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I had a favorite Growing Up (Anita Yuen in the 1998 Taiwanese TV series). I’m obsessed with Chinese TV series like , And . I consider myself well-versed in Chinese historical figures, especially those represented in the entertainment industry in the 1990s and 2000s in Asia. So when I found out that a studio in the UK had made a VR game called Pirate Queen Based on a forgotten captain who was prolific in the South China Sea, I was shocked. How have I never heard of it? How come the Asian film and TV industry never covers it?
I was able to play part of the game this week, which was released on the Meta Quest store On March 7th. The titular character Cheng Shih is voiced by actor Lucy Liu, who also produced this version of the game with UK-based Singer Studios CEO and founder Eloise Singer. Liu and Singer sat down with me for an interview to discuss Pirate QueenZheng Shih, The Strengths of Virtual Reality and the Importance of Cultural and Historical Accuracy in Games and Film.
Cheng Shih, which translates to “Madam Cheng” or “Mrs. Cheng”, was born Shi Yang. After she married the pirate Cheng Yi (usually romanized as Cheng Yi), she became known as Cheng Yi Cao, which translates to “Cheng Yi’s wife”. Together they led the Guangdong Pirate Union in the 19th century. After her husband’s death in 1807, she took over the reins and later became… South China Morning Newspaper “The greatest pirate in history.”
How did Singer Studios learn about Cheng Shih and decide to build a game (and an upcoming franchise that includes a movie, podcast, and graphic novels) around her? According to Singer, it was through word of mouth. “It was a friend of mine who first told me the story,” Singer said. She said: Did you know that the most famous pirate in history was a woman?
Cheng Shih is loosely referred to in Before that, he played the character of Mrs. Cheng in the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End And Jing Lang in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. As Singer pointed out, Cheng Shih also appeared in a recent episode of the series Doctor Who.
Singer said her team began developing the project as a film at the end of 2018. But the pandemic disrupted their plans, prompting Singer to turn it into a game. Short version of Pirate Queen It later debuted at the Raindance Film Festival, and soon after, Meta came on board and provided funding to complete the game’s development. Liu was then contacted when the full version was ready and about to debut at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.
“The rest is history, but not forgotten history,” Liu said. She said that Zheng Shih had never been recognized as the strongest pirate. “It seems crazy that in the 19th century, this woman who started out as a concubine would rise to power and then own the pirate fleet that she commanded,” Liu added. She went on to talk about how Cheng Shih was advanced at the time and was also a “bit of an underdog story.” For the full 15-minute interview, you can watch the video in this article or listen to this week’s episode of The Engadget Podcast and learn more about Liu and Singer’s thoughts on VR and technology over the past 20 years.
Capturing the historical and cultural details of Qing Shih’s life was crucial to Liu and Singer. They said the team had to create female hands from scratch to represent them from the player’s perspective in VR, and a dialect coach was hired to help Liu pronounce the Cantonese words Qing Shih speaks in the game. Although I’m not entirely sure whether Cheng Shih speaks Mandarin or Cantonese, the latter seems like the more accurate choice since it’s the lingua franca in the Guangdong region.
It all added to the immersion Pirate QueenWhere players find themselves in an air-sea environment. Meta Quest 3’s controllers were my hand in the game, as I paddled boats, climbed rope ladders, and picked up items with relative ease. Some of the mechanics, especially the idea of ”teleporting” like moving, were a bit outdated, but after about five minutes I got used to how things worked. You’ll have to point the left controller and press the joystick when you choose a place, and the scene around you will change. This may reduce the possibility of nausea, because you are not standing still while watching the movements of objects around you. It’s also very typical of , so those with gaming experience will likely be familiar with the move.
You can still walk around and explore, of course. You checked the corners of rooms, checked the insides of safes and more, while searching for keys that would open boxes containing clues. A lot of this is pretty standard for a puzzle game or room escape game, which is what I played most as a teenager. But I was particularly impressed by scenes like rowing a boat across the sea and climbing a rope ladder, both of which made me break out into a light sweat. Inside Zheng Shih’s cabin, I lit a stick of joss and placed it in an incense holder—a procedure I repeated every week at my grandfather’s altar when I was growing up. It felt so realistic that I tried to wave the joss stick to extinguish the flames and could almost smell the smoke.
These types of activities are what make VR games a great way to teach and empathize. “We didn’t want to have these combat elements that traditional VR games have,” Singer said, adding that was one of the challenges in creating the game. Pirate Queen.
“It’s nice to see and learn and be a part of that, rather than saying, ‘Let’s turn to page 48,'” Liu said. “It’s not as exciting as doing something or being an active part of something.” Liu added that when you play as a historical figure in a game, and it’s as immersive as a virtual reality game, “you’re living the life of that person or that moment in time.”
while Pirate Queen Currently only available on Quest devices, Singer said there are plans to bring it to “as many headsets as possible.” Singer Studios also said it “extends Pirate Queen A franchise that transcends virtual reality into a graphic novel, film, and TV series.
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