DgcityThe music of Black Myth: Wukong is filling concert halls this month. A symphonic concert built around the soundtrack of the blockbuster game reached Nanjing for performances on Nov 9 and 10, part of a second tour that has drawn audiences well beyond the game’s core players.
The Nanjing stop, held at the Nanjing Poly Grand Theatre, sold out quickly after tickets went on sale. Prices ranged from 180 to 880 yuan across five tiers. The rapid take-up reflects how the 2024 game, developed by the Hangzhou studio Game Science, became a national cultural event rather than simply a commercial hit, drawing attention to Chinese mythology, regional architecture and traditional music.
The concert is produced by Poly Performance in cooperation with the game’s makers. Performances are led by the Tianjin Song and Dance Theatre orchestra under the conductor Li Bowei, joined by a bearer of the northern Shaanxi storytelling tradition known as pingshu or pingshu-style narrative singing, Xiong Zhuying. That pairing of a full Western orchestra with folk narration mirrors the game’s own score, which mixes symphonic writing with Chinese instruments and regional folk styles.
The program draws from the music composed for the game’s journey through a fantasy reimagining of the world of Journey to the West, the Ming novel about the Monkey King. The concerts have pulled in a noticeably wider age range than a typical game event, with older audiences attending for the orchestral and folk elements even when they have never played the game themselves.
Interest has also revived attention to older Chinese screen music. The 1986 television adaptation of Journey to the West and its synthesizer-driven opening theme, Yun Gong Xun Yin, remain among the most widely recognized pieces of Chinese media music, and the game’s success has brought the melody back into heavy rotation among listeners revisiting the Monkey King canon.
The second tour also takes in Taiyuan, Harbin and Wuhan in addition to Nanjing. The format is part of a broader push by Chinese game studios to extend successful titles into concerts, exhibitions and live events, treating game music as a serious repertoire rather than promotional material. For Poly, which operates a national network of theaters, the sold-out run is evidence that symphonic concerts tied to homegrown games can compete with traditional classical programming.
