Chapter 4. Xuecha: What We Missed Was More Than a Few Consoles¶
A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 四 雪猹: 我们错过的不止是几台游戏机
First published in the author's Zhihu column on September 30, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19856097
This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 3, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.
On September 29, 2014, in complete contrast to the strong feelings running through the games industry, the official launch of the Chinese version of the Xbox One seemed to stir very little among most players.
In the eyes of most people, perhaps, what is there to be pleased about when a console goes on sale that is region locked, has few legitimate games to choose from and costs more than a grey import?
When it comes down to it, is it not just a games console? Most of us never played one as children, and we have turned out fine. What could we possibly have missed? It does not seem to have made any difference to my life either.
Yes. That is what I thought too, until I had finished talking to Xuecha.
Xuecha, real name Yang Xuefei (杨雪飞), was born in Wuhan in 1980. He is a former senior editor and senior journalist at Games Console Practical Technology (游戏机实用技术), the magazine better known as UCG, and he wrote under the pen name Polygon (多边形). He specialised in console games from childhood, was the first editor in the Chinese games media to be sent to the United States to cover E3, lived through a great deal of console history both in China and abroad, and was a guest of honour at Microsoft China's Xbox One launch event.
Xuecha watched the Chinese console market fall apart step by step with his own eyes, and he also followed closely how console games abroad were made more and more beautifully. Setting those two threads side by side lets us understand more clearly the enormous difference between games culture in China and games culture elsewhere, why very good foreign games fail to take root once they arrive here, and why the games we make ourselves are in such a hurry for quick returns.
Xuecha's unusual childhood¶
Xuecha's mother worked at the Wuhan Friendship Store. People of that generation may remember that in the early days the Friendship Stores were shops that served foreigners in China exclusively, and were only later opened up as department stores selling foreign goods to the general public.
That put a great many novel foreign products in front of Xuecha very early on. He played an American Atari console in 1984, and Nintendo's Famicom in 1987.
Growing up in that environment left him with a lasting appetite for the newest and best of everything.
Video games are of course every child's favourite, and when he was in his early teens computers had not yet spread through China, which meant there was no such thing as PC gaming either. So arcades and the baojifang (包机房), the console rental rooms, became the places he went to again and again.
The console rental room¶
This is a term that has probably gone hazy in a lot of people's memories. It was different from the computer rooms, an early form of the internet café, that appeared after 1998, because a rental room dealt only in console games: the Famicom, the Super Nintendo, and later the PlayStation.
Usually a rental room had a row of televisions along the wall, and the cabinet under each television had a drawer holding a console and its controllers. Drawers half open, cables in a tangle, controllers of every shape and kind. Does it come back to you? That was our childhood.
For Xuecha, childhood was spent in a handful of rental rooms tucked away in the odd corners of Wuhan's three towns. His family was not well off, and in those little dark rooms, which were raided and shut down from time to time, he got his hands on the Super Nintendo, the 3DO, the PlayStation, the Saturn, the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 the way a guerrilla gets his supplies.
Compared with today, playing a console game back then was quite difficult.
First, for a long stretch before the state issued its explicit ban on games consoles in 2000, consoles and arcades were counted, by a kind of unwritten rule, among the disreputable venues of vice, gambling and drugs. Unlicensed dark rooms, sealed up and cleared out every so often, plus the social stigma, cost the console world a very large part of its users from the start.
Then there was the high barrier to entry of console gaming itself.
At the small end, even saving your game was a problem. On a shared console, someone else would write over your save file, so at first you had to find ways of hiding it, and when that failed you gritted your teeth, saved up in secret and bought a memory card, which for a child was extremely expensive.
At the large end, the Super Nintendo era brought the floppy disk drive. It is rather shameful to admit, but the main use of this thing was to make piracy easy. It pulled the ROM out of an original cartridge and wrote it to a 3.5-inch floppy disk, and after that you could play from the drive without having to buy the original at all.
The arrival of the floppy drive, together with the Super Nintendo's rich choice of games, sped up the spread of consoles, and the spread of the Super Nintendo in particular. The rental rooms of the day were almost all Super Nintendo. Even so, by today's standards a Super Nintendo plus a floppy drive cost three or four thousand yuan in the early 1990s, which an ordinary family still could not accept.
It is worth mentioning that the Sega Mega Drive was relatively cheap when it came along later, so a good many children from slightly better off families went down the Japanese games road after that. One of them was Jichuan Mingjing (吉川明静), the Shanghai boy in chapter one of this history.
But Xuecha's family circumstances were not good.
