by Benjamin Wai-ming Ng
Introduction
The electronic game is one of the most globalized but little-studied forms of Japanese popular culture.[1] Japanese arcade games, home console games and handheld console games have dominated the world market since the mid-1980s. [2] Hong Kong is one of the consumption centres of Japanese electronic games in Asia. As John Fiske points out that just as readers can become "active readers" by adding new meanings to cultural products (Fiske 1989, p.32), Hong Kong game players, businessmen and artists have been turning Japanese games into Hong Kong-style Japanese games and other forms of hybrid culture in terms of the rule of playing, the making of crossover cultural products as well as specific languages translated, used or created. As one of the first studies on the subject of Japanese games in Asia, this paper examines the reception and domestication of Japanese games in Hong Kong through a case study of Street Fighter (SF) and The King of Fighters (KOF), the two of the most popular arcade games as well as combat games in the world. & #12288;Both games have had a significant impact on Hong Kong popular culture and the Hong Kong entertainment industry. Hong Kong artists and players have been selectively and creatively incorporating elements of Hong Kong commercial movies, martial arts novels and comics, as well as lower-class slang and behaviour into these two Japanese games. Examining the history of SF and KOF in Hong Kong, the making of new rules and jargons by Hong Kong players, and the adaptation of these two games into Hong Kong comics from historical and cultural perspectives, this study aims to deepen understanding of the dynamic force of localization and transnational cultural flows in forging Asian popular culture. Data about SF and KOF were gathered from newspapers, magazines and the internet, interviews with game players, arcade game shopkeepers and editors of game magazines, as well as on-site observation and participation.
The History of Street Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong
The history of Japanese arcade games in Hong Kong can be traced to the 1970s. In these early years, small game centres equipped with first-generation arcade games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders mushroomed across the entire territory. In the 1980s, Japanese games became dominant at Hong Kong game centres. In 1987, Capcom, a leading Japanese game software company, introduced Street Fighter (SF1) to Hong Kong and it became an instant success. Newman (2002) argues that "the pleasures of videogame play are not principally visual, but rather are kinaesthetic" (p. 2). This idea can be applied to SF1. Despite its primitive program and character designs and unsophisticated graphics, SF1 won the hearts of the players with an innovative control system (such as the use of separate keys for punching and kicking and the joystick for choosing direction, jumping or hiding) that later became the model for other two-dimensional combat games including the KOF and Samurai Spirit series. Street Fighter's draw also helped popularize the term hissatsuwaza (literally "sure-kill technique", the most powerful fighting skill) among young people in Hong Kong. [3] Game players in Hong Kong added elements of Chinese martial arts to SF1 by perpetuating the rumour that there was a hidden hissatsuwaza called yiyangzhi (single yang finger), a term borrowed from popular Hong Kong martial arts novels by Jinyong. There was a time when Hong Kong game players were absorbed with finding and discussing this hidden move. This shows that the localization of Japanese combat games started from the very beginning of their introduction to Hong Kong.
Street Fighter 2 (SF2), launched in 1991, created an unprecedented arcade game craze in Hong Kong. The game represented a breakthrough in control system, stage and graphic designs, drawings and music (Kent, 2001). It became the most popular arcade game in Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Many small-sized game centres had nothing but SF2 games. The queue was always long for SF2. Street Fighter 2 competitions were held frequently by various organizations in different parts of Hong Kong. Local game magazines focused their reports on SF2. Characters and terms of this game were adopted in Hong Kong comics, movies and Cantonese pop music (Chen, 2002). For example, the Hong Kong comic artist Situ Jianqian, used Ryu, Ken and Chun Li, the three major characters of the SF series, in his comic, Supergod Z: Cyber Weapon (1993). After receiving a warning letter from Capcom, Situ changed their names, but kept the character designs (see Figure 1) (Situ, 1993).
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