> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.killscreen.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When a film festival ran Sleeping Dogs, the walls came off - URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-a-film-festival-ran-sleeping-dogs-the-walls-came-off/ - Published: 2026-10-02T19:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T02:50:09.000Z - Description: A Hong Kong built in Vancouver reads differently from outside its mission routes. Aidan Page and SideQuest's Elliott Burns gave a London pub basement the controller to prove it. - Author: Kill Screen Staff - Tags: News, machinima, Game Art, hong kong, Side Quest, Aidan Page, Sleeping Dogs, Hong Kong Film Festival UK, London, united kingdom, #radar-item On Oct. 2, in the basement of Loading Bar, a gaming pub in London's Stoke Newington, the Hong Kong Film Festival UK put *Sleeping Dogs* on a screen and invited the audience to walk through its walls. [Hong Kong Recoded](https://www.hkff.uk/programme-list/game-workshop?ref=killscreen.com), hosted by curator Aidan Page with Elliott Burns of SideQuest, had the room no-clip through the 2012 crime game's Hong Kong, a city [made in Canada](https://www.killscreen.com/long-dark-brings-canada-videogames/). 0:00 /0:18 1× The Hong Kong of **Sleeping Dogs*, held in a fixed shot from the teaser for Edwin Lo's **Accidents* (2025), one of the three films previewed. [Watch the teaser with sound](https://vimeo.com/1143503291?ref=killscreen.com) on Vimeo. No-clip is a debug cheat that lets you drift through whatever the designers made solid. Pointed at a city, it works like a survey. In [Burns's account of the night](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKAgUKiMkH/?ref=killscreen.com), this Hong Kong is "spatially distorted and shrunken," laid out to serve its missions and padded with copy-pasted blocks. You only see that from off the route. The hosts previewed three machinima by Hong Kong artists who had already stepped off it. Ip Yuk-Yiu's *Another Day of Depression in Kowloon* (2012) empties *Call of Duty: Black Ops* maps into a rain-soaked portrait with no one shooting. Edwin Lo's *Accidents* (2025) holds a fixed camera on *Sleeping Dogs* street accidents while traffic carries on. Wai-Keung Hui's *Sleeping Armageddon Plan* (2026) sends the game's pedestrians to the harbor with luggage. [VRAL](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com) began streaming Hui's follow-up, *Awakening Armageddon Plan*, that same day; it runs through Oct. 15. What I like is the host. It was [the second year running](https://www.hkff.uk/full-programme/sleeping-dogs-spatial-representations-of-hong-kong-in-western-gaming?ref=killscreen.com) that Page brought *Sleeping Dogs* to this pub for the festival, which now calls it a yearly games program. The game took its city from Hong Kong cinema, so a Hong Kong film festival is the right body to audit the loan. Killscreen has circled both halves of this. In 2016 we covered [Robert What's no-clip exhibition](https://www.killscreen.com/beyond-the-veil-of-counter-strike/), 396 screenshots from outside the maps of *Counter-Strike: Global Offensive*, and in 2015 we argued that cyberpunk uses Hong Kong as ["exotic window dressing."](https://www.killscreen.com/all-cyberpunk-heads-hong-kong-eventually-shadowrun-does-it-right/) Stoke Newington put the two in one room. Burns writes that the night closed over photographs of 1960s Hong Kong, from a visit Burns's grandfather made while serving with the RAF in Singapore. Another visitor's Hong Kong, this one on paper. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wai-keung-hui-sleeping-armageddon-plan-0.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wai-keung-hui-sleeping-armageddon-plan-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-5s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-13s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-25s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-37s.jpg) From the films previewed on the night. First two: Wai-Keung Hui's **Sleeping Armageddon Plan* (2026), courtesy [Milan Machinima Festival](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/another-end?ref=killscreen.com). The rest: Ip Yuk-Yiu's **Another Day of Depression in Kowloon* (2012), from [the artist's excerpt](https://vimeo.com/127484336?ref=killscreen.com). Nights like this one, where a game gets read as a city instead of reviewed as a product, rarely get written down. The free Killscreen newsletter is where we write them down. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta)