A Forgotten Legend’ and storytelling in VR

Speaking to NME, actor Lucy Liu and director Eloise Singer have discussed bringing notorious Chinese pirate Chen Shih to life in VR game The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend.

Set in 19th-century China, The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend follows Chen Shih – a real-world pirate who commanded hundreds of ships – on the night she rose to power.

Chatting to NME from New York, Singer shared that she felt “compelled” to share Shih’s story upon realising that it wasn’t very well-known.

“When I first discovered more about Chen Shih’s story, I was fascinated,” said Singer, pointing to Shih leading 70,000 men in the lead-up to the Opium Wars. “She [also] created a code of laws that meant men and women had to be treated equally on her ship, which was phenomenal.”

Originally a courtesan, Chen Shih took control over a large confederation of pirates when her husband fell overboard. Chen Shih’s fleet became so powerful that the Qing dynasty eventually offered to pardon her in exchange for her weapons and ships – a deal she accepted before retiring peacefully.

“This is beyond Pretty Woman,” joked Liu, who plays Shih in The Pirate Queen. Though Liu has starred in a small number of games before, The Pirate Queen is her first performance in VR, and it took two recording sessions to bring the pirate to life. In the first, Singer and Liu collaborated to find Shih’s voice and develop her character, while the second – which was held after winning the Immersive Storyscapes award at last year’s Tribeca Festival – was spent recording her final lines.

“The one thing I learned with doing voiceover in VR is that it’s got to be very quiet and intimate,” Liu explained. “I didn’t really take that into account when I read the script, but that’s nice because it’s such an intimate experience with the player.”

“Adding a little bit of personality within that quietness is something that I really enjoyed and found quite fun,” she added. “[Shih was] ruthless, but combined with how smart she was, you have a small window to add a little bit of personality within the game. I think the script was really well-written in that sense of adding a little bit of personality without a lot of exposition.”

Singer – whose past directorial work has been in film and TV – said VR felt like the “perfect” platform to tell this story. “There’s literally no other medium where you can step back to 19th century China and be a pirate,” said Singer, who described the process of making The Pirate Queen as “amazing”.

“Video games take a long time to make and they start with just grey boxes, things not working, and trying to do one thing that never functions. It’s iteration. Then there’s a moment after you get to beta, where you know that the game is going to work, and it’s going to be fun, and everything suddenly clicks into place. You can’t ever recreate that feeling.”

As for Liu, she feels that VR is “the wave of the future” for telling stories that are more personal than those in film or TV. “It’s a very ahead of the curve experience that I never really thought possible,” she added. “I think it’s exciting and very different from cinema.”

“The VR experience is cinematic, visually, but it also becomes almost saturated into your body. It becomes a very cellular experience, which is not different from cinema, but you really are living that experience as an individual.”

“That’s something that I find fascinating and also terrifying,” Liu continued. “When you’re sitting in a movie theatre, you’re sharing that experience with whoever’s in that theatre with you. This is such a singular exploration. Whatever your body is reacting to, or involved in, it’s a private thing. I think that’s something that’s good and bad, you know, there’s a special quality to that.”

The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is available on PC (VR headset required) via Steam and Meta.