Developer United Front Games
Publisher Square Enix
Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, 360, Xbox One
Release 2012
Your very first mission as undercover cop Wei Shen involves extorting protection money from the vendors at the local street market – the first of whom, you’re told, happens to sell pirate DVDs. The image of a Chinese person hawking counterfeit goods is a well-worn stereotype, but one that has some truth to it, particularly in the city that Sleeping Dogs calls home. In Hong Kong, in the years before platform holders officially set up shop in the territory, pirated game software – such as Game Boy cartridges packed with a dubious number of games – commonly sat alongside imported stock, and what little there existed of licensed Chinese distributions. There’s some karma there, perhaps, in the fact that many depictions of the former British colony in games and movies also have the uncanny remove of a counterfeit product.
Hong Kong’s neon cityscape is frequently used as an orientalist inspiration for the cyberpunk genre, while the long-demolished Kowloon Walled City, with its reputation
