Reborn in 1999: Building a Gaming Empire from the Start

The moment he opens his eyes, Li Tianran is back in Hong Kong in 1999. Instead of the dream start every reborn person hopes for, he gets the worst hand imaginable: A bootlegger father who has skipped town, a dilapidated tin shack on the outskirts of Sham Shui Po, five roaring diesel generators, an ancient disc-production line, and… a mountain of loan-shark debt that could get him killed. His only hope of turning things around is the Game Developer System that came with him when he was reborn. Draw cards, combine them, and generate games automatically. The era-defying Zombie Samurai bursts onto the scene, only to be blasted by players for having no save feature and inundated with refund demands. It also catches the attention of Capcom and whets the appetite of Hong Kong’s underworld. To stay alive, he is forced into the dangerous undercurrents of Sham Shui Po: On one side, the domineering Brother Long wants to bring him under his wing, offering the gilded cage of a mansion halfway up the Peak. On the other, Big B, a powerful distribution boss, schemes greedily and keeps tightening the screws. And all the while, the police are quietly closing their net around the triads… In an age when computers are still bulky behemoths, the internet runs on dial-up, and owning a mobile phone is a status symbol, Li Tianran wields a golden finger capable of creating gaming miracles in one hand, and dances on the edge of a knife, walking the line between the criminal underworld and the law with the other. From bootleg discs churned out in an underground workshop to a life-or-death wager with Capcom over 500,000 copies sold, he has just one goal: Use one world-shaking game after another to smash open a path to survival, and lay the foundations of his own gaming empire in this turbulent, extraordinary year of 1999.