United Front have revealed how they got the look of Hong Kong down for their new action game Sleeping Dogs. Speaking to the , executive producer, Stephen van der Mescht discussed how his team “capture the essence of city.”

“We took 35,000 to 40,000 reference photos and hour upon hour of video footage, but it’s not a street for street depiction,” van der Mescht says. Lots of the landmarks are there, many of the names are similar yet, first and foremost, we wanted to make that space fun to navigate around.”

It is not only the environment that United Front have been working hard on. The team have also tried to make sure that the people, culture and atmosphere that inhabit their virtual Hong Kong is as realistic as possible. Mescht explained how this was important to Sleeping Dogs saying:

“There’s a lot of literature around on Triad hierarchy and structure. We wanted to be as authentic to that as possible. We weren’t interested in doing caricatures and stereotypes. We were fortunate enough to have a few contacts in Vancouver, where we’re based. There’s a big Chinese community there, lots of people from Hong Kong, and we managed to talk to the former head of the Hong Kong police force’s organised crime bureau. He’d been there 25 years orchestrating undercover operations so he knew the ins and outs of the local Triads, from the pettiest crimes all the way up to the high scale stuff.

“There was also someone we became chatty with who gave us insight into how Triads work within their stamping grounds. It’s not how you imagine it, Triad culture. They’re not always thugs who hang out causing trouble. They’re well integrated into their local communities, and to summarily remove them would cause those local societies to crumble.”

Sleeping Dogs could be a sleeper hit of this year. See what we thought by checking out our preview.

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