All he could do was play in the rental rooms, and to keep the cost down he often stayed the whole night. The owner would go home to sleep and lock him in the little dark room to play on his own.
In an age with no internet, and with games magazines hard to come by, there were no walkthroughs at all. The only way through a game was to compare notes with the friends around you.
But locked in a dark room, who was there to ask? So every time a puzzle stopped him, and it happened countless times, he copied the English text down and looked the words up in a dictionary at home. By the time he was in junior secondary school his English was already very good, and in senior secondary he picked up some Japanese as well.
Being good at foreign languages from an early age is something close to a shared trait among all the successful people behind the games that I have interviewed.
It also gave Xuecha his chance at a bigger stage.
In 2002, spending much of his time on the major games forums, he had a sudden idea and wrote a piece of Metal Gear Solid 2 fan fiction. It caught the eye of Oriental Spider (东方蜘蛛), a member of the UCG editorial board, who passed the piece on to the magazine Game People (游戏·人). After that he began moving into games media circles, and his grasp of console games and of what was happening abroad brought him a lot of commissions.
The biggest of those commissions came from Gouki, an editor at UCG. Gouki wanted to put together a Metal Gear Solid special and asked Xuecha to write a walkthrough for the Game Boy version. Xuecha took it very seriously. To produce a full map of every stage in the game he used a method that was clumsy but effective: he took one screenshot per step in an emulator, then stitched all the images together in Photoshop.
As luck would have it, before the project was even finished Xuecha was pulled straight into UCG's editorial office in Shenzhen as a full-time member of staff, because the magazine happened to be looking for someone with good English who also understood games to strengthen its editorial line-up.
The old saying holds up: opportunity only ever comes to those who are prepared.
The two biggest console games magazines in China at the time were Electronic Gaming Software (电子游戏软件) and UCG, and both deserve a short introduction here.
Electronic Gaming Software was founded in June 1994, originally under the name GAME Concentration Camp (GAME集中营). It was China's first proper games magazine. In 1995 it ran a now classic editorial, Crows, Crows Cawing (乌鸦·乌鸦叫), complaining about the plight of console gaming in China, walked straight into the muzzle of the video game crackdown, and was suspended for a time. It came back only under the new name Electronic Gaming Software. I would recommend reading that editorial: Crows, Crows Cawing, the most famous article Electronic Gaming Software ever ran
Even read today, twenty years on, its warnings about the damage done by the pirated games market and about the short-sightedness of the industry still ring out.
UCG was founded in 1998, went semi-monthly in 2001, and at its peak sold more than 300,000 copies a month.
Xuecha says that when he walked into the magazine's editorial office in 2003 it felt like walking into heaven, because not only could he meet editors he had long admired, people such as Gouki, Shajia (沙迦) and Shengfushi (胜负师), he could also play, for free, every kind of console he could never have afforded before.
Free games and a salary as well. What could possibly be better than that? How could he not throw himself into it?
His efforts were rewarded very quickly.
In 2004 he and Gouki were sent to the United States to cover E3. He was 24 that year, and it was his first time abroad. In the years that followed, even when money was tight, UCG kept sending them to E3 in the United States and TGS in Tokyo every year to report, and that long strategic view brought a great deal of first-hand information to the Chinese games industry.
Xuecha is deeply grateful for that period.
He says he never expected to reach the outside world so young, and that understanding the past and the future of console gaming in particular gave him many more angles from which to look at how the whole industry was developing.
A history of upheaval in console gaming worldwide¶
Xuecha traces console gaming back to the United States in the 1970s. Atari rose partly on a very far-sighted strategy of moving arcade games into the home, and partly on building an open games platform, which laid the ground for a huge number of titles to come aboard. But the platform was managed very loosely, and Atari exercised no effective control over the quality of the games.
After it wrongly adopted a policy of quantity over quality in particular, a flood of shoddy games appeared, and in 1983 this finally produced the famous Atari Shock, in which a disappointed market abandoned the company entirely.
A handful of bad games brought down the whole North American console market, and Atari, then in its golden age, fell from a great height.
In 1983 Nintendo seized its chance.
When it launched the Famicom, it took the lesson of Atari to heart. It built a platform and tightened its oversight of games, controlling not only the quality but also the quantity of titles on the FC platform strictly. That disruptive step raised the standard and quality of games enormously, console gaming began to revive, and Nintendo became the new overlord of the age.
And the very thing that made them was the thing that undid them.
Nintendo's later oversight of games developers was too harsh, and that took the company to the opposite extreme.
