JP: February 28, 1997 JP: April 14, 2010 (PSN)
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

Kowloon's Gate (クーロンズゲート, Kūronzu Gēto) is a 1997 adventure video game published by Sony Music Entertainment. Released for the PlayStation in Japan, it is considered a cult hit.

The game takes place in the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. On June 22, 1997, before the handover of Hong Kong, the demolished Kowloon Walled City reemerged from the realm of Yin (陰界) back to the streets of Hong Kong in the living realm of Yang (陽界). The Hong Kong Supreme Feng 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 the Four Symbols so that order would be revived.

Kowloon's Gate was developed by the New Media Department of Sony Music Entertainment Japan (also credited to Zeque^[1] who also co-developed Planet Laika). This was a multimedia division of the company that worked on non-music products.^[2] It was conceived as an early PlayStation 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 an SGI Onyx in the Sony Music office. The plan was to create an exploration experience. Kimura thought about an old bazaar town in Morocco and other kasbah type areas "dreaming of the romanticism of the Arabian world". Eventually Hong Kong's Kowloon was chosen as the setting.^[4] The team visited the place for research in April 1994.^[4]

By the end of 1994, images of the Kowloon'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 in Japan on February 28, 1997. It was later re-released on the PlayStation 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 so good, but as time went by a passionate fanbase developed due to the mysterious gaming experience in Kowloon's Gate.^[10] It gained further attention with video-sharing sites on the Web and Kowloon's Gate eventually became a cult hit in Japan.^[11][12]

In the video game magazine Famitsu, a 2009 reader poll of games with highest demand for a sequel ranked the game tenth with 151 votes.^[13]

To commerate the 10th anniversary of the game, the original creators came together and re-made the game world on Second Life, and was released in 2007.^[14]

In October 2017, a VR prequel named Kowloon's Gate VR Suzaku was released as a PlayStation 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 a VR headset. An Oculus 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 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Microsoft 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 on Pixiv's Booth service, with the first part released in February 2023.^[20]

• Game website (in Japanese)