I sat down for a demo of Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero with two main curiosities. First was how its combat compares to last year's Black Myth: Wukong, and it turns out: pretty different. Second was the backstory of S-Game studio founder "Soulframe" Liang, who started his career with an RPG Maker game while studying architecture in college. Where did I go wrong in my life that I didn't end up adopting a pseudonym like Soulframe?
"Well, it was in high school—it was just some random idea," Liang told me in an interview after I'd played Phantom Blade Zero. "I just figured out something cool and not-so-usual, something fantasy and something solid coming together. Because my actual Chinese name is a little hard to pronounce in English."
Liang spent a lot of time online playing and making games in his teens and twenties, partially as a result of his unusual early career path for a game developer. "I had my undergrad in China, so I began making games in my last couple years in China and then I went to Yale for graduate school," he said. "When I first came to the country I didn't have many friends, so there were many free and boring nights. I had to find some ways to kill time. I think making games is the perfect way to kill time. In the several years I was at Yale, I was making games, and I also made some friends from drama school doing set designs. I was also a teaching assistant for interactive architecture, which is very close to games."
Liang had an internship at an architecture studio in the Netherlands, and when he finished grad school he got an offer to work at a firm in New York. It seemed like he was all set… but his game Rainblood: Town of Death had proven popular, and he opted for the far less certain option of moving back to China to start a small game studio. S-Game currently employs about 100 developers working on Phantom Blade Zero.
"In the very beginning it was just four [people]," he said. "I called some friends. We'd only met online, hadn't met in person, but I called and some of them quit their jobs and we did this thing together."
It turns out that the way you get (and keep) a nickname like Soulframe is pretty straightforward: Come up with it as a teenager, and then found a company with your internet friends who know you by that name. Oh, and also be extremely successful. S-Game released a trilogy of live service Phantom Blade games on mobile in China, each raking in more money than the last and allowing the studio to finance its upcoming big-budget action RPG.
Oh, and one other thing helps, it turns out: Trademarking your name.
"There is a game [called Soulframe] now," Liang said with a laugh, bringing up the Warframe sequel I was about to ask him about. "In China, this nickname—I actually registered as a trademark in China. So they were talking with me through Tencent, trying to buy the trademark, but I said 'this is a name we've been using for 15 years, so...'
Did Soulframe Liang really tell Digital Extremes, the makers of Warframe, and Tencent, the biggest Chinese game company, that they couldn't use his 2000s internet message board nickname for their next game?
"No, I'm not selling," he said, laughing again. "But they have figured it out. They have another Chinese name in China."
I did a little digging in a Chinese trademark database to try to confirm what, exactly, Soulframe (the game) is called in China, since the official website still shows the same name written in English. Best as I can tell, Digital Extreme's attempted trademarks were rejected, appealed, and rejected again, while the trademarks attributed to S-Game were approved without issue—truly a victory for '00s message board nerds everywhere.
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