When Black Myth: Wukong became a global hit, images of a figure resembling Nio’s CEO were widely circulated, bringing Nio unexpected attention.

One of the most discussed topics in China this week was the global success of Black Myth: Wukong, a video game developed by a local team.

The game’s enormous success has attracted many companies and local tourism authorities who want to use the game’s popularity to market their products or tourist destinations.

Electric vehicle (EV) maker Nio (NYSE: NIO) had no intention of capitalizing on the game’s popularity, but it turned out to be a big winner.

On August 20, the day Black Myth: Wukong officially opened to users, a comment about a character in the game who bore a resemblance to Nio founder, chairman, and CEO William Li made the rounds.

Subsequently, images showing the character Elder Jinchi next to Li’s profile photo began to circulate widely, and a line from the game was changed to refer to Nio.

Also on August 20, Nio held a Power Up 2024 event to unveil plans to build charging and battery-swapping facilities.

Li was focused on the Nio event at the time and trying to recruit more partners to build EV infrastructure with the company, but he seemed to have never heard of the game.

During a live video stream on the evening of August 20, Li was asked several times about the game and whether Nio’s vehicles supported gaming. At this point, he also asked team members what the game was and who the producers were.

As Black Myth: Wukong gains more traction, images comparing Elder Jinchi to Li continue to go viral, bringing more attention to the Nio brand.

Li himself seemed to have received many pictures shared with him by his friends. In the comment section of one of his Weibo posts yesterday, he stated that he had received many such pictures and called on people to support the masterpieces created by local teams in various fields.

Black Myth: Wukong is an action role-playing game developed and published by Chinese team Game Science.

The game is inspired by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West and revolves around an anthropomorphic monkey based on Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, from the novel.

Elder Jinchi is the hidden boss in Black Myth: Wukong and players must complete a secret mission to get there.

The game is one of China’s rare successes in this field: just one hour after its release, the number of concurrent players on Steam exceeded the million mark.

Last night, Black Myth: Wukong reached a new high of approximately 2.36 million concurrent players on Steam.

The game is not only well received by players, but is also considered an important platform for more foreign users to learn about Chinese culture. State media such as the People’s Daily have therefore praised the game highly.

At yesterday’s regular press conference of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, a reporter mentioned the game and spokeswoman Mao Ning made the following comment:

I don’t know much about video games, but thank you for bringing this game to my attention. The name of this game suggests that it is inspired by the Chinese classic Journey to the West. I think that speaks to the appeal of Chinese culture.

Some car manufacturers have tried to capitalize on the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong and market their products, but with little success.

For example, Nio’s local counterpart Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) shared a video on Weibo yesterday of a blogger visiting some of the Black Myth: Wukong locations with a Li L7.

Both the blogger and Li Auto offered prizes to encourage Weibo users to repost the video, but only a little over 3,000 videos were reposted in total.

To this day, there are still several Weibo threads about Li and Elder Jinchi, many of which have been read millions of times.

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