How Wu-Tang Clan came to star in a 1990s video game and why it proved a disappointment
The Wu-Tang Clan is much more than a band. The enterprise is bigger than that, with so many side projects and ideas branching out from the core collective. It has dipped its toes into all sorts of different areas, including video games.
In 1999, the core group members appeared as characters in the Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style PlayStation game, in which they were depicted as martial artists operating under the guidance of a master who practices an ancient kung fu discipline called Wu-Tang. When their master is kidnapped by the antagonist Mong Zhu, the crew sets off on an adventure to rescue him.
It was the perfect sort of kung fu story to suit the group, whose interest in the discipline was apparent in their music from day one, but their involvement in the game was far from assured. The game’s development was a rocky one, with many twists and turns that the Clan had absolutely nothing to do with, and they only jumped on board late into the process. Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style actually began life as another game entirely, developed by a company called Paradox, initially meant to be called Thrill Kill, and it was once a much raunchier affair than what it eventually became. It was a fighting game that boasted an explicitly BDSM-inflected aesthetic.
The game, during its initial development, was specifically being designed as an adult game, containing sex acts and skimpy clothing, but, as its original completion date neared into view, problems arose. The US arm of its publisher, Virgin Interactive, was taken over by Electronic Arts, who soon killed the project, claiming it too violent for the corporate image that they wanted to project.
Thrill Kill was no more, but the people who’d developed it knew that it boasted a unique feature that no other game at the time had. It could be played by four users simultaneously, which they felt was an extremely attractive feature for a game of that era, so they sought to repurpose its engine for another story, and that’s when the Wu-Tang Clan got involved.
The Clan had been in talks with another game publisher, Activision, to try and get a game built around its members. Thrill Kill, then, could be repurposed for this aim, although this represented a massive change in direction for the game’s developers; if they didn’t do it, their game would likely never see the light of day in any form, so they agreed to retool Thrill Kill and to make it into a Wu-Tang story.
The problem is that the developers weren’t uniformly Wu-Tang fans. Many of them didn’t know much about the group at all, and the band members were barely involved in the development process. That meant the game’s developers had to make up traits for the characters they were designing with very little information to base them on. “We ended up giving U-God a sort of boxing style, with his golden arms,” Dana De Lalla, who was involved in making the game, recalled to Variety in 2019, “And Masta Killa was basically just a ninja. It’s like, what do we actually know about U-God? A little bit of feedback on that would have gone a long way.”
De Lalla also explained that he and his colleagues had to rush the game’s development, as Activision had set an ambitious deadline of late 1999. He claimed he was overworked, but, in the end, the deadline was met. The completed Shaolin Style was, technically speaking, very similar to the original Thrill Kill game, but with the new Wu-inspired story. It was released in November ’99, receiving mixed reviews and selling only moderately.
After all that effort to make a unique game, and with the popularity of the Wu-Tang Clan to drive it, Shaolin Style hardly set the world alight. Its production, in the end, had been rushed, and it had failed to consult the Wu-Tang members themselves to help build their characters. It got over the line, after so many years of setbacks and struggle, but ultimately, it could have been better.