CHINESE SOFTWARE
By the standards of mainstream Beijing, Bruce Hsu looks like a slacker. He speaks English with California breeziness and spends most of his time playing videogames. "I haven't had a shower in three days," he confesses while steering a People's Liberation Army tank across a decimated onscreen landscape.
But in 1997, Hsu created Tianhuo (Sky Chaos), China's best-selling domestic videogame.
This spring, with technical help from Intel in optimizing the software for use on the Pentium III chip, Hsu's Studio Pangaea will release Dynasty, a new game set in China's Warring States period (475-221 BC). "There are so many cool battles and slain heroes in Chinese history," Hsu says. "There's more to Chinese design than dragons, kung fu, and noodle-eating men."
Born in Beijing, Hsu attended high school in the US. First in San Jose, then in Denver, he learned to speak and code in English. Returning to China after graduation, he found himself unprepared to take China's college-entrance exams. And with that, a videogame start-up was born.
"Because of piracy, it's hard to make money writing software in China," Hsu admits; even with one of the country's best sellers, Pangaea has merely broken even. "Last year there were more than 10 game developers. Now there are six or seven." And while Hsu worries the government's crackdown on piracy actually hurts Chinese games - how else would they get distributed? - he believes demand for native code will win out: "Players here want Chinese-made games. It's part of the nationalism thing."
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