The new challengers, the next generation of consoles¶
In 1994, after Sony and Sega had brought out the PlayStation and the Saturn, next generation consoles that used optical discs, Nintendo stubbornly stuck with cartridges on its own third generation console, the N64, and stuck with the same old harsh system of control, requiring its games suppliers to use cartridges too, by then relatively outdated in both cost and efficiency. That met with resistance from the industry and from players.
The most serious consequence of all this was that the famous developer Square moved Final Fantasy VII, originally due out on the N64, over to Sony's PlayStation. Given the standing of the Final Fantasy series in the industry at the time, and the bristling stand-off between Nintendo and Sony, that was simply a fatal blow to Nintendo.
Sony pressed its advantage and put out a slogan: all the games gather here.
The challenger had overturned Nintendo's platform system once again.
Sony still monitored the quality of games, but it relaxed part of its control over suppliers, letting them decide how many copies of each game to release rather than requiring them, as Nintendo did, to pay Nintendo to manufacture the copies. Sony also lowered the licensing fee on each disc, giving margin back to the games companies, which greatly raised the enthusiasm of the people making games.
At the same time, before the N64 came out, Virtual Boy, the portable 3D console Nintendo had built, failed because its concept was so far ahead of its time that it could not be properly supported by the technology available. Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo's leading designer and the father of the Game Boy, resigned to take responsibility, and the company was badly weakened.
From that point Nintendo began its decline.
After Sony's rise, the industry was overturned once more when Microsoft's Xbox appeared in 2001, but that is a later story, and we will come to it in a few years.
Now let us look at what China was doing over the same period¶
Through the 1990s the rental rooms were being sealed up left and right, ordinary people could not afford consoles, the country was full of knock-off Famicoms and pirated games, and Sega tried and failed several times to enter the Chinese market. In 1997 the Sega Saturn, launched jointly by Sega and China's Stone Group (四通集团), finally failed. On that episode I would recommend another article, Because of Sega, Therefore Games, which sets out Sega's strategy in China and the background of the period in detail.
After that came a few attempts to play in the grey areas, such as iQue (神游), which took the roundabout route of turning consoles into handhelds. Personally I think this company's abilities went beyond the limits of what a human being can do. Not only did it secure the Nintendo licence, it also swapped out the trademark of that most assertive of companies for iQue's own logo. Even now the whole thing is astonishing. It is as if you were not only Apple's general agent in China but had also replaced every Apple logo with a picture of your own face, and, most miraculous of all, Apple had agreed.
In 2003 Sony too finally worked its way through every last piece of paperwork and prepared to open official Chinese sales of the PlayStation 2, only to be told for no clear reason, the day before launch, that the launch was postponed. It went on sale quietly six days later. Almost exactly the same thing as this Xbox One Chinese launch.
But whether they were playing in the grey areas or had come in properly through the front door after clearing one obstacle after another, all of them failed in the end.
Because approval for legitimate games was stuck.
A machine officially licensed for sale in China, and hardly any games to play on it. For a console, which needs a steady stream of new games to drive hardware sales, that is a fatal wound.
Looking back over these thirty years, was what we missed really just these few games consoles?
Xuecha says that because of the difference in hardware support, the production standard of console games is far higher than that of PC games. From the 1970s until now, forty years have passed. The people abroad who grew up playing console games back then are now the backbone of the modern games industry, and they were steeped in games of that quality. How are we to surpass the games they make? That, first of all, is a question of cultural accumulation.
What is more, under the long-term influence of PC specifications and network conditions in China, even if we brought a lot of excellent games in right now, they would still fail to take root. The more beautiful and complex a big game is, the faster it dies in China, and many console games have to be stripped back a great deal when they are turned into online versions before they can fit local conditions.
So when people in the games industry cheer, it is only because this may be the beginning of a market being cultivated. We all know perfectly well that for it to flower and bear fruit will take another ten to twenty years of steeping at the very least, but at least this counts as a start.
And this is only the gap in cultural grounding.
The thing we may miss that matters most
is, I am afraid, the next wave of the industrial revolution.
The Xbox One that claims to be centred purely on entertainment sits in your living room today, and you can control it with your voice. Without any other device, you can direct it with gestures. It can play music and television, it can shop on the internet, it can make video calls, and it can connect to more devices.
Wait. Have you seen Iron Man?
Do you remember Jarvis, the butler in it who could do anything, from intelligent interaction all the way up to military grade applications?
Do you still think
that what we missed was really just a few games consoles?
The History Behind Chinese Games
Everyone has a story, as long as you have enough patience and insight.