12/23/96 LET A HUNDRED CHINESE VIDEO GAMES BLOOM

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LET A HUNDRED CHINESE VIDEO GAMES BLOOM

Just across from Beijing's ancient Temple of Heaven sits the bustling Hongqiao market, where shoppers can find everything from fresh fish and pearls to cassette players, clothes, Christmas ornaments, and all kinds of electronic goods. The busiest aisle in the market is filled with teenagers poring over the latest in Sega Enterprises Ltd. video games and Nintendo Co. Game Boys. What they are intent on buying, though, is the cheaper home-grown stuff: video-game systems produced by Xiaobawang Co. of Guangdong province and simple Chinese ''game boys'' made by Jianan Electrical Factory in southern China's city of Shenzhen. Accompanying the Chinese systems are unauthorized versions of pricier foreign discs, ranging from Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, as well as locally made games based on movies like Aladdin and The Lion King.
The games spilling out of the aisles at Hongqiao reflect the appearance of a vigorous local industry. And now that the Chinese gamemakers have captured loyal customers, they want to raise the quality and sophistication of their wares to Japanese and Western levels.
That's especially true for the producers of game software for PCs. Yang Nanzheng, game department manager of Beijing Golden Disc Co., a successful multimedia and game software firm, says China's growing PC sales will increase the demand for his products and those of his rivals. He figures legitimate sales of game software--now a minuscule $12 million--will surpass $100 million by 2000.
That growth will depend on Chinese firms' ability to produce games aimed squarely at the home market. Best-sellers have largely focused on battles in Chinese history and literature. The Beijing WayAhead Software Corp. Ltd. has a popular game called ''The Battle of Guandu,'' based on a famous clash from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Golden Disc has released a game called Chinese Airforce, about the Korean War. Golden Disc's latest project, which runs on Windows 95 and is designed for Intel Corp.'s uPComing MMX chip, is set during the 19th-century Opium War. This time the best player can reverse history so that China never loses Hong Kong to the British. The game's release is timed for the month before Hong Kong's actual return to China.
CURBING THE PIRATES. Some Chinese companies are even demonstrating their skills away from the home playing field. Golden Disc has already sold South Korean distribution rights for three games to conglomerates LG and the Ssangyong Group of Cos. It is negotiating to sell a game based on Mongolian warrior Genghis Khan's conquests to a Japanese company.
But for the market to really grow, China will need to rein in the country's rampant piracy, points out Su Weichou, deputy director of the U.S. Information Technology Office in Beijing. Chinese companies have often seen their price advantage erased and their sales decimated by pirated copies of their games. Yang of Golden Disc says that knock-offs hit the streets within one month of a game's release. Still, he expects government will curb the worst abuses. Maybe he could help with a game where players capture the dreaded software pirate.
By Dexter Roberts in Beijing

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