Why Sleeping Dogs Is More Than Its True Crime Roots

10 years ago, on 14th August 2012, developer United Front Games and publisher Square Enix released Sleeping Dogs, an open-world game featuring an undercover cop infiltrating a Triad organisation. In the time since, Sleeping Dogs has received some critical acclaim, several DLC packages, an announced online multiplayer spinoff game named Triad Wars, and even the beginnings of a feature film adaptation. But five years ago, United Front Games closed its doors and Triad Wars never saw completion. Today, there’s still hope for the Sleeping Dogs film — but nothing confirmable as of yet — and so the original game stands alone, 10 years on. However, it didn’t start that way and, just maybe, standing alone isn’t that bad of a thing for Sleeping Dogs.

The game that would later come to be known as Sleeping Dogs started life as a project from developer Treyarch for publisher Activision, titled Black Lotus. The title was designed as an action-focused game inspired by Hong Kong action films, likely providing a cinematic feel similar to the one felt in the final product. However, Black Lotus was a tad different, featuring an entirely different protagonist — instead of a male undercover cop, the game starred a female assassin. The character was said to be modelled after actor Lucy Liu and some of her action-heavy roles, such as Alex Munday in Charlie’s Angels or O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

However, little more is known publicly about what Black Lotus would have looked like as a finished product, as the project was shut down in 2007. According to a 2010 article written by Leigh Alexander for Game Developer (then known as Gamasutra), this was partly because Activision was disinterested in releasing a game with a female lead due to findings in “skewed” focus testing that showed that titles with women as protagonists didn’t sell. Activision has since denied this statement, stating that it does not have “a policy of telling its studios what game content they can develop” and that the company did not mandate any change in the protagonist’s gender.

Either way though, it was also around this same time that the project in question went through several major shifts. In addition to ditching the Lucy Liu-inspired protagonist, Black Lotus also changed developers and even joined an existing series, becoming True Crime: Hong Kong. The exact timing of these changes and the order they took place in is hard to nail down, but by 2008, United Front Games was in full production of the game.

True Crime: New York City

The True Crime series had been considered a great fit for the Black Lotus project, as it was also an action-heavy game originally inspired by Hong Kong action cinema. However, with the series’ focus on starring members of law enforcement, an assassin protagonist just wouldn’t work anymore, necessitating a change in the hero, their role, and likely the overall plot. Even so, since the last True Crime game, True Crime: New York City, hadn’t performed terribly well critically or commercially, transforming Black Lotus into a True Crime game could have been exactly the spark needed to rejuvenate the series.

True Crime: Hong Kong took on many elements that had existed throughout the pre-existing series — and not just its choice of an undercover cop as a protagonist. True Crime, as a series, featured open-world environments based on cities in the real world, faithfully recreated through the use of satellite imaging, GPS, and copious photographs of the original locales. In that same vein, Hong Kong’s designers performed extensive research on their titular area, taking countless photographs of the city and its landmarks as well as taking to the streets themselves to ensure that they could accurately understand the layout. The plotline received much of the same careful effort, with it being built upon several interviews made with former members of both Triad organisations and the city’s Anti-Triad unit in their Police Force.

And yet, despite all of this careful work to make True Crime: Hong Kong the best it could be, it never saw release. The title was announced towards the end of 2009 and was set to be released in the next year. However, it was later delayed to 2011 before getting cancelled entirely in February of that same year. The reasons cited included a lack of quality and an expectation that the game would not be able to compete well against contemporary open-world action titles like Grand Theft Auto, though Hong Kong itself was said to be in a playable and virtually complete state. On some level, its fate is ironic — it was turned into a True Crime open-world game in order to save the True Crime brand, but then itself was destroyed by entering into competition with other open-world action titles.

The project was resurrected in August later that year when Square Enix, interested in the game’s potential, acquired the publishing rights. However, without also obtaining the intellectual property of the True Crime series, Hong Kong would have to go through one last naming change. The project had reached its final form: Sleeping Dogs. After another year in development and new features being added, the game was released in August of 2012.

Despite Sleeping Dogs’ many development woes and shifts, the final title was received reasonably well and sold over a million and a half copies in its first month. However, that was not enough for Square Enix to avoid considering it a commercial failure. Perhaps Activision had been right to cancel the game as True Crime: Hong Kong or maybe Sleeping Dogs’ long development and cancellation left consumers unwilling to give it a shot.

However, when I play Sleeping Dogs, I don’t see the cracks of development hell, I don’t see a game that couldn’t possibly go toe-to-toe with other open-world crime action titles, and I definitely don’t see a failure. The combat is smooth and entertaining, but not so easy that I can just lazily hit the counter button over and over again without looking at the screen. The plot is dramatic in all of the right places, making me feel like I’m playing through a game version of movies like Infernal Affairs or The Departed. Sleeping Dogs looks incredible, plays like a well-tuned instrument, and can keep me engaged for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours.

There are problems with the game, yes. But on the whole, Sleeping Dogs is an absolute gem to experience. It’s a game that I never want to uninstall to free up space. If I want to spend some time walking around an open-world city, Sleeping Dogs’ Hong Kong is always one of my top choices beside the likes of Saints Row 2. To me, the game is so much more than a spiritual successor to a handful of almost-successful Grand Theft Auto clones. It carves out its own enduring space that I can’t wait to get back to, even 10 years on.

Does a game like that deserve to be part of something greater, either as the saviour of a franchise or the progenitor of its own series? Maybe so. Will I always be disappointed that Black Lotus didn’t get a chance to exist as it was originally intended? Yes, definitely. But even if we never get a continuation of Sleeping Dogs’ story, even if the movie never quite manages to come together, even if this wasn’t exactly what the creators wanted for it, that doesn’t make the game a failure. That doesn’t make all of the work that two different developers put into it worthless. The fact that I am talking about this fantastic experience a decade after its release should be proof enough that it can stand the test of time as an enduring classic. If it never goes any further than that, Sleeping Dogs will still be a success in my book.