The world of fan translation patches have been booming in recent years, making video game curios and vintage gems more accessible around the world. At the forefront of this wave are Hilltop Works, a collective behind top notch patches for games I assumed would remain out of reach. Today they’ve announced a surprise project: A translation of a lurid four-disc PlayStation RPG inspired by a real world cyberpunk hovel.
From the team behind the irreverent Planet Laika, Kowloon’s Gate is a sprawling RPG set within a claustrophobic environment. Set in 1997, the Kowloon Walled City has reemerged on the outskirts of Hong Kong despite its demolition in 1993. You play as a feng shui expert working for a shadowy agency that monitors spiritual balance. Terrified that such a cesspool could offset the yin and yang of the universe, you must investigate the city, survive mazes of space and time, reawaken the four divine beasts and return reality to its equilibrium.
The shadow of the real Kowloon leans large in popular culture. A former military outpost that became a no-man’s land following World War II, Kowloon attracted refugees, drifters and crime families into an ever growing urban nugget. By the ‘80s it squished approximately 35,000 people into the square footage of five football fields. It has inspired the cyberpunk visions of William Gibson, Ghost in the Shell, and Tokyo’s strangest arcade. As illustrious as its legacy is, many who had been there say that life in the dense complex was more banal than its reputation suggests. Largely off the grid, the most popularized records of it are Greg Girard’s 1993 photo journal City of Darkness and a handful of broadcast periodicals.
A split between an FMV adventure game and a dungeon crawler RPG, Kowloon’s Gate is a surrealist cyberpunk epic. You navigate derelict passages and encounter numerous urban wastelanders. It’s a perfect recipe for a game lost on its original audience but stirred into a cult classic over time. And so it has received ports to the PSP and PlayStation 3, a tie-in manga, a VR prequel and a visual novel sequel that just cannot seem to get the door. While it never left Japan, portions of the dialogue and copy are intended to be read as Chinese, making it a tall order for fan translators.
If you’re a fan of Japanese adventure games or PlayStation obscurities, you’ve been eating well these last few years. Official and unofficial, there have been English localizations for Garage: Bad Dream Adventure, Germs and even Linda³. Hilltop Works have made a strong reputation for themselves as a collective, releasing English patches for Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 and the Japan-exclusive game adaptation of the midwest-coded phenomenon Jingle Cats. Their work is so well renowned that they’ve been commissioned for official translations as well, such as the port of 1999’s Milano’s Odd Job Collection.
Hilltop’s Kowloon’s Gate patch is set to drop on June 9th.