How Black Myth: Wukong rose to the top of Steam's wishlist

January's normally a quiet time of the year for video games, with few reveals, even fewer releases, and most of us content to hunker down and catch up with the winners from the previous year's awards season as studios muster themselves for the year ahead. But January 2021 was different, as a trailer for an unknown game from an unknown studio blazed across the internet like a swift swing from a combat staff. This game was Black Myth: Wukong, a new, dark take on the classic Chinese story Journey to the West.

The viral trailer started with the comforting crackle of a small fire, as a wizened voice spoke in Chinese of a "Victorious Fighting Buddha" and a mysterious figure who may be fictional, may be dead, but whose story we were about to hear. Following this intro, a golden cicada weaved its way through a lushly overgrown temple environment before transforming into the Monkey King Wukong. Over the next 10 minutes, the staff-wielding hero engaged in some gorgeous high-intensity duels, culminating in a boss battle against a vicious silver-furred beast.

From the flashy yet grounded combat, to the particle effects, environments, and monster designs, it looked incredible. So incredible, in fact, that gamers wondered whether this was some kind of pre-rendered trickery. From Aliens: Colonial Marines to Cyberpunk 2077, by way of No Man's Sky and Anthem, we'd been burned too many times to get our hopes up—especially when the game was coming from a studio best known up to that point for a free-to-play (but apparently pretty good) strategy game called Art of War: Red Tides.

But it soon became clear that the trailer—which took developer Game Science Studio six months to assemble—was all in-engine gameplay, and that Black Myth: Wukong was a serious production. The trailer went viral, and led to thousands of resumes flooding into the studio, desperate to get involved with the project. Ultimately, around 100 of those resumes sent to Game Science translated to hires, as the studio realised it had to expand its 30-person team if it was to meet the hype it had unwittingly generated.

By August of that year, Game Science had moved Black Myth over to Unreal Engine 5, releasing another trailer to celebrate the upgrade. This time it looked more like how you might expect the game to play, with a visible UI and combat that was more than just a dazzling procession of the flashiest moves the game had to offer (case in point: there was about ten times more dodge-rolling here compared to the previous trailer). This gameplay footage looked more tactile and tangible, with a Bloodborne-style flow, and a focus on epic boss encounters.

Two years later, in August 2023, Black Myth got its own Steam Store page, but it was only in May of this year when it completed its journey to the top of the wishlist charts, following a cinematic trailer at Summer Game Fest 2024. This was just a 90-second teaser showing Wukong ascending a misty mountain, at the top of which he confronts four giants that we can only guess will be bosses—but after showing so much of the game so early in its development, Game Science was probably entitled to show a little less this time round. Gamers weren't deterred, and within days, Black Myth: Wukong was the most wishlisted game on Steam, where it sits to this day on the eve of the August 20 release date.

Of course, trailers—even those involving gameplay—tell the story that devs want to tell, and even if the game winds up looking as good as it has up to now, how it feels in the hands is another matter. And as Tyler notes in his review, Black Myth: Wukong is "one of the most joyful action RPGs I've played"—a game filled with eccentric characters and daring boss battles.