Cantonese in Games: Grand Theft Auto III
Foreword
Grand Theft Auto III (which will be referred to as simply GTA3) from here on) has a special place in my heart. While all my friends back then were drawn to the neon-lit beachfronts of GTA Vice City or were drawn obsessed the huge world map or trying to unfold the intrigue-filled story of GTA San Andreas, I was still wreaking havoc in Liberty City - GTA 3's rendition of New York City.
The world map of Liberty City consists of two islands Portland, Staunton as well as the peninsular Shoreside Vale, which are all interconnected via bridges and tunnels. The starting island of Portland contains an eponymous Chinatown district. Liberty City's Chinatown is based on real-world Chinatowns the ones in New York-Manhattan and New York-Queen or London-SoHo.
Like its real world inspirations, it's packed with shops fronts and buildings, some of which have an oriental look-and-feel to them. Unlike its real world inspirations though, Chinatown's pedestrians - especially the Triads, walking stereotypes that are so numerous and same-y looking that they appear to make up 25% of Chinatown's population - don't speak a word of Cantonese, or any other Chinese language for that matter. However, as you will clearly see, most of these storefronts consist of textures that have been directly captured in the real world and thus feature Chinese-language signage. As such, I thought it appropriate to take you on a walking down memory lane through Chinatown and try to make sense of the signage, the meaning of which you may have been wondering about when playing GTA 3 yourself.
Are you ready? Perfect, we're going to start our tour right here:
Entering Chinatown
The in-game capture below is a birds eye view of the southern portion of Portland which also encompasses Chinatown. It was captured by me using free-lock mods. You wouldn't normally be able to see this in-game hence, some of the roofs here look unfinished. We start our walk at the southwestern edge of Chinatown, right at the bottom of the picture.
This building stands out from far away and looks like an oriental-style building straight out of a real-world Chinatown.
On close scrutiny however, the building doesn't quite hold up. Note, the entirety of the building's facade is made up of a few textures that are reused several times. Keep this in mind, as it's something we will come across quite often on our walk through Chinatown. To add to the absurdity of this building in particular, the Chinese characters don't quite make much sense.
This sign written in simplified Chinese characters displays "际盟民节", which would be written as 際盟民節 using traditional Chinese characters. According to my grasp of the Chinese language, this can be loosely translated as "International Allied People's Festival". Which is this texture plastered multiple times on the same building and where did the developers even get it from? I'm afraid I haven't got a clue.
The sign on the opposite building in comparison makes much more sense:
烤 (haau1) which means "roast" as in roasted duck 烤鴨 (haau1 aap). Note sign says "Roast Peking Duck" in English, however which would be written as 北京烤鴨 (bak1 ging1 haau1 aap3) within 北京 (bak1 ging1) being the Cantonese pronunciation for Beijing. 烤 in itself is quite vague though as it could also stand for or an entirely different meal such as Peking barbecue 北京烤肉 (bak1 ging1 haau1 juk6) - But I digress, let's continue our walk through Chinatown...
As you can clearly see by now, most of these area consists of textures that has been directly captured in the real world. Considering most facades consist of textures taken from real real locations, a couple of them got me really interested in trying to find out where they were originally captured...
This texture of an establishment with its shutters down for example was clearly taken from a real business. In fact, there's even a shop sign baked right into texture! "My luck day!" I thought. But upon closer inspection, I realized...
These Chinese characters look a bit off. In fact, they look flipped horizontally just as in... - and then it dawned on me: This sign was actually a reflexion from a shop on the opposite side! After flipping the image horizontally through the magic of basic image editing software, this was what I got.
Due to the low resolution I had to consult with a native Cantonese speaker on some specific characters, but at the end we came up with the following transcript: 泰昌肉食公司 (Jyutping: taai3 cheong1 juk6 sik6 gung1 si1) or "Taai Cheong Butcher Shop". (Note: All my captures were done on the Steam version of GTA3 (not Definitive Edition). According to this thread on GTAFORUMS from 2008, the Xbox version has among other things higher resolution textures. If have not yet been able to play either the Xbox version or the Definitive Edition to compare the legibility of the storefront textures)
Immediately I tried to find out online where the original texture might have been captured. Since the developers, DMA Design (now known as Rockstar Games North), were based in Edinburgh my first hypothesis was, that the developers went out and took some textures from shops in Edinburgh. After all, according to online sources, there exists a small Chinatown in Edinburgh. My online research using the Chinese name of the establishment however actually pointed me towards an establishment of the same name in Hong Kong. Here's a view of the establishment from Google Street View:
Enter the Paifang
