Hong Kong Setting Sold Square Enix on Sleeping Dogs

Video game publisher Square Enix picked up the publishing duties for the newly renamed Sleeping Dogs after seeing how the game used the city of Hong Kong as a setting and decided that it was ready to spend money in order to get it to market.

Jeff O’Connell, who is senior producer working on the project, told AusGamers that, “There’s not a lot of cop games, so the original in that respect sounds amazing. And the guys that came off Just Cause and Arkham and saw our mechanics, they loved that as well. So for them, there wasn’t a whole lot of need to change elements.”

The publisher believes that the systems the developer United Front Games created are well suited to the game genre and that gamers will find the experience interesting, a new kind of take on the open world concept.

O’Connell added, “They’re system-driven and the system is essentially building a world simulator and that doesn’t really play nicely together until near the end when all the systems are in place. The thing about Square is that they kind of understood that and they understand about how these game come together.”

Sleeping Dogs was initially known as True Crime: Hong Kong and the development team made a lot of progress on the project working with publisher Activision Blizzard.

The company felt that the game was not good enough to see it released and canceled it outright. For a long time it seemed that True Crime: Hong Kong would never be released.

Square Enix has long tried to expand away from its traditional line of Japanese role playing game releases and appeal more to Western gamers, something that the renamed Sleeping Dogs will do.

Sleeping Dogs is currently set to launch in the second half of 2012 on the PC, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft.