In the 1980's, the United States no doubt created the "Action Movie" genre with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and others. The movies that came out of this era are classics - Commando, RoboCop, The Running Man, Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop are all examples of absolutely great action movies of this era. These action movies had superheroes as the main characters - guys who oozed testosterone and machismo from every pore.
These movies were great, but on the other side of the world, the last British colony (I really don't know if that's true), Hong Kong, was creating mind-blowing, groundbreaking action movies the likes of which you can thank for the advent of movies like The Matrix, John Wick, The Transporter, and more. The movies coming out of Hong Kong from 1985-1996 changed how action movies were made worldwide. Period.
Without movies like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Police Story, and Once Upon a Time in China, we would not have the spectacular action revolution that started in the 2000's here in the United States that changed the way action movies were made. It's thanks to people like Jackie Chan, John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jet Li that we see great things now like the MCU.
I remember first watching The Killer on VHS. We rented it from Hastings in Lawrence, and the cover was two guys holding guns in each other's faces. The tagline on the movie said: "One Vicious Hitman. One Fierce Cop. Ten Thousand Bullets." The movie was poorly dubbed in English but it was absolutely amazing. Back in the early 1990's I had never seen things like "The Killer" before. It was eye-opening.
The story was good (cliche, but good) and the execution was flawless. Slow-motion, squibs exploding, doves flying around, it was a concentrated, awesome, ballistic ballet. It led me to track down other movies, including Hard-Boiled, Wheels on Meals, and Fist of Legend. I ate this stuff up, going as far back as the 1970's "Chop-Sockies" to see things like Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. When I went on a trip to New York, I dragged my brother and sister to a sketchy video store in a not-so-nice part of Manhattan to get obscure, hard-to-find Hong Kong Action movies that I could take home and devour.
I rented everything I could, driving from Lawrence to Kansas City to rent videos at Video Library or the Fine Arts Theater. I even went to an Asian Cult Film Festival where I saw five amazing movies on the big screen, including Goyokin and Kiru from Japan, and Once Upon a Time in China in America from Hong Kong.
These influence bled into the RPG market as well, with two releases that I recall vividly: Hong Kong Action Theatre! and Feng Shui: The Shadowfist Roleplaying Game.
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Note: This picture is not blurry or out of focus. The company chose a low-res image for their cover and blew it up in all its pixelated glory when they published the game. |
Hong Kong Action Theatre! (HKAT!) was put out by Epitaph Studios in Lawrence, KS, and had secured the rights from Golden Harvest to use still images from all sorts of Hong Kong action movies. It was ... let's just say the writer of the book's ego took center stage over any actual substance within the pages of the book. The game was eventually bought by Guardians of Order who retooled it for a second edition, but for me, the next game was the one that sealed the deal.
Magic: The Gathering hit game stores in the early 1990's and created a whole new kind of game - something that revolutionized tabletop gaming and changed the way the business worked for all time. Magic was everywhere when it came out, and exploded in popularity - the collectible card game was born. With the birth of the genre, an influx of collectible card games (CCGs) flooded into the gaming market over the next several years. It was ridiculous how many CCGs there were.
Companies bought up licenses left and right and tried their damnedest to become the next Magic; The Gathering. You had Towers in Time, Vampire Jihad (became Vampire: The Eternal Struggle), Rage, Babylon 5, Dune, Deadlands, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Animayhem, and even a Bible CCG. One of the games that came out was Shadowfist, a time-hopping, urban fantasy game inspired by none-other than Hong Kong action movies.
Feng Shui was the RPG that was based in the same universe. The CCG came out first, but as I understand it, the RPG was created first, then they quickly made a CCG to cash in on the CCG craze, then released the RPG right after that. A company called Daedalus put both the card game and RPG out.
Now, one thing that made this game stand out was that the core rulebook was printed in full-color and just looked so cool. The physics on the cover made no sense, but when you opened that book you were treated to a fun setting of guns, fists, and magic the likes of which no one had ever seen before.
Feng Shui revolves around several factions fighting through time over the control of important sites of power called Feng Shui sites. You can attune to them and gain power, fortune, and extort some control over reality if you get enough of them under your hat. If you attuned to enough of them, a Critical Shift would occur that could change the future based on what time period you were in.
By traveling through the Netherworld, the space out of time, you could travel to one of the four junctures in the game: 69 AD ancient China, 1850 China, contemporary (assumed to perpetually be 1996) Hong Kong, or 2056 dystopian-supernatural-cyber future. When you created a character, you started off by picking an archetype from action movies, like Maverick Cop, Supernatural Creature, Martial Artist, Old Master, Abomination, or many others. You then built the character according to a few variations set out for you, and picked some "Schticks" that your character was good at.
These Schticks were things like "Both Guns Blazing" where you could potentially be better at running around firing two guns at once with better accuracy and damage than if you fired one gun. You could pick Fu Powers that gave you magnificent martial arts abilities like leaping 30 feet horizontally or running up sheer surfaces. You could get sorcerous powers like flight or the ability to blast a cloud of radioactive chopsticks at your enemies. It was insane.
And to this day remains one of the few games I can think of that is absolutely as much fun to run as it is to play.
The game has a kind of freedom that fully admits that the player characters are better than anyone else, and will win the fight ultimately. The game was about looking cool while doing things, and it leaned into that hard. It introduced mechanics for Named and Unnamed Characters.
Unnamed characters were there solely as scenery and to make Named characters look good. Sure, they occasionally got in a lucky shot, but for the most part, heroes could wade through an army of Unnamed mooks and hardly break a sweat. But when one of those motorcycle-riding, uzi-carrying duded flipped off his helmet and did something cool, you knew that was a Named character who was somehow important to the plot and posed a genuine threat.
I loved how the damage system worked in the game - you could take up to 20 wound points without a problem, then start suffering impairment, and then eventually making death checks. The thing is, once the combat was over and the scene changed, the appearance of the damage remained and your wound points went back to zero. This was to account for things like John McLane in Die Hard looking like absolute death-warmed-over by the end of the movie, but he hops into the back of a limo with his wife and rides off into the sunrise.
Next time, I'll get more into Feng Shui and the things I pulled off with it, and how it influenced me as a gamer from then on.
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