40 Years of Three Kingdoms IP Games: From Koei to NetEase and Lingxi's 3A Cross-Platform Ambitions

Koei released the first 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms' in 1985, introducing the Three Kingdoms theme—with hundreds of characters and a span of decades—into strategy games. Over the following four decades, Japanese game companies continuously combined the Three Kingdoms IP with various genres, including Capcom's arcade game 'Warriors of Fate', Sega's 'Sangokushi Taisen', Bandai's 'BB Senshi Sangokuden', and Team Ninja's 'Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty'. These products leveraged the console market's accumulated technology to form a mature industrial pipeline. Taiwan also produced works such as 'Sanguo Qunying Zhuan' and 'Huanxiang Sanguo Zhi' in the 1990s. After the 2000 console ban, China's game industry shifted to the internet and mobile platforms, giving rise to the card game 'Three Kingdoms Kill' (2008) and the SLG mobile game 'Sanguozhi: Zhanlue Ban' (2019, Lingxi Interactive). The 2024 release of 'Black Myth: Wukong' achieved global success, proving that Chinese companies are capable of completing world-class AAA projects.

Currently, NetEase plans to release the single-player strategy game 'Wanmin Changge: Sanguo'. On June 23, 2025, Lingxi Interactive published recruitment information revealing a 'Sanguozhi' IP project using the Unreal Engine 5, positioned as 'serious history with a quality generation gap'. The project aims to achieve AAA-standard interoperability between PC and mobile, incorporating open-world elements.