When a film festival ran Sleeping Dogs, the walls came off
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.
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, 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.
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 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, 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 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 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, 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." 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.
From the films previewed on the night. First two: Wai-Keung Hui's Sleeping Armageddon Plan (2026), courtesy Milan Machinima Festival. The rest: Ip Yuk-Yiu's Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012), from the artist's excerpt.
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